If you live in Houston where the top students at your HS aspire to attend Rice, then you’ve heard of Rice. If you live in Boston where even kids who think they are a “lock” at Harvard apply to Tufts (and often end up there) you’ve heard of Tufts.
Singleparent, you are just demonstrating how regional some of this college stuff is. Rice is a big deal academically (for grad schools, corporate employers in a wide range of industries, competitive fellowships) and whether or not someone who lives in Minnesota or Georgia has heard of it doesn’t detract from that whatsoever.
Many of the LACs and women’s colleges have acceptance rates > 10% but are (almost) as selective as the Ivies in terms of quality of accepted students because of self-selection. Tons of kids throw their hat in the ring at H’vard and Yale because, “why not”. And honestly, whether someone on the east cost has heard of Rice or Pomona, or someone on the west coast has heard of Tufts or Williams, who really cares. The quality of the students is very comparable. The bragging rights of HPY is why so may students apply for the “what the heck” reason.
Regionality does still reign. That reminds me of a conversation we recently had with the parents of one of D’s friends form the South. He’s going to Northwestern, and, according to his parents, that fact is sometimes greeted in the Deep South with a puzzled look and the clear implication that “He could have done better…why not Emory?” D, on the other hand, was seriously considering Emory at one point, to which someone here in the Midwest actually did respond (almost verbatim), “Where? Embry-Riddle? Yeah, I heard they just opened a campus in Rockford.”
I think many of you nailed it with the fact that it is so often regional. I am in the south and Duke is the end all beat all around here, obviously we are all aware of the Ivies, and a handful from my daughter’s school are going to Ivies, but few people here feel any need to go north. Big names here are Duke, Emory, Davidson and UNC-CH.
Edit. I don’t really want to post this during a time in which I am being judged by colleges, as an admissions officer could see this and identify me, but it was my interpretation of what Top Tier is.
Tier 1 - the Top 10(nationally renown, pie-in-the-sky):
8 Ivies + MIT + Stanford
Among this group, HYPSM is in a separate sphere, total crapshoot colleges where no one stands a chance unless they are triple legacy/super athlete/super URM/have parents rich enough to donate a building.
Tier 1.5 - also nationally renown but slightly more reachable(only slightly):
Univ. of Chicago
Duke
Caltech
Johns Hopkins
Northwestern
Georgetown
NYU
Also the top LACs: Amherst, Swarthmore, Williams
UC Berkeley
UCLA
Tier 2 - still prestigious, but prestige varies by region:
Notre Dame
USC
Rice
Vanderbilt
Washington
Emory
Tulane
Tufts
Boston University
Plus LACs: Claremont McKenna, Pomona, Carlton
UVA
UNC-Chapel Hill
Univ. of Michigan
UT Austin
Tier 2.5 - smaller, regionally prestigious
Lehigh
Wake Forest
Plus LACs: Middlebury, Colby, Bucknell, Kenyan, Lafayette, Boston College
Tier 3: Many of the state flagships:
UWA, UWI, UIL, UAZ, UFL, UCO, UCSB, UCSD, UCD, UMN, UMD, Penn State, Rutgers, OSU, Indiana.
@JoanneB Other than considering Amherst, Duke, Chicago, Swarthmore, and Williams to be clear members of your Tier 1, with Northwestern, G’town, and Hopkins as plausible T1 or T2, I think you’ve got the general prestigiousness of the schools pretty accurate.
I agree that the self-selection factor confounds the simple comparison of the top lacs’ selectivity with that of the Ivys. Williams accepts close to its class via ED, and when you remove the recruited athletes from those admits, the stats of the remainder are competive, at the least, for admissiom to HYPSM.
I thought of this thread when I read “named a top tier university by USNWR” on my daughter’s school Web page the other day. Yet her school is not listed on any of the lists here!
On another note, my daughter is applying to law schools and considering a top 15-25 (coming from an ivy undergrad). Over on the law school forum, many posters said that she shouldn’t even bother going to such a low-ranked school. Apparently, if it’s not a top 12 law school, law firms won’t hire you. Comments like “a waste of money” and “she won’t get a job,” even though they all acknowledge that the quality of the education at tier 1 law schools is pretty equivalent across the board. So, why the elitism in law schools? I really don’t get it.
With law schools, unlike colleges, there is a pretty clear prestige hierarchy at the top. I used to talk about the 12 law schools in the top 10, but now people seem to focus on 14, and there is a pretty big gap between those law schools and the rest, especially if you think you may want to work somewhere other than where you went to law school.
That said, almost all law schools are regional to some extent. There’s really only one “national” law school. It’s Harvard, which is also one of the biggest law schools, and has alumni pretty much everywhere. That doesn’t mean Harvard is the # 1 law school – most knowledgeable people would slot it at #2, and that has been true for a couple of generations – but it is the school with the widest network. A student with a decent record at any of the top 14 law schools will be an attractive job candidate for big firms and prestigious federal government positions anywhere in the country. If you drop down to the next tier (the best regional schools, including publics like Texas, UCLA, Wisconsin, and strong privates with regional appeal like Vanderbilt, WashU, USC), a very top student will still look pretty good, but 95+% of the class is going to be employed in the school’s home region. If you are content to stay in that region, however, going to one of those law schools and doing well is probably just as good as going to one of the top schools.
Where things get significantly more iffy is with schools that are the third or fourth choice regionally. Apart from a thin layer of the very best students, much of the class is going to struggle to find a good, stable job; it takes both luck and a lot of elbow grease.
I highly recommend going to law school where you are most likely to want to live and work your first job. Networks are SO very important in firm life. The bigger and more prestigious the firm, the bigger the demands on the associate will be (billable hours, marketing, etc). The path to partner has become even more difficult in recent years. Where you go to school may get you that first internship or first job but be sure it is what you really want.
