Actually, Cal & Michigan both have more top 10 ranked grad programs than Harvard (per the now old NRC report).
But sure, Yale Law is #1 and has been #1 for a long time, and it ain’t even close. Harvard generally bounces between 2 & 3.
“The grad schools are a different matter and Mich/UCB among others have premier programs on par with the privates though still not quite equal with the very top private school.”
If you only consider schools who are ranked for 1)undergrad, 2)medical school, 3)graduate engineering, 4)graduate business, 5)law school, and 6)graduate education, and look at how they are ranking in each, I think you will end up with an order like:
Stanford/Harvard
Penn/ Columbia
Northwestern/Michigan/ UCLA/USC
I think it is interesting how few schools offer that breadth of programs and are ranked in all of them.
The reality is that a very few schools have managed to create a “luxury brand” in education like Rolex, Mercedes, or Gucci. All across the country there is a huge wow factor if a kid when asked says they attend H/S/Y/P. Everyone is massively impressed and assumes the kid is special. But if the same kid says he goes to UBC or Michigan the adult yawns and say that’s nice. If the kid says I go to Bowdoin or Pomona most adults look puzzled and think you are at a local JC. Personally I think it’s silly but that’s the way it is 2018 and despite what they say the top schools work very hard to maintain their brand.
SAY- if you are describing the guy at the bagel shop or the woman at your local dry cleaners then perhaps you are correct. You are absolutely NOT describing how large corporate employers feel, or how academics feel, or how people who get paid to know feel. I have been hiring new grads, middle tenured professionals, and senior executives for over 30 years and I get paid to know that Missouri M&T has a terrific ME and Chem Eng program, and that Harvey Mudd is phenomenal for Math, and that Berkeley, Michigan and Chicago have three of the strongest Classics departments in the country. This is not Gucci or Rolex.
You are vastly overstating the importance of “brand” and vastly understating the importance of actual academic rigor. If I am running a management training program with a two year rotation through various functions and subsidiaries, I don’t have the luxury of depending on Brand, like I’m buying a cute handbag.
You really think that the people who run recruiting for global companies don’t know about Michigan or Berkeley???
blossom you misunderstood my post. I was talking about the typical middle and affluent people not specialized people who deal in hiring or academics. All I can tell you is I have lived it over the past 15 years and seen it over and over. As I stated I think it’s silly but you are very mistaken if you don’t think H/S/Y are a major elite brand. Every SCOTUS and every president of the past 30 years has a degree from H/Y except Trump(Wharton). Do you think that is just by chance. Today the dorms at S/H are filled with the offspring of the power brokers of America and the truly brilliant. Why in the world do you think the elite of the country work so,hard to get their kids admitted if there is no advantage?
I don’t believe this. Harvard, perhaps. Everyone’s heard of Harvard, and everyone knows it’s a great school, or at least they know they’re supposed to think it’s a great school (although few have any basis for making that judgment other than hearsay). The others, not so much, except in certain upper middle class and wealthy circles especially attuned to higher education, and equally attuned to prestige. And there’s also huge regional variation. Yale and Princeton are pretty well known and highly regarded in the Northeast, but less so in many other parts of the country—especially Princeton, which is not nearly as well known. Yale probably gets something of a boost because many people (though far from “everyone”) have heard that it’s traditionally Harvard’s main rival.
The data are somewhat dated, but Gallup did a survey in 2003 that asked people, “What would you say is the best college or university in the United States?” Harvard easily led the field, with 24% giving it a first- or second-place mention. Stanford and Yale tied for second with 11%, followed by MIT with 6%. Princeton tied UC Berkeley and Notre Dame for fifth place with 4%, only slightly ahead of Michigan, UCLA, and Duke with 3%.
But they also found huge variation by region. In the East, Harvard led with 36%, followed by Yale with 16%, Princeton with 7%, then Stanford tied with MIT, Penn State, and Penn with 5%. In the Midwest, it was Harvard with 21%, Yale with 11%, Stanford with 10%, Michigan with 9%, Notre Dame with 8%, and Princeton nowhere to be seen. In the South, Harvard 18% (exactly half its score in the East), Yale 10%, Stanford 9%, and Duke and Texas A&M tied with 7%—again, Princeton nowhere in sight. In the West, Harvard led with 24%, then Stanford 19%, UC Berkeley 11%, Yale 9%, and MIT tied UCLA with 7%—but again, no Princeton.
These perceptions might have changed since 2003; Stanford in particular has probably made significant gains in public consciousness. But the overall thrust of the findings still rings true to me as a Midwesterner who previously lived for some time in the Northeast and also spent some time in California. Upper middle class people in the Northeast are much more attuned to HYP, the Ivies in general, and other quality private colleges and universities in that region. My guess is these days Stanford is king of the hill in California but UC Berkeley still has a very strong following. Here in the Midwest a lot of people are not so much into prestige and status-seeking, and apart from Harvard and, these days, Stanford, they’re not nearly as agog over elite private schools–even Yale and Princeton–as are people in the Northeast.
