What makes a college more prestigious?
People throw around the word “prestige” but everyone seems to define it differently.
Some care about admit rates and Ivy branding. Others care about IB/consulting recruiting, ROI, or graduate school placement. Some still trust US News rankings, while others think outcomes matter more than historical reputation.
So what actually makes a college prestigious in 2026?
U.S. News ranking or historic significance /tie LIKE Ivy Or for some NESAC or the schools forever with top historic names - the UNC/UVA, W&M, U Mich etc.
It’s all in each person’s perspective.
At the end of the day, does the name impress another ? That might define prestige.
and that what bothers me most because people who get impressed seem to understand the least.
Basically, selectivity. So certainly not limited to the Ivy League.
I agree on selectivity, but I meet so many people who have not kept up.
Can a college within an ivy, with a 30% admit rate, still be as prestigious as Ross is for an oos applicant?
I think this is location dependent. When we lived in the Northeast, parents were way more fixated on the traditional prestigious schools (Ivies and the highly selective NESCACs). When we moved to the Midwest people were way more impressed by the U Michigans of the collegiate landscape or the schools where students got full rides. Quite frankly, people are impressed here that our kid did honors engineering at Purdue. If we were still back East I’m sure people would have said “why didn’t she apply to Cornell?” or just assumed that her grades were subpar.
I think it’s an illusion of what the uninformed parents hear from other’s, or informed parents expect. . I have heard this over the year’s. I help some people in real life. Once I show them other choices that are a great “fit “for their child the thought of the prestige goes away. It’s really funny but I ask them what prestige means to them and they can’t answer it. Usually it’s just the name brand schools that they heard about that their neighbor or relatives kid’s go to. They think it’s impressive. Then I ask again why and very educated people can’t answer the question.
Like in most conversations, the people at the extreme ends of this conversation are wrong. Some people say, if you don’t go to a highly selective university, you are wasting your time and should go to a trade school. Obviously, this is silly, and we could be here all day listing important & successful people who went to state universities.
Some people will take this info and spin it to the other extreme….there are no benefits whatsoever ever to attending a highly selective university and it is all about the effort of the student.
Prestige means results. Do highly selective private universities deliver the results, yes. Even when you take into account the wealth & connections of the families of the students attending, the benefit is still there:
You are 100% correct. I am from the northeast and people are certainly more pro-ivy and “top only” liberal arts college than they should be. I think we are lagging in our thinking. I would say that we do not respect state schools enough here, but now that the top ones have less than 10% admit rates for oos students, I am seeing that change very quickly.
Does test policy have anything to do with it? Do UCs get credit for being test blind?
Almost no one in our circles in the Midwest has even heard of the NESCACs, even the most prestigious ones. My oldest attends one of them, and about 98% of the time, I have to explain what and where the school is when asked what college he attends. They’d be waaaay more impressed by Purdue!
Overall, I do think that a major component of prestige is whether the school impresses people in your social/professional circles, and that there are strong regional influences to perceived prestige.
Test policy is probably neutral for prestige purposes, except among the most pro-test people and those who use test scores as the primary factor in selectivity which they use to determine their version of prestige ranking. For these people, test optional or test blind is probably a negative for their notion of prestige.
I was thinking maybe people would think they are leaders in test reform… or something like that. You are probably right.
FWIW, I think it’s worth separating out parents from everyone else. Parents will know more as they learn more. I think the layperson around the US will know Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Stanford, and CalTech and say that these are prestigious for having really smart people. Then you might have a few more people that know the next set of Ivies and Ivy+ schools. And then you’ll have a subset of people that will know the various SLACS. And of course, you’ll have people that know their local area schools like people in Texas might know Rice, for example.
For students, I think prestigious ones are schools that are hard to get into. So Northeastern, which many old people won’t consider prestigious, gets a “prestige” entry because of their selectivity.
And I’m not one that thinks that hiring managers at most companies know all these various schools. I think that big companies that recruit a LOT might know many, but the HR people that I know don’t necessarily know beyond what many laypeople know. The hiring managers that I know are very dependent on their own experiences. As someone living in the northeast that grew up in the midwest, I did not know many of the LACs that are common to those in the know here. And I was hiring for roles in NYC! My old boss went to Hobart and I got it confused with Hamilton. I knew next to nothing about both, but ran across Hamilton first in a book, so thought that’s what he said.
All this to say that prestige is, I think, mostly about who’s asking.
It’s definitely regional. We live in the heart of New England and our daughters attended a highly competitive public school. Our older one hated living in the Northeast and wanted to go to a warm weather school so she chose Rice. Nobody at our school (other than the counselors) knew about Rice, including her teachers. They literally never heard of it. They couldnt believe she would pass up top Northeast schools to attend Rice. She was the first student from our HS to attend Rice.
Our younger daughter is completely the opposite and she’s going to Brown. When I meet with clients in Texas and we make small talk about our kids, they’re much more impressed by Rice than Brown.
I’ve lived in New England for awhile and there is definitely a strong east coast bias. Our HS was fine, but there are some parents here who think it’s so much better than schools from other parts of the country. Im pretty sure my kids wouldve been excellent students if they attended a well funded affluent suburban HS in a different part of the country.
I don’t think selectivity in and of itself means prestige because many find well known schools as prestigious, regardless of selectivity while others very selective are unknown - so don’t really have an aura about them.
But I live in New England, and the “top of the charts” prestigious places are the military academies (all of them), Julliard/Curtis, and an almost reverence for Stanford. And a close second to these are the accelerated BS/MD programs which are considered the holy grail. The Val of the closest HS to me got into the CUNY 7 year med program and I think she got more hoopla over that than Taylor Swift getting engaged.
I don’t think you can brush entire regions of the country with the same brush.
When I hired for the aerospace industry, our “prestige” list looked very different from when I was hiring finance talent, which looked very different from consumer products. And when my company opened its first operation in China, we were falling all over each other over Tsinghua and PKU. Amazing– HR folks in the US can actually learn about universities thousands of miles away.
Im just sharing my experience from my interactions with parents/teachers in my area.
Ive encountered a lot of people who think the “best schools” are only in the East and West Coast (plus a couple in the midwest… but never in the south).
Interestingly, when I was growing up (in NE) the military schools had significant prestige. Now I find that people do not know what to make of them. Obviously, good schools.
That’s got nothing to do with prestige. I think it should be a knock but it’s not on a UC or a Bowdoin, etc.