Most kids I know don’t choose a college for football. I know this because while our state flagship has a great football team, the academics are even better. And the other public universities that students attend don’t have football teams that are awesome. Students pick schools because they have programs that interest them, or because they can commute to campus, or because their parents, neighbors, or other people they know went there & liked it, or because the price works for them, or because they visited the campus & liked it, or because it’s close to skiing, or because they have friends going there … in other words, being from the Midwest doesn’t mean students don’t think beyond how good the football team is.
I would say yes, although whether it should matter to you is a different question.
For various reasons (often involving some pretty deep histories that vary by state and region), some flagships are more prominent in various research areas than others. And some are so prominent in so many areas it adds up.
Just by way of example, edurank does a research ranking based on fairly straightforward data and formulas:
Off that list, Wisconsin is #17 in the world, #13 in the US, followed immediately by Minnesota at #18/#14.
Iowa is then #71 world, #48 US. Finally, UConn is #140 in the world, #80 in the US.
Now personally, I think this tends to matter most for things like grad school, and in cases like that you are not going to be looking at these rankings, you will be doing something far more specific to your field and possibly subfield.
But I do think that the aggregate difference is discernable. And I do think some kids look at such things for undergrad as well as grad programs, whether or not they should.
In my state which has a really good flagship (and other public campuses), I think the better students, after affordability, are first segregating between being closer to home or wanting to explore some place new and then maybe by size. There is some divide between the humanities types and STEM types, but the regular well rounded student is unlikely to deep dive into specific major rankings.
Discernable how? Why is this set of rankings any more credible than any other selling ad space? Their criteria are research outputs which I didn’t see schools ranked by (though I may have missed it with all of the pop-ups), non-academic prominence which seems largely to lean on the easily-gamed “selectivity” (looking at you Northeastern) and “alumni influence” which hardly seems objective or well defined (the popularity of the recognized alumni?).
Clearly there are some places that are better resourced than others, but I’ll remain skeptical that a kid’s academic experience will differ greatly at any of those institutions if they’re hard working and want to learn.
Eh yes and no. I have been very forthright that I have zero doubt that my resume with MIT on it let me transition from engineering to investment banking. I’m over 50 - to this day people are impressed that I have an engineering degree from MIT. You can scoff, you can discount, but as much as folks pretend it doesn’t matter - my life experience says it opens lots of doors and gives you interviews, which is at least 80% of the battle. I’m old and retired and don’t care, but absolutely disagree that where you go doesn’t matter. In 15 years in a bulge bracket investment bank exactly ONE person wasn’t from a target school. He was a lawyer that made a mid level move. EVERY SINGLE analyst and associate in my 10 years was from a target school. Argue all day long that school doesn’t matter, sure you can be the .001% or you can go to a target school if you don’t want to be an account executive pretending to be an investment banker.
The fact that all of your recruits came from places you recruit is your argument?
Ok.
I also was at a bulge bracket (but transitioned to consulting).
I also have a “rat.”
We can agree to disagree.
So “discernable” means something like “able to be perceived”. The difference I am identifying is discernable in the sense that something like edurank’s methodology will make it perceptible, but if you like you could also go through a whole bunch of different ways people look at departmental or institutional research (if you do it departmentally, you would have to add it up yourself to get an institutional measure).
So to be clear, I only think edurank’s rankings are “credible” in the sense I believe they are accurately following their stated methodology. I then do think that is at least one reasonable methodology for comparing research prominence. But it is an entirely different question whether something like institutional research prominence should actually matter to you much, if at all, when choosing a college.
Like, given their methodology, there is basically no way even a very prominent LAC could rank highly. That doesn’t mean I think LACs are bad college choices! In fact, I don’t even think they are necessarily bad choices if you want to do research as an undergraduate. But edurank isn’t purporting to measure any of that.
And I am also not particularly wedded to edurank. I think they do have the cleanest methodology for this purpose (at least that I have seen). But if you liked, for example, you could look instead at ARTU:
As explained there, ARTU is aggregating three of the most prominent global rankings, ARWU, THE, and QS. Long story short, I think by doing that, they end up partially controlling for some of the noisier factors in those different measures, although only partially.