As for “everyone” being “massively impressed” and assuming that a student attending HYPS must be “special,” that’s demonstrably false. I’m not massively impressed, and I don’t assume the student must be special. I’m an academic. I’ve known and worked shoulder-to-shoulder with graduates of all those schools, and in fact I have degrees from some of them. I’ve also taught graduate students who got their undergraduate degrees from each of those schools. I hold the schools in high regard, and their students and alums are invariably bright and often very capable people. But I hold quite a number of other schools in equally high regard, and I know, work with, and teach many equally bright and equally capable graduates of good LACs (not limiting that to the most prestigious), other good-to-great private universities, and good-to-great public universities. I think most academics and college and university administrators—the people in the higher education industry—would say the same.
bclintonk you are just showing your age. 2003 is ancient history in elite admissions. You say you doubt it but I have witnessed it first hand dozens and dozens of times. To pretend that upper middle class people barely know Yale or Princeton is silly. I have four kids spread apart. Two attended a high end private school and the last two the best public school in the area. I have heard or over heard hundreds of parents discussing colleges over the years and most them are quite aware of all these schools. As an academic you are a special case and not representative. My last two kids attended H/S and I can tell you that the kids got so tired of the way people reacted that they tried to change the subject to avoid the conversation. My niece and nephew attended NU and UCLA and the response was far different every time. And yes almost every person assumed they were special in some way because that is the only way you can get admitted. Surely you are aware that the non-hooked admission rate is between 1-2%. But I fully agree that there are many great schools that have great students. By the way the situation for PhD or JD is pretty similar. A quick look through the faculty at H/Y will show you that almost every faculty member went to the very top programs hence the unwritten rule that an academic rarely can get an appointment at a higher ranked school than where they received their advanced degree.
Smartest CEO I ever worked for graduated from Rhodes. Second smartest went to Reed.
I grew up in the Northeast, have lived in the midwest, work and recruit all over the country, and EVEN in the supposedly prestige obsessed Northeast, I don’t think SAY’s comments are accurate.
First of all, there is no single “elite” in this country. You have old money, and there are divisions and striations and pockets which differ dramatically in their approach to higher ed. Some want junior at Yale because there is a library or building named after great grandpa, and going back to Colonial times there has always been someone at Yale. Some want junior at Denison or Trinity because “why should he work so hard? He’s going into the family business anyway”.
Then you have “new money”. Some of them want little Susie at A&M or SMU because that’s where she’ll meet the right people, or they want Chip at Wake Forest because the four people who sponsored their family at the country club are all Wake Forest grads. Plus the president of the homeowners association in their gated golf community went there. So that’s a good place.
Then you have immigrants from various places-- mom and dad arrived with $12 in their pocket but mom is now an endocrinologist and dad is a surgeon. This will be highly geographic- both where they come from and where they live. Some of these families will be gunning for Berkeley or UVA because that’s the “elite” in state option and where THEY went. Some will be gunning for Dartmouth because they know that racial and ethnic diversity is harder to pull off out in New Hampshire vs. at Columbia and so Dartmouth might be a sure bet, based on their kids stats, and Columbia might be less so.
Then you have Catholic families whose kids are in Parochial school, and it’s Notre Dame and Georgetown for the high achievers, Villanova and Holy Cross for the kids just below that, and a wide range of “elite enough” colleges beyond that. They don’t care about Harvard or Yale because their kid isn’t going there; ditto Orthodox Jewish families where it’s Yeshiva University for boys, Stern college for girls, and Touro for kids whose scores and grads can’t get them in to YU.
This is a very big country and there is no single “elite”.
Moreover, the “man in the street” POV on colleges is quite irrelevant for virtually every HS kid in the country. Are you really going to make a decision on your own education based on the checkout clerk at the local Kroger?
blossom this site wouldn’t exist if there wasn’t a widely accepted group of elite schools with very competitive admission. If there was no agreed elite list then the admission rates at H/S wouldn’t be 4% and many families wouldn’t be hiring expensive admission consultants. But yes there are many good schools.
This site caters to a niche market. The reality is that only a small fraction of high school students aspire to these elite and often unaffordable schools. And yes, the US News rankings also cater to that market … but it really is only a small fraction of college-bound students.
If that’s the reason this site exists, why are there threads like “where can my B student who is interested in CS find a solid program” or “If my kid doesn’t get in to the Naval Academy, what are her back up plans?” or "My son wants to major in Finance but struggled with Calculus-- is there a college with a business program where that won’t be a problem? or- “what are the direct admission PT programs in the Northeast?”
Many, probably most people who hire admission consultants aren’t gunning to get their kids into HYPS. They want to get their kids into good schools that are a good fit. People who are chasing prestige often think everyone is doing so. That’s just not true. But it’s pretty much universal that people want what’s best for their kids, and that’s not necessarily prestige. Ask @Hanna, a private admission counselor who posts on CC regularly.
