I would disagree strongly with the “Brandeis is not prestigious” remark. Brandeis is extremely well regarded.
Brandeis is the college being attended by the valedictorian of my kid’s suburban public high school class, where other members of the top ten students ranked just below her are at Brown, Cornell, Williams, Vanderbilt, UC Berkeley, etc.
Brandeis has many special aspects. Here are two cool ones:
- It is a tier one research university, where two professors recently won a Nobel prize... and yet it is relatively small in size and has the small class sizes and close professor-student relationships of a liberal arts college.
- It also is the nation’s only completely secular, never-religiously-affiliated college not to have a Christian majority. No religion boasts a majority there, although Jews are a plurality. The campus boasts three temples from three different religions purposely built so that the shadow of any of the three never falls on any of the other three.
Only you and your family can decide if the intellectual experience of attending Brandeis, and your perception of its being a good fit for you, will be worth the added expense. In terms of later career/ grad school/ financial success, I agree with the posters above who stated that your individual achievements and drive will be more determinative than the college you attend.
We toured both Brandeis and Clark. Clark has a similar appeal to Brandeis in that it also is a small university and has a student body that includes many comfortably quirky kids and is oriented toward community service/ social justice.