I would agree with IB, but not Big law. Big Law depends on first year grades at a top law school. And, Law school is essentially a numbers game (GPA+LSAT). Harvard Law has a very high acceptance rate for both high numbers, and it doesn’t much matter if that 3.95 is from state Uni, as long as it is associated with a 173+.
A few nitpicks:
- For law, it would be the JD that matters, not really undergrad.
- Princeton is actually one of the top schools in CS. UMass is fine for CS, but I don’t think you can find any computer scientists who believe that UMass is actually better than Princeton in CS.
“I don’t think you can find any computer scientists who believe that UMass is actually better than Princeton in CS.”
I have talked to two hiring managers who told me they would rather hire from UMass. I don’t mean to insult Princeton’s CS department. However, for CS “prestige” is not important (thus the tshirts and blue jeans) and either would be excellent, as would any one of at least 50 (if not 100) other universities.
I believe that I mispoke regarding law. Agreed is it the law degree that matters.
My son is at Princeton and he actually has high school friends at both UCLA and USC. I know this will offend three quarters of the usual suspects, but specifically speaking about undergrad, it’s not even close. All usual disclaimers apply, all three are great schools, a motivated student can have amazing success from a whole lot of colleges, blah, blah, blah. But don’t kid yourself. If for no other reason than the obscene amounts of money places like Princeton have to throw around at research projects, study abroad, facilities, financial aid, etc, etc., the experience is going to be very different. Anecdotally and now that the boys are half way through undergrad, it seems from one remove that the manner of education is somewhat different. I won’t pretend to know a whole lot about either USC’s or UCLA’s undergrad experience, but I have talked casually with my son’s two friends. There is nothing like Princeton’s precept system. To my knowledge, neither has anywhere near the relationship with professors that my son has (although a fair amount of that could be personality tbh). According to my son, the classwork also does not appear to be as rigorous, but he is assumedly just guessing from their discussions.
As far as intrinsic value, I guess it depends on what you mean by value. For well over 90% of the population, it is very likely that a Princeton education will be cheaper. I understand that for coastal Californians and those on the eastern seaboard who are in normal terms extraordinarily well off (salary +$250k) this may not be true. But for pretty much everyone else it will be. Simply going by the numbers, and again with all appropriate disclaimers, the cohort of kids at Princeton will be more accomplished, and will have shown a greater aptitude for certain academic disciplines than at either UCLA or USC. While these types of measurements are not the be all end all, they do exist, and should be acknowledged in any fair weighing of one against the other. On other matters, Princeton’s system of junior papers and senior projects, plus the abundance of opportunity for funded research appear almost designed to get kids into grad schools. I don’t believe either UCLA or USC has anything comparable. I would think that has some intrinsic value. I can say that neither of his classmates has done the research work or had the internships my son has had. That too has value. Certainly everywhere except perhaps Cali reputationally Princeton’s name will carry more juice. That has value as well. As I said earlier, my son at least believes he is working harder, and learning more, than his friends, but that is in some ways at least subjective, and I assume hotly debated. Oh the other hand, Princeton has nothing even close to UCLA’s film school or USC’s center for the arts.
There are other things in play here besides “intrinsic value” though, and in many ways those “enviornmental” factors should probably carry great weight in any decision as to where to attend, because at the end of the day USC and UCLA are what I would call “prestigous enough”, meaning that they are schools of a quality that will not close any doors, and will be of great assistance to a motivated student as they move through life.
UCLA and USC are orders fo magnitude larger than Princeton. Princeton is in a suburb, and while I don’t really think of LA as a “city” in the normal sense of the word, both UCLA and USC are manifestly in it. UCLA and USC have a much larger jock culture, and the USC/UCLA game will have just a bit of a different feel than Princeton/Yale. Both have a much larger graduate presence, neither guarantees housing for all four years and in fact most students don’t live on campus at either. All of these things are very different than what a student would experience at Princeton.
Recruiting preferences may be based on factors other than perceived quality of the program. For example, some Silicon Valley companies may go to SJSU rather than Princeton out of convenience. In addition, at Princeton, you are competing with Wall Street and consulting to hire new graduates, which can make the yield for recruiting for other computing jobs poor at Princeton.
