College Rankings On Lay Prestige

It’s just a guestimate, but it’s doesn’t seem to be a particularly popular school in my area for whatever reason.

Northwestern is in the Big 10 (the original
10 :slight_smile: ), so some people have heard of it.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/9109/harvard-number-one-university-eyes-public.aspx

In Korea:

Harvard
Yale
Princeton,Stanford
MIT
Williams
Columbia
Caltech
U Chicago
Penn
Amherst
Cornell
Northwestern
Dartmouth
Duke
Brown
John’s Hopkins
WashU
Georgetown
Notre Dame
Rice, Vanderbilt
Emory

(this is based on admission/matriculation patterns I’ve noticed over the last 14 years)

Universal list - fill in the blank:

  1. Any D1 schools where Harbaugh coached.
  2. The college I attended.
  3. My graduate school.
  4. My kids college (s)
  5. The college my wife/husband attended.
  6. The college my mom attended.
  7. The college my dad attended.
  8. The colleges the other grandparents attended.
  9. Any D1 college whose marquis sport is crew or lacrosse
  10. Any top 25 FBS school that has not been sanctioned in the past decade
  11. Any school with 'tech' in the name

How I ranked things about 15 years ago (roughly, anyway), before I began researching schools. I grew up in Wisconsin and at that point lived in TN:

Harvard & Yale
Caltech
Princeton & MIT
Northwestern
UChicago
The rest of the Ivy League (no idea on differentiation, though I knew them all)
Stanford (I knew it was good; no idea how good)
Haverford & Earlham (my father loved them primarily because of the old Quaker affiliation; my mom had been raised a Quaker…)
Cal
UW-Madison & Michigan
Duke (the “state school choosers” song sung at Cameron when they played Mich impressed upon me that Dukies thought they were pretty smart.)
Notre Dame
Rice
Texas
UCLA
…and many more top flagships.

I hadn’t heard of Washington U or Tufts and had no idea of the quality of Carnegie Mellon, Emory, USC, and other good private schools.

I learned of Caltech at and soon after the 1994 Rose Bowl, which I’d attended with my dad. Someone had been messing with the scoreboard, and some nearby UCLA fans mentioned their Caltech suspicions. It turned out they were right. That zoomed Caltech up near the top of my rankings.

@marvin100 Interesting global viewpoint!

@Alexandre That’s an interesting source. It only asks people what the number one university is though.

1, Ohio State, 2, Ohio State, 3. Ohio State.

A Michigan regional perspective

Harvard/Stanford
Yale/Princeton/MIT
Penn/Columbia
Johns Hopkins/Duke/Cal Tech/Michigan/Northwestern/Cornell/Chicago
Cal/Brown/Williams/Amherst/Dartmouth
Vandy/Rice/Emory
Georgetown/Notre Dame/UVA/UCLA
Wash U

Chicago:

Harvard, Stanford
Yale, Princeton MIT
Columbia
Northwestern, Chicago
Penn, Duke
Caltech, Michigan, Notre Dame, Cornell
Johns Hopkins, Brown, Dartmouth

Lay prestige? So do we eliminate the best colleges here as part of the premise?

@merc81 Lay prestige being what the average person would rank these colleges

I think merc81 is merely point out the insignificance of a lay person’s opinion. A college education serves three purposes:

  1. Getting a good education
  2. Preparation for graduate school
  3. Preparation for a career

Generally, getting a good education depends entirely on the individual.

Graduate school admissions committees are generally made up of professors, not “lay people”

Most employers have a college recruiting strategy that was developed over time and independently from the whims of the lay person.

In other words, why care what lay people think unless one wishes to work for a small local operation, in which case, all that matters is what the lay people in that locale think.

@Alexandre Haha I’m not basing my college choice off of this. I’m merely just curious!

Glad to hear it MrAustere. :wink:

@MurphyBrown So you feel as if NU should be getting ranked higher?

Harvard
Stanford
MIT
Yale
Princeton
Berkeley (as a student here, wildly overrated)/Dartmouth
Columbia
Johns Hopkins/UCLA
UPenn/Chicago/Brown
CalTech/NYU/USC/Cornell

This would be the point of view of someone in Northern New Hampshire, where I went to high school.

I’m from the Westside of Los Angeles, and I would say the rankings there are almost identical, except swap Stanford and Harvard and move Berkeley, UCLA, and CalTech up a ranking or two.

“Wall Street / Buy-side” lay prestige from my experience in industry:

Tier 1: Harvard
Tier 2: Penn (Wharton), Princeton, Stanford, Yale
Tier 3: MIT, Caltech
Tier 4: Columbia, Dartmouth, Duke
Tier 5: Penn, Brown, Northwestern, Cornell
Tier 6: Georgetown, Chicago
Tier 7: Top publics (Ross, Haas, UVA, etc.) and NYU Stern

@Boothie007 Interesting that you would put Harvard above Wharton and Stanford at the same tier. According to my father, who went to Wharton and worked at Morgan Stanley and the Lehman Brothers in the late 90s, this would be his “Wall Street” ranking:

  1. Wharton
  2. Harvard Business, Stanford GSB, MIT Sloan, Berkeley Haas, Chicago Booth
  3. NYU Stern

He didn’t really explicate past this, but I imagine Tuck, Kellogg, Ross, Columbia were all tier 3 or just below.