<p>I’ve been wondering about this because I come from a low income family and I am a student with not so stellar grades( 89% avg/B+ and a pretty low rank) and I talked with a mentor about an in-state school and was told that I could probably receive a full ride if I attended. Now the problem is that the school is no named and I was wondering if grad/law/med schools would care about that little fact. Then again my real goal is to strike out on my own and start my own business but in case I change my mind I wanted something to fall back on.</p>
<p>Law schools care about the LSAT and grades. Med schools care about the MCAT and grades. Grad schools are similar depending on the field. If you plan on going further in your schooling it is in your best interests to keep your undergrad costs down. A full ride would certainly do that.</p>
<p>Remember that “prestige” is in the eye of the beholder and what is the be all and end all on CC may not be elsewhere. Have you heard Rick Perry talk about the difference between George W. Bush and himself? “He went to Yale [said with a disguested sneer.] I went to Texas A&M.”</p>
<p>All other things being equal, it is obviously better to have a 3.4 gpa from Dartmouth than Indiana State. So I do not agree that the prestige of the school you go to for undergraduate doesn’t matter at all.</p>
<p>However, that doesn’t mean you can’t still be a success in life if you can only afford to go to, and/or can only get into, Indiana State.</p>
<p>Having gone to big name schools has indeed helped me over the years. But my mother’s second husband went to MIT, and he was living in a trailer park when she met him.</p>
<p>Reagan went to Eureka College. Nixon went to Whittier College.</p>
<p>I know for a fact that kids who went to Nova Southeastern University and Florida International University have gotten into med school. </p>
<p>My kid, who has high SAT scores, will probably soon face a similar issue. Whether to spend 50K a year to go to a big name private college, or instead go to a state university.</p>
<p>If you major in the right field, like biology or computers or the like, you will do fine even if you don’t go to a big name school.</p>
<p>The schools typically mentioned on CC are probably the top five percent in the whole country. That doesn’t mean the other 95% are no good.</p>
<p>Now to be fair that has everything to do with the fact that the American public wants a common man to be President. Ivy Leaguers for some reason are seen as elitists who don’t know how the rest of America functions.</p>
<p>^^^^^
The American public wants a common man to be president?</p>
<p>Apparently an Ivy degree doesn’t seem to be much of an impediment given that all our presidents for the past 20 years are Ivy grads.</p>
<p>OTOH, all the Wall Street ib’s who are responsible for much of our current financial disaster are said to be Ivy grads (apparently the big firms won’t even interview anyone who isn’t) so perhaps we’d all be better off putting graduates of State flagships in charge.</p>
<p>They could hardly do worse.</p>
<p>To answer the OP, prestige is absolutely in the eye of the beholder and is often completely disconnected from the effective abilities of any given individual. No matter how many times this is proven, people still love the big brand names. Apparently, it’s hard-wired into the human psyche.</p>
<p>Yes! Exactly. The vast majority of people (> 90%) went to non-prestigious colleges. They might be more impressed by someone who’s like themselves. Not by somebody who went to a highly ranked school they’ve never heard of. Or, conversely, sometimes people have heard of a school but don’t give a hoot about where it stands on a “prestige scale.”</p>
<p>There is a subtle difference, but let’s don’t confuse name recognition with prestige.
Further, the locality makes a difference. A job in Indianapolis(borrowing from a previous example) might lean with favor to an Indiana State grad over Dartmouth grad, if a person was entering the job market right after 4 yr degree.
Always remember this, more successful, happy people didn’t go to Harvard than those who did.</p>
<p>All good points. A B+ avergage, low rank…and full ride- that sounds pretty winning to me. You can work hard, rise to the top and later think about a hot grad program.</p>
<p>Actually, only about one third of adults over 25 in the US have completed a bachelor’s degree at any college.</p>
<p>In terms of prestigious colleges, here is California’s public undergraduate enrollment:</p>
<p>UC: 179,581
Berkeley: 25,540
UCLA: 26,162</p>
<p>CSU: 348,205
Cal Poly SLO: 17,332</p>
<p>So out of 527,786 undergraduates at California four year public universities, only 51,702, or 9.8%, are in those with national recognition. Adding regionally recognized Cal Poly SLO brings it up to 13.1% (yes, one can quibble about UCSD, UCSB, and a few others, but that won’t bring up the percentage that much).</p>
<p>Now, there are also private schools like Stanford and USC which are high prestige schools, but there are also a lot of low prestige private schools like Phoenix and DeVry.</p>
<p>But the elephant in California post-secondary education is the community college system, with about 2,900,000 students.</p>
<p>I am an engineer and have worked primarily on NASA projects involving a lot of high end engineering talents. I went to a prestige engineering college. When I meet people thru my job for the first time and they ask where I went to school, I get that “oh wow” look when I tell them. It lasts for a few seconds. After that, it is what I say and the quality of the technical excellance that I project that either keeps that look on their face or wipes it away. And I know some engineers from my school that will wipe that look right off the other people’s face quite quickly.</p>
<p>So, while the prestige school may open a few doors initially, it is no guarantee of anything. Most of the people I work with did not go to a prestige college and that includes some very talented and well thought off engineers. It is your talents that mean the most.</p>