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How can one identify a “dream school” beyond the 75 your book will identify?
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For many families, affordability is the biggest limiting factor in the college search. That may mean that they are looking at non-flagship publics or at “extreme buyer” colleges. What criteria can families use to distinguish between a good value (lower price with quality opportunities/outcomes) vs. a cheap option (lower price with low(er) quality opportunities/outcomes), particularly if the student would not need any remediation and the family can comfortably afford the cost of attendance for four years (i.e. barriers that many students encounter resulting in a lower college retention/graduation rate)?
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Help me select between USC, UCI, and UCSD for an undergraduate engineering degree. I heard USC has better networking and thus maybe better job opportunity? But not sure if USC is worth double the cost of a UC school.
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What is the best way to evaluate the academics of a school? It’s easy to see where the students themselves will be very intelligent based on statistics, but a hyper-competitive environment does not always correlate with excellence of instruction (or funding of that excellence). For example, I hear that many large T1 universities have well-known professors who really want to focus on their research more than undergraduate teaching. What do AO’s for grad programs think, and are there valid ratings for undergraduate teaching? Second question, how important is the ability to engage in research as an undergraduate? I don’t remember myself or any friends doing research with faculty at our (good) schools years ago. Is this focus simply because, for now, research is better-funded? It seems like there is more emphasis on research for undergrads these days, and that is linked to prestige. All the colleges are marketing it.
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How do I choose my dream school?
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Simply asked… Does prestige matter?
Asked another way… When does prestige matter? Does it matter in getting your first job? A job in your first 5 years in the workforce? Your first 10 years?
Are you really buying into an alumni network rather than an advanced education? Does the alumni network really matter that much to justify the additional tuition costs?
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What small liberal arts colleges have particularly strong career services departments? Our junior is looking at St. Olaf, Bryn Mawr, Skidmore, Dickinson, and Mount Holyoke, among others.
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How does one really define prestige? Is the numbers, the facility, the services, the retention rate, etc, or the student experience? Or can it be looked at both ways? (sorry if this is confusing!)
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One theme in Who Gets In and Why was the idea of under matching (and overmatching). How does that concept interact with prestige (it seems to me that schools where students have extremely high stats also often tend to be higher in name recognition and rankings)? And how closely should a student look to hew to the middle 50% of a school’s CDS stats when choosing where to apply/attend?
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Last year, Forbes released a list of 10 public and 10 private schools that they named the “New Ivies”. Is that just one magazine’s opinion, or have you observed a real shift in these schools’ perceived prestige over the past decade?
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I attended a LAC for undergrad before going on to two large unis for masters degrees and i wanted my kids also to go the same route; however, we are pretty global and at different times have found ourselves living and working abroad. One observation is pple haven’t heard of the prestigious LACs, but will perk up if you say Ohio State. This is something we are thinking about as we enter final days of college decisions and I am curious what your thoughts are about picking T50 name recognition over prestigious LAC.
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Which schools comprise this “top 25” and what criteria did you use to rank or define them as “top”?
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Is overall school prestige/ranking more important than the prestige/ranking for a particular major or vice versa? For example, schools like IU Kelley where the business school is much more prestigious than their overall ranking, or Purdue with engineering/CS, etc…
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Are there some majors for which a top ranked prestigious university a must?
Is it true that if a student wants to get an MBA, MD or JD, their undergraduate institution matters a lot but for a Science-field PhD or engineering, it doesn’t matter.
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How would you quantify strength of a university’s alumni network? Do you see a correlation between “prestige” and strength of alumni network? I could see the two overlapping a bit.
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My son is going to college this fall as an engineering major, but the engineering school rankings are very different from the overall school ranking. For example, according to US News, SUNY Binghamton is ranked #73 overall but for engineering, it is ranked closer to #100. Forbes just listed it as the #1 “public ivy” in the country. Should we take the overall ranking into account? My son doesn’t want to consider it because the engineering school is ranked so low… Thoughts?
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In addition to academic rigor, what “prestigious” universities offer is a signaling to future employers, graduate institutions of a students’ level of rigor. No matter what their ranking is, the name of certain schools still open doors. Given how competitive the college application process has become over time, what is your take on how the signaling from top universities will look in 10 years time? Will the Ivy Plus institutions still loom quite as large? If not, what new signals do you think our institutions will gravitate towards?
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Thank you everyone for attending today’s exclusive Q&A w/ @Jeff_Selingo! We’ll go live shortly and I’m excited to welcome Jeff to his second College Confidential event (see first Q&A here). Happy to see so many questions already asked. Jeff will answer your questions in the next hour. Make sure to ask all your questions by commenting below.
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Drexel is ranked #2 (after Northeastern) for its co-op program, and yet it’s “ranking” is fairly low and “acceptance rate” is fairly high. Does that in anyway detract from the overall co-op experience and what would explain the difference between these two schools?
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What is the actual curriculum difference between a liberal arts college and a university? I understand there are differences in the size and research opportunities etc but how about the actual curriculum?
It’s fantastic to be here. Looking forward to all your questions and sharing what I learned from reporting my forthcoming book, Dream School: Finding The College That’s Right For You.
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