Agree with @Ohiodad51: The education and experience at different schools may not be the same. Also not potentially the same when comparing different majors.
How that matters and how much really depends on the individual and goals.
Okay, this is totally anecdotal, but here goes:
I learned a few years ago about a P’ton student whose senior project relied heavily on work I’d done. The student’s project and its conclusions were described at a meeting, and it was clear to me that the student had made some assumptions that weren’t justified.
The student never contacted me in the course of their work to ask some pretty fundamental questions, and they really, really should have. They just took something at face value.
The professor should’ve known better, as well. It’s really affected my perception of at least one department at P’ton.
I’m sure the same kind of thing can (and has) happened at UCLA and USC. And a lot of other great schools!
Here is the bottom line, if you can get admitted to Princeton then you post graduate life will be about the same if you attend USC/UCLA.
Aaaaand, I agree with @CU123 as well.
UCLA has some of the top grad departments in the world while USC’s alumni base is famously proud.
Someone who is upper-middle-class (so definitely not disadvantaged) and remains driven will be able to leverage the resources available at UCLA or USC to fashion for themselves a future as good as they would had gotten through Princeton.
A Princeton pedigree does have a high degree of cachet in certain narrow career fields…such as IB(i.e. Goldman Sachs) or high profile consulting(i.e. BCG, McKinsey) or in some exclusive social circles where its pedigree uber alles.
However, outside of those circles, not necessarily and in some cases/certain fields(i.e. technically oriented fields like engineering/CS) it can actually work against the one holding the Princeton(peer Ivy/elite college outside of MIT/Caltech/CMU/Stanford) as I’ve overheard some older engineering/CS graduate colleagues/supervisors* refer to highly pedigreed colleges like Princeton scornfully as “finishing schools for rich dilettantes”.
This is unfortunate in the case of Princeton, Cornell, and Columbia engineering students/grads as among the Ivies, they were historically the ones with strong engineering/CS departments comparable to elite engineering/CS schools like Georgia Tech, UMich, UIUC, etc.
- Most were alums of schools from engineering/CS departments of schools like MIT/Caltech/CMU/Berkeley along with Georgia Tech, UMich, UIUC, etc.
Even my uncle who was himself an Ivy engineering graduate(Columbia SEAS) had a bit of this bias which wasn’t helped by his being stuck for 10 years with a Harvard engineering graduate as his secretary/clerk when he got promoted as a junior engineering exec because the latter happened to be the idiot nephew of a highly influential executive of the firm and the other executives felt being my uncle’s secretary was where he could do the least amount of damage in light of his performance in the core engineering and even the sales/marketing departments. Even nowadays after retiring from being a professionally licensed engineer and engineering executive with a career spanning several decades, he still regards that secretary/clerk as the most incompetent employee he’s ever had to supervise/work with.
Not according to older relatives and former supervisors/friends who hire for such positions.
While UMass Amherst’s CS/engineeering departments are respectable(top 25), they aren’t the peer of Princeton or its peers(GTech, UIUC, UMich, Cornell, etc) in those areas.
lol. Classic CC post. Admits to knowing nothing about two schools then writes a novel on why another school is better than both of them.
So I don’t know anything about Princeton, but I know someone that goes to Harvard and Yale and they told me about their homework, so I know that Harvard and Yale are “intrinsically” better.
This post didn’t offend, but it did make me laugh, a lot.
This, to a certain degree.
If people really think that a motivated student at USC/UCLA can’t get some access to research/intern experience, they are underselling the value of being at a major research university. No doubt Princeton provides a level of intimacy that USC/UCLA will struggle to provide to a large percentage of their student body. But the big schools various honor “groups” do have access to better intern and research opportunities.