Anyway, globally ARTU has Wisconsin #59, Minnesota #93, Iowa #322, UConn #334. Not as high in any of these cases, which in part is because none of the underlying measures are pure research rankings, so neither is ARTU. It is in the same order, however, which is in part because even though it is not a pure research ranking, research does play an important role.
So broadly speaking, ARTU “agrees” with edurank in broad strokes, but with some differences.
The last measure like this a decent number of people look at is the US News Global Universities Ranking, which is sort of a market competitor to the rankings used in ARTU.
Anyway, they have it Wisconsin and Minnesota in a tie at #72, Iowa #238, UConn #292. Again, different details, but similar overall pattern.
OK, so, I do believe that what we are seeing here is different imperfect looks at what is an actual truth in the world, namely that there is a difference in overall research prominence between these institutions. So in that sense, I believe that is a discernable difference.
But I cannot emphasize enough that doesn’t mean I think any given individual looking for a college should care a lot about this, or indeed at all about this. I just think it is a discernable difference, and then each individual can do as much or as little with that as makes sense for them.
I can see number of publications as a valuable datapoint on an individual subject basis for a student who is interested (#1 in neuroscience). Extrapolating that out to the totality of a university as a basis of ranking, not so much. Your Amherst example is apt.
As you can tell, I’m sensitive to the cottage industry that has emerged feeding off of and into college mania. It reminds me of the sportswriters now who are giving these curated stats to make things more impressive for the sake of pixels (“The first triple by a twenty-three year-old shortstop on a Tuesday with a full moon”).
Just seems like we spend so much time arguing the top four in the NBA MVP race that we forget the last guy in the G-League is the best basketball player you would ever play against. There’s lots of quality talent out there.
I find all this complicated to deal with. Like I know that people are looking for information, and sometimes the information they are looking at is maybe not really suitable for their purposes. So, something else might be better, but it also might still be highly imperfect. So, if I do nothing, they may still use the unsuitable information. If I mention the imperfect information, maybe they will misuse that instead. Tricky business.
To explain why I think this is all relevant the greater topic, something like edurank is definitely not useful as a list of colleges that would necessarily be better for any given applicant, even one interested in undergrad research. On the other hand, if someone is, say, making a lot of use of the US News National Universities rankings, and claiming things like, “I am shotgunning the T20 because they have better research opportunities,” then it might well be worth pointing them to something like edurank so they can see how the US News National Universities rankings are not in fact a reliable measure of research prominence.
But I definitely do not intend such a person to then substitute shotgunning the edurank T20 for the US News T20! What I am really hoping is they will start seeing that any sort of ranking is only as good as its methodology, and once you start digging into methodologies, you might realize that whatever they are measuring might not actually matter to you, or not in the weight they are giving it, or it is not including things that do matter to you, or so on.
Which I think is better than doing nothing, or just saying they shouldn’t use the US News rankings like they are without any sort of illustrative support. At least sometimes it is better, I hope.
Interesting thread!
I think these two posts relate the most to why my kids had the lists they did which in fairness were prestige-heavy. I would never check “prestige” on a list of fit factors my kids considered but one or both had the following goals on the list as “fit”. The only schools that have everything on this list are the privates in the Top 30ish (including a couple LACs they each applied to).
-small to medium sized undergrad population
-no admission by major and ability to try classes in many areas before declaring, with a school that has a good reputation for successful graduates across many varied areas
-as a corollary a school that has a great track record sending many students to phD, law, and med every year, again so they would be free to change interests and still have a great chance to achieve their goals
-a school where the faculty-student ratios are advantageous to undergrads: rare classes over 150, and plenty of “spots” for undergrads to do research with faculty/in faculty labs starting early in undergrad rather than primarily for upperclassmen and competitive to get.
–my Archaeology/Classics kid did not look at a list that ranked that major because it was just an interest, albeit a deep one that started early in HS, but half of students change majors and we were well aware of that! As it is Duke is fairly small in that area and probably is not on anyone’s T10 list for that major, but that ended up being a great benefit. There were plenty of faculty for the small amount of undergrads, leading to incredible mentors, opportunities in the field that are rare for undergrads, a departmental award, and an ivy grad acceptance with funding. Sometimes a small department in a top school is ideal.
