<p>That is an old thread, but I’ll reply anyway.</p>
<p>I think it depends on your major. If you are a CS graduate, a CMU diploma is on par with a diploma from MIT or Stanford, and companies like Google or Apple see it that way.</p>
<p>Overall though, I think CMU is less prestigious than, let’s say, Northwestern, JHU, Cornell, or UChicago, and probably ranks only slightly better than some top public universities like Michigan and UCLA.</p>
<p>As another poster said, the USN&WR ranking gives an accurate measure of CMU’s overall domestic prestige, which is hardly surprising since USN&WR is basically a prestige list after all. </p>
<p>Internationally, CMU’s prestige is, however, better than it is domestically. International students for example normally rate it higher than domestically overrated American universities like Vanderbilt, Emory, Rice, Georgetown, WUSTL, Notre Dame, or even Brown and Dartmouth.</p>