As for admission rates, they’re a function of three factors: how many people apply, how many seats there are to fill, and what’s the yield, i.e., of those offered admission, how many actually enroll. HYPS have many applicants, relatively few seats to fill, and very high yield. A number of schools actually get more applications, though generally they have more seats to fill. Few have a comparable yield, but some do. BYU, for example, had a yield of 79.2% in 2017, compared to 69.2% at Yale and 67.7% at Princeton. But yield only tells us is that the school is the top choice of a high percentage of those who apply and are accepted, over the other schools where they were also accepted. It says nothing at all about how it’s viewed by the broader pool of college applicants. And the reality is, the overwhelming majority of college-bound students choose not even to apply to HYPS. Many know they have no real chance of being admitted, of course, but there are many other reasons that many highly qualified students don’t bother to apply. Some want to stay closer to home. Some want to go to a different part of the country. Some want to go to a smaller school, or a larger school, or a party school. Some have longstanding family ties to another school. Some have religious reasons for preferring a different set of schools. Some are interested in a major that is just as good or better at another school—e,g, an aspiring engineering student might well calculate that she can get as good an engineering education at Georgia Tech, Michigan, or Purdue as Princeton, and better than Harvard or Yale. Some just want to get a decent education that will set them on the path toward a good career, e.g., in business which isn’t even offered as an undergraduate major at HYPS. Some are chasing merit scholarships. And on and on.
I’m in a part of the country where a relatively tiny fraction of even the best students apply to HYPS. That includes my own daughters. Unlike most Midwesterners, we took the time to tour all the Ivies. My daughters had zero interest in any of them. They both wanted smaller, more intimate LACs, and that’s what they both did. They couldn’t be happier with the results. They wanted a good education and didn’t give a hoot about prestige, which in any event they didn’t get because almost no one in this part of the country has even heard of the schools they attended. But they got the education they wanted. And the same is true of the kids of many of my “upper middle class” colleagues in academia who know better than to be bamboozled by the claim that HYPS and those who attend them exist on some exalted plane unto themselves.
Oh, and if you ask the admissions officers at HYPS, they’ll tell you that sometimes what’s “special” about their admits is that they’re good athletes capable of doing the work even if a bit below grade on purely academic factors, or their grandparents gave the school a ton of money with the promise of even more upon their demise, or that they’re well qualified legacies and that gave them the “tip” over dozens of equally well qualified non-legacies who applied and were rejected, or equally qualified college-bound students who didn’t even apply.
CC isn’t representative of the broader public. And although some people on CC are fixated on what they perceive to be the highest prestige schools, I read far more comments here on other schools, on the ins and outs of the application process, on financial aid, and much more… IMO the most valuable function served by CC is not to inform people about the most “elite” schools or the best-known schools, but to inform CC users about schools they may be less familiar with or perhaps have never heard of, as well as aspects of the admissions process and FA that may seem daunting when you’re just beginning to think seriously about colleges, either as a student or as a parent. So yes, I certainly think CC would exist even if no one was chasing prestige as much as a minority on CC are, which is an even tinier minority of college-bound students and their parents.
bclintonk our points of view aren’t really very far apart. Yes CC does provide tons of information for everyone but it is the severe level of competition that just didn’t exist 25 years ago that drives the admission industry. I applied to college in the 70’s and was fortunate to get my degree from a top ten school. I didn’t study one minute for the SAT and none of my friends did either. The application took maybe 3-4 hours total without any help from my parents. My HS grades were good but far from perfect and my SAT today would be far below what is required for admission. Today kids with 1450-1500 SAT and 3.9 GPA and no hooks are routinely denied at all the Ivies, S, and MIT. It’s just a very different world in the admissions world. The truth is that H/Y/S/P are a big part of the problem since they work very hard to preserve their elite brand status and the mystique of attending these schools. Whether it really matters is open to debate but the student bodies at Stanford, Harvard, or Yale are truly the children of the ruling class of America.
By “children of the ruling class” do you mean to say that many of them are there due to having the unearned privilege of legacy* admission preference stacked on top of the usually already advantaged environment of their upbringing?
*and other less common ones like development, VIP, etc.
@say I was with you up till the last sentence 
H/Y/S/P are all fine schools, but there are many others. It’s just human nature to rank things and then debate the rankings.
My last sentence was meant to point out that the elites(ruling class) are true believers about the importance of attending these schools. If you go look the children of the top politicians, Hollywood, Tech titans, fortune 500CEO’s, music industry etc you will see that their children overwhelming attend the top schools. They all talk about solving inequality and then pull every string to get their own kids admitted.
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-many-rich-powerful-people-went-to-elite-colleges-2014-6
The Selectivity portion of the ranking is worth exactly 1/8 (12.5%) of the overall score. There are three parts to it, all in the single digits in terms of the overall score.
Not sure what you mean “children of the ruling class”? The undergraduates and graduates that I know from HYPSM are not from families that are movers and shakers of the world but more so upper-middle class professionals in business, medicine, law and an increasing numbers are internationals from China, India, Middle east, and Europe. The demographics of these elite colleges is not the same as it was 25-50 years ago.
The children of powerful people are massively over represented at these schools. As an example just go look at where the children of the top politicians of both parties went to college. My goodness every president of the past 30 years has a degree from H/Y except Trump(Wharton). All 8 SCOTUS and the new nominee all went to H/Y. i.e. The ruling class.
https://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/april/tour-bus-reules-041014.html