Your response made me think of an interaction I saw recently on Twitter (I still can’t call it X). One person had tweeted, “I can’t believe everyone is always saying Lebron James sucks“ and someone tweeted back at them, “No one is saying that. You are out here having an argument with absolutely no one.”
I got the same feeling from your response.
No one is saying (or has ever said) on this site that it is impossible to get into an M7 MBA from an undergrad that isn’t highly selective. No one has ever said that you won’t come across brilliant people that didn’t attend an IvyPlus school. No one has ever said here that they value the prestige of a degree over actual work product.
The question presented was simply this: So what actually makes a college prestigious in 2026?
If you think prestige related to college & universities simply doesn’t exist, I am curious why you even feel this website is valuable? Why are you here? I don’t ask that in a mean way. I am genuinely curious. If it doesn’t matter where someone, anyone, goes to college, why would a website like this even be of interest to you?
Is the only reason to be on CC to gauge one’s/one’s child’s chances at a T20? Some people have questions about merit or are looking for fits for their kids that are NOT 4.0/1500+ students. A couple of years ago there was a very active thread dedicated to finding a full ride for a stellar student whose parents didn’t want to/couldn’t spend on undergraduate but made too much $$ for need-based aid. They found a great match, but it wasn’t “prestigious”. Prestige has its place - and my kid attends a fairly prestigious school (and applied to bunch that were even more prestigious) - but it’s not the be all and end all. It’s A way to get from point a to point b, but not the only way.
To me, a preference regarding prestige is part of a student’s “fit”, just like cost limits, academic programs, location, social aspects, etc.. To some students, prestige is a very important part of “fit”, but to other students, prestige is not a consideration and therefore not part of “fit”.
The formula for elite employer was (% of Ivy+ grads working at employer) / (% of highly selective public college grads working at employer). With the denominator, I’d expect employing few highly selective public college grads to be more influential on being an “elite” employer than employing an especially large portion of Ivy+ grads.
I’d expect that the employers that score highest in this ratio are not limited to just employers that are perceived as most prestigious by general public and misses various employers that often perceived as especially desirable by general public. For example, some FAANG type employers such as Amazon, hire a good portion from highly selective publics, so they probably wouldn’t do well in the “elite” employer formula above.
The author uses this formula to show that students attending a Ivy+ are more likely to work for “elite” employers than students attending highly selective public colleges. Given the circular nature of the formula, this is near guaranteed to be true, regardless of controls or qualifications.
That said, the author repeats the calculation with NYC and Boston employers removed to control for geographic influence and still finds that attending an Ivy+ college instead of a highly selective public increases odds of working for employers that employ a disproportionately large share of Ivy+ college grads compared to highly selective public grads. They don’t control for familial connections directly, but do indirectly by comparing accepted from waitlist to rejected from waitlist, with the assumption that accepted and rejected waitlist have similar degree of special connections.
As long as employing a lot of Ivy grads is the de facto definition of an “elite” employer you are going to find that Ivy grads are over represented. These are very smart people doing this study so I’m amazed that this passed muster.
But another thing I don’t typically consider a fit factor is affordability. Like, to me, it makes sense to say you should start by looking at colleges that are comfortably affordable, and only then consider fit. I again think it isn’t helpful to fail to distinguish fit from affordability, as it renders the term fit meaningless in my view.
Agreed. Said differently, it’s a privilege to be able to consider ‘fit’ in one’s college decision. A privilege that is just not possible for most students who are considering attending college.
I note out in the real world, there are plenty of people who can only get the degree they are trying to get at one college. Like, they have to be a commuter student, there is only one college they can commute to with their degree program, so that is their college. And this can still be life-changing for them.
I recognize we could then say, well, that person also chose on fit, in the sense they needed a college they could commute to, and this college fit that requirement. I just don’t think that is a helpful way of talking about fit in this context, I think it is instead useful to distinguish that sort of practical requirement from a person who is thinking about, say, which dorms they liked the best on their visits.
Which I don’t mean to be dismissive about, but that is very much a luxury, to be able to choose on grounds like that.
It seems to me that the fact that a high (% of Ivy+ grads working at employer) is correlated with a high {(% of Ivy+ grads working at employer) / (% of highly selective public college grads working at employer)} is the most trivial claim that a person can have in this context.
As far as I can see, there are a large percent of Elite College graduates at “Elite Firms” because the “percent of Elite College graduates” is the numerator in the formula for “Elite Firms”, not because of some important social process.
All that graphs like Figure XIb is showing is that firms that employ a high percent of Elite College graduates employ a high percent of Elite College graduates. In other news, an ice maker makes Ice.
That really means that affordability is one of the most important “fit” factors. If it is not affordable, it cannot “fit”. But if it is affordable, the student can use the net price and other preferences to find the best overall “fit”.
More like, many college students are only able to consider affordability and major/program availability as “fit” preferences, and that it is a privilege to be able to include other preferences in “fit”.
I used AI. Not sure if it 100% correct, in fact, I am sure it is not. On the other hand, I like this idea better than the US News Survey, which seems to be driving the way many think of prestige. People who are choosing a school freely, without any ED/REA manipulations - that is an interesting prestige measure.
Try asking it how it calculated these values. It might explain its methodology — or admit it made them up
I had a similar situation a few months ago while researching something (not related to college admissions), and I discovered that ChatGPT had fabricated the data.
Not missing something. In other words, water is wet. They probably should have omitted this from the study - or used the data differently. I don’t think anyone would be surprised if “elite” firms employ more Ivy than non-Ivy grads (given the existence of target schools etc) but using “employs a lot of Ivy grads” as the definition of “elite”, you undercut the whole premise.
Again this is essentially semantics, but I don’t think you are losing anything if you say:
“Affordability is one of the most important factors.”
Adding “fit” into that sentence isn’t really adding any sort of new insight to that statement, and it is losing the ability to contrast factors like affordability with other sorts of factors that are not really like affordability in terms of their possible consequences.
