My gift to you today:
If you google the WSJ article title, then click on the Google link, you can read the paywall article for free.
To read yet another paywall WSJ article for free, you need to clear cookies first.
<:-P
@purple titan (post#60), yes, B1G sports are huge here, but oddly Northwestern (and to a lesser extent, Purdue) fly under the radar.
For schools that ar big in sports, it’s like if the name of the state or a large city (e.g., Pittsburgh, Louisville) isn’t in the school"s name, it fails to register in (lay) people’s minds. I would assume it’s the same with Clemson, Auburn, Rutgers, Baylor, etc. I mean poor Rutgers even has to tack “the State University of New Jersey” onto its name in a nod to laymen’s obliviousness.
@PurpleTitan: In the eye of cross-admit students, Williams is also doing better. About 63% for Williams and 37% for Northwestern. Of course, one can refute this with either (1) the sample size for the stat is too small or not representative, or (2) academically strong high school students are not laymen. 
Oh, I just cam about the third one: (3) prestige is not an important factor in students’ college selection.
I’m really interested in this LAC vs National U so let’s do a hypothetical. Say your a student and your goal is to attend Harvard Law and Harvard Business, and you’re debating wether to apply ED to Williams or NU, which school would y’all choose?
I know nothing about law school. I do know a bit about MBA. Williams does a little better than Northwestern on a per student basis. To control for location preference, let us take 2 major MBAs as an example: Wharton (location favors Williams) and Stanford (location favors Northwestern). At Wharton, about 2% of MBA students are from Northwestern and about 1% of students are from Williams. At Stanford, about 2% of students are from Northwestern and about 0.7% of students are from Williams. Taking into the size of Northwestern is close to 4 times that of Williams, you will see Williams does a little bit better on a per student basis. The number that I quoted above are from Poets and Quants.
For elite MBAs in the Northeast (including Harvard), Williams as a feeder school is strong given its small size. Disclaimer: I have no kids at Williams and I do not have a degree from Williams, but I do like its curriculum design. I try to convince my D, who is a HS sophomore, that she should seriously consider Williams.
Lifetime Philadelphia area resident, lay person impressions (pre-CC):
- Harvard, Yale
- MIT
- Princeton, Penn, Columbia
- Georgetown, Carnegie Mellon, Johns Hopkins
- Stanford, Duke
- Wash U, Emory, Swarthmore
Recognized these names but did not think of them as top schools: Brown, Dartmouth, Cornell, Vanderbilt, Notre Dame; U Michigan, UCLA, Berkeley, UVA.
Had never heard of (or only in passing) and had no idea these were top schools: Northwestern, U Chicago, Rice, Williams, Amherst (really, all LACs except Swarthmore as it’s nearby)
prof2dad, the Rhodes scholarship is awarded according to region and is very much a reflection of a college/university’s commitment to devoting resources to winning the award. The fact that Williams (or University of Washington or University of Montana etc…) have produced far more Rhodes scholars than Northwestern or the University of Pennsylvania does not make them more “prestigious” in the eyes of the Rhodes Scholarship committee. In fact, if one wanted to gauge a university’s reputation in academe, the US News Peer Assessment rating is a fairly good source.
@Alexandre: I do not dispute your argument and reasoning. I also agree that US News Peer Assessment is a better source. The reason that I brought out Rhodes Scholarships was that if my memory serves me correct I read a U Michigan campus newspaper long time ago about how long U Michigan had not landed a scholarship and in that article the author attributed part of the reason to be that persistent winners, like Harvard and Yale, are more prestigious than U Michigan.
@prof2dad, Stanford’s location definitely doesn’t favor Northwestern. If you want to choose a school where the location favors Northwestern, look at Chicago Booth.
You must be on the East Coast because if you are anywhere to the west of there, you’d realize that the Midwest and West Coast are very far apart. Chicago is closer to both the East Coast and Mexico than it is to CA.
And yes, cross-admit data shows popularity among the HS kids who choose to go on that particular site. Doesn’t quite reflect the real world.
@moooop, you said people where you are wouldn’t know where Northwestern is, which would be shocking if they followed B10 sports at all. After all, both UMich and MSU do occasionally visit Evanston.
To the OP: the difference in experience between NU and Williams is so big that focusing on prestige rather than fit seems quite misguided. It’s like deciding on a sports coupe vs. SUV based on how the headlights look.