–for our Engineering one, the goal was schools which either do not have separate E-school acceptance or if they do, easy to switch into the Arts&Sci division if she ended up hating Engineering and wanted basic science. Turns out she picked the school that let her do a degree in both and switch to one if desired, UPenn 's Viper dual degree program.
–Any “top engineering” list has a bunch of schools that do not fit the rest of the factors here; the schools that fit happen to all be prestigious T20 privates.
Alas prestige ends up being a common thread for what fits, when one tries to meet all of the above; IMO it is valid to call it a “fit” factor.
Schools where entry to majors is not restricted beyond admission to the school tend to be either very wealthy ones which can afford to maintain unused reserve capacity in each department, or less selective ones where the rigor of popular majors reduces the likelihood of them being over enrolled.
I think a more informative question would be: how many applicants from non-target schools were offered a real opportunity to interview for these IB roles?
To be clear, I’m not trying to start a fight; I just push back on the attribution of esteem afforded by the fact that one has a particular ring due to luck and circumstance as misguided. While I’m not trying to put words in your mouth, it kinda felt like you were making the argument it was justified. That you didn’t say so explicitly is to your credit. But it feels like many other do, and that cascades down to the kids in a way that’s not healthy or productive for them, in my opinion.
Does it matter in the real world? Not to me, but to others it obviously does. Should it? I would say absolutely not. What you do matters. Where you’re from should not. My evidence of this is not my co-workers, but my C-level clients, the sharpest of which came from many schools that would be unfamiliar to many on this board (certainly were to me).
Is that the case in Private Equity? Nope, because they’ve created a closed system where the deal guys all have to be from environments like you’ve described. It is noteworthy that the Operating Partners are rarely of that pedigree and have actually worked their way up real firms and “done/run stuff.”
I try to be particularly careful not to sell my own trade and love the nontraditional kid who has figured out a way to get their resume onto my desk. And I’ve managed to field successful teams, so it works.
I think it’s useful to understand why this happens. For the most part, it’s not exclusivity for the sake of exclusivity.
Rather, it’s that if a company needs to hire 50 students company-wide for a certain role, they don’t need to need to look at 500 colleges. They can target the roughly 20 colleges most likely to meet their needs, and even then, they will have more than 10 qualified applicants for every position. Looking further would be an inefficient use of time.
On the other hand, if an exceptional talent from State Flagship U somehow does make it on their desk, they of course should look at it.
I’ve got no axe to grind with MIT. My father went there (BS/MS) and my sister turned it down for an instate full ride. The last person fired off of my son’s team though was from MIT. The paper itself, and in this example, the brass rat, is impressive. It’s what you do with the paper that matters.
In a perfect world, you would be correct. However, that isn’t our world.
Most rankings come out and no one cares. However, after a drop in US News, the Vanderbilt Chancellor writes a public letter in response defending his institution. Florida becomes a top 5 US News public school, and they immediately hang banners all over campus proclaiming this fact. People see Columbia getting busted for being dishonest and reporting false data to game the US News rankings.
The public cares only about the US News rankings because the schools themselves only care about the US News rankings. I’m not saying this is right. This is our reality.
Yep. As someone who has worked in these firms, I know this is the commonly offered explanation.
It’s also one I personally disagree with. I view it as an excuse to preserve a comfortable status quo that’s decades-long and self-reinforcing.
In 2025, with virtual interviews, AI resume screening, and nationwide internship programs, expanding the search well beyond twenty schools shouldn’t be an operational burden. Others do it.
The Ivy School equivalent of this approach would be: “we are only going to seriously consider applications from a dozen elite north-eastern prep schools. That has worked very well for us for over a century. Reviewing 50,000+ applications from all over the country is just too inefficient “.
Yes, but in reality (unless it’s an MD’s referral) we know where that resume usually lands. If Sergey Brin had applied for an IB role after completing his undergraduate degree, his resume would have been binned faster than you can say “Google”.
Anyway, this is a discussion for another day, and the comments above aren’t directed at you personally @hebegebe
In summary: yes, the school name definitely matters for these roles but it’s also helpful to understand how hiring works at these firms.