I have close family and friends who have done research or internships dealing with genetic engineering or stem cells either in undergrad or the year afterwards, and were added as secondary co-authors to the resulting paper. They attended UCB (close enough to UCLA) and one got the position at another institution on the basis of a UCB degree + relevant experience/skills. The friend (actually his daughter) has had business internships driven by the SC business honors program that landed her an internship with an american company working in Shanghai. Not saying these are better than Princeton, but even Princeton students may consider these experiences worthwhile.
It may take a year longer if there are less connections the student was able to establish but a year of maturity and perspective never hurt anyone. These people I mentioned are all doing very well.
How do we define “intrinsically more valuable”? Are you really asking if it’s better academically?
If so, we’d have to define quality in undergrad education:
- Smaller class sizes?
- More prof contact?
- Access to research for undergrads (as applicable)?
- Top profs teach undergrads
Variables like those would help us to answer whether Princeton is better than UCLA and USC in overall academic strength.
If you’re asking about prestige or post-grad outcomes, it’s a different conversation.
I forgot to note that it doesn’t really jibe to say that USC/UCLA are “orders of magnitude larger than Princeton” and then try to place concern regarding their “jock” culture. It seems that there is little familiarity with how student culture works at a larger community; there are islands of culture all over (some which don’t value sports), and one would say the spectrum would be much more varied than at smaller schools. And, believe it or not, there are people that don’t enjoy sports at these schools and still have friends and a social life; two such UCLA grads work at my office (the USC grads here are sports fans though 
) The ability to navigate through a variety of groups is one of the joys of being at a larger school.
Come on, I like Princeton. I know grads from there as well and I’m happy to call them friends. But let’s not make claims that really don’t reflect the reality of what a student of a certain “caliber” can achieve at any of these schools.
Well, it’s another thread that is going the way of “my school is better” by bashing the other schools with unsubstantiated jibberish.
I always wonder if a poster’s kid didn’t get accepted to a school, or their football team got beat, etc., so they proceed to bash it on CC because they are angry…because otherwise, why would highly educated people not see these are all great schools where students can do and achieve great things?
All three are schools where every year thousands are not accepted but wish they could attend, and offer those fortunate enough to go there a stellar educational experience with immense opportunities. What a student does with those opportunities is the difference.
Simply answer to OP’s question: no.
Yes, one needs to make the distinction between a big spectator sports culture (that may be found at UCLA and USC and some other large NCAA D1 schools) and a tendency to find a large percentage of actual intercollegiate athletes among one’s fellow students (that may be found at smaller schools that have many intercollegiate sports, like Princeton).
I mentioned Princeton, USC, and UCLA simply as examples of schools at different levels of the strata of elite schools, not to single any specific school out.
I don’t know what “intrinsically more valuable” means exactly, but I do know that Princeton has been ranked #1 for many years in “Biggest Endowment per Student,” which translates into most generous FA, fully funded study abroad programs, UG research funding and opportunities, student to teacher ratio (5:1), facilities, etc. Add its Precept System and the Senior Thesis (70% alumni rate it the most rewarding UG experience), it’s easy to see why its UG experience is highly prized. Obviously, it’s up to each individual to determine what’s intrinsically valuable in an UG experience, particularly as it pertains to the intended field of study.
Of 7 colleges my son was admitted to, Princeton offered the most generous FA by a large margin. Picking Princeton was no brainer given its financial support as well as its reputation for the UG focus. One of the very first things my son received upon being admitted was an info about its “Bridge Year Program” that encourages the incoming freshmen to take a fully funded gap year at various countries even before they enter Princeton. Once my son committed to Princeton, he received another email about this program. It showed the institutional commitment to its rich and rewarding UG experience. Like I said, I don’t know what “intrinsically more valuable” means, but I’m sold on what Princeton offers.
“I mentioned Princeton, USC, and UCLA simply as examples of schools at different levels of the strata of elite schools, not to single any specific school out.”
And that’s silly. When discerning between schools, the actual schools matter.
Tufts and CMU may be the same strata as USC and UCLA (at least according to USNews), but they are very different (also from each other) and how they differ from Princeton would differ as well.
I don’t understand why, despite many admonitions to not do so, people insist on looking at colleges through a one-dimensional lens.
Answering the OP’s question. YMMV.