BTW, at Chicago Booth, Northwestern grads make up 4.2% of the student body. Williams is not listed, so make up less than 0.8%.
@PurpleTitan You make a good point in that fit should be the main factor here and it is. I’m merely wondering what school would give a student the best bet at getting into an ivy law and business.
@dfbdfb “The Ivies … don’t actually enter into the conversation much at all, really.”
Some Ivies may not have any students from Alaska at all. They will give a pretty solid break vs. a typical student to get a kid enrolled from a state they don’t have. If the student is in the ball park, especially if they would be eligible for financial aid, it could be a very good opportunity for you to suggest to the right kid that they consider it.
In terms of lay prestige, when I was a kid growing up in south Florida and attending a private “Prep” school, Northwestern was considered to be equivalent to the Ivy’s, and LAC’s like Williams, Amherst, et al were generally not known or discussed at all.
Most kids attended one of the public or private Florida universities, and most who went OOS attended schools like Emory, Auburn, Furman or Clemson (we thought they were all private). We did have one guy who went to Harvard (legacy), one to Penn (everyone thought it was Penn State), and one girl who attended Berkeley, although nobody knew what state Berkeley University was located in.
Check this paper out
Note, that the authors are comparing the earning premium of students from selective schools to graduates from tier 4 institutions (largely less-selective schools). So both graduates from Tier 1 private schools like Northwestern and LAC’s (called tier 2 in this study. There is a list in the appendix of which institutions fall into each category) like Williams who earn an MBA from a selective MBA school do better than somebody who earned their undergraduate from a tier 4 institution and then got an MBA, but the Williams graduates’ premium is bigger than the Northwestern graduate.
Of course this may be due to selection bias, but still…
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2473238
Of Course you have to get into the selective MBA program first. My guess is that if you attend Northwestern for undergraduate, your chances of being accepted into Kellogg might be higher, than if you were a Williams graduate applying to Kellogg. For Harvard though, both pools will have an equal chance.
@Much2learn: Right. But it’s not really something that a lot of kids (or their parents) here aspire to. (Some do, of course—we may have a small population, but not so small that we don’t have a pretty wide variety. But not many, it would seem.) Relative prestigiosity of a school simply isn’t as big a deal up here.
And that’s part of what this thread’s origin was after, I think—a lot of the conversation on CC assumes the preferences of a very, very narrow slice of the population (in terms not just of academic aspirations, but also of geography). It’s worth remembering that not everyone—and, in some regions, not just not everyone, but very few—matches that.
To the OP: What I said before: to b-schools and law schools, the characteristics and experience of the applicant will matter far more. No one would value NU or Williams more than the other.
Northwestern does have Kellogg and Integrated Marketing Communications certificate programs that allow you a taste of b-school classes, however.
@CollegeAngst, be careful of the leaps in logic you are making. The average performance of grads at tier I and tier II institutitions doesn’t tell you anything about how grads of specific schools in tier I or II do.
Also, in both business and law, Ivy League schools aren’t necessarily the best while some of the best are non-Ivy. In business, the top tier are the M7. In law, there is the T14 (and T6 and T3).
That is why it is called “relative” pretigiosity. Attending Notre Dame in the Chicago area is seen by a certain segment of the population as the “ne plus ultra” college. Other segments of the population think it is horribly overrated or worse. Having worked in New York, I can see why Williams and Amherst would be an attractive school to those who are interested in the Ivy lottery, but that doesn’t necessarily carry nationwide.
@PurpleTitan Yes, Thank you for pointing this out, but I was not intending to make any leaps of logic. Averages are always like that. That is why I mentioned “Like Williams” and “Like Northwestern” before shortening that phrase to “Williams” and “Northwestern” in the second sentence (Lazy typing you can say). That sentence was not intended to compare a particular institution against another institution.
If you go to an average selective LAC and then go an average selective private MBA program, you enjoy a higher premium that someone who goes to an average selective private University and then attends an average selective private MBA program and both have a higher premium than somebody who goes to a non selective school and then goes to a selective private MBA program, according to this paper.
Averages in this case is as useful, as “Average SAT score, Average GPA, Average admit rates, etc are all useful”. They also don’t tell a student their specific chances, but give some idea on how to look at the schools