<p>Based on my experiences in prestige driven business fields on the east and west coast, wustl and emory have almost no prestige relative to Berkeley or Hopkins. WUSTL is disfavorably positioned in the midwest and is far far overshadowed by Northwestern and Chicago within its region while Emory plays second fiddle to Duke in the south. Let’s stop confusing prestige with selectivity however. Vanderbilt and WUSTL have stronger freshman academically based on test scores than Stanford, Cornell, Brown, Penn due in large part to merit aid. Yet would you equate Vandy or WUSTL to any of the latter four schools based on “prestige”? Same goes for Columbia. Not exactly comparable to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or Stanford from a prestige standpoint.</p>