I think you make sense with your 3, but how might they compare to these?
- Academic fit
- Career outcomes
- Student fit/environment
- Cost/value
- Opportunities for involvement and leadership
These seem like more of a priority, or should be.
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In the spirit of consistency, while I do think being attracted to your romantic partners is usually a good idea (assuming you are a sexual person, at least), I would not in fact advise people to date other people based on some generic list of attractiveness they got from their peers, their parents, the US News, or so on. I would advise them to date other people based on who they actually found attractive.
And in fact, it is a familiar concept that different people find different things attractive in other people. Your “type” might not be my “type”.
So why in fact would we advise people to instead consult their peers on who they thought was attractive, rather than making that decision for themselves? That would make as little sense to me in that context as it does in the college choice context.
So suppose for a moment we agreed to dump the concept of “prestige” and substituted networking opportunities as a more useful concept. Would it make sense to only evaluate colleges for networking opportunities in a certain academic field?
I think when you ask a question like that, it then helps clarify why there is no simple answer. On the one hand, if you really knew going into college that was going to be your field, then maybe so. On the other hand, if you are going in completely undecided with an exploratory mindset, that would make no sense. And real world people are in a variety of mixes between these extremes, like some people might have some general understanding of what they like or don’t like, but are open to exploration within a broad range. And so on.
OK, so I think this invites some serious self-reflection, indeed possibly engaging in a process well in advance of applying of doing things with the specific intent of exploring your interests, your likes and dislikes, and so on. But you don’t necessarily need a final answer by the time you apply, including because senior year can be a big year for that sort of process. And then even when you are choosing a college, you can understand that depending on where you got in that process, you might put a higher or lower value on future flexibility, and choose a college with that in mind.
Again, how is it better to encourage kids to think about this in less personal, less reflective, less nuanced, less informed way? I just don’t see the appeal, I would rather help each individual kid follow a process like that and understand their options in detail when both applying and then when deciding which offer to take.
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I like this. Never understood the Brad Pitt thing. Taylor Swift? Couldn’t pay me. Which ties to…
Which feel like the criteria that go into “Type.” I’d put three first, by the way. Point is, all of these trump prestige, in my opinion, which I don’t think is as universally valued as some would posit.
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As an aside, I note if you think in terms like flexibility of future major choices, and a wide variety of good networking opportunities which does not depend on what you end up choosing to do, something like a good public four-year college in a major metro might score very highly! Of course its networks might be best in that metro, or perhaps state more broadly. But assuming you are OK with doing your next steps in that area, then that can work out great.
I think a REAL problem is kids who don’t live in major metros might not always have practical access to public colleges like that. To me that can be a seriously life-limiting problem.
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At a high level, I think often what is happening is people are arguing a generic prestige list sourced to US News, peers, parents, or so on, can be used as such a reliable proxy for all those things, you need not actually look into them in any more detail.
To me that is such an obviously implausible notion that it immediately suggests this is being used as a rationalization for something else they don’t want to talk about, possibly not even with themselves.
But that is an admittedly critical viewpoint, and I understand why people sometimes insist that is wrong, that they really do believe generic lists sourced in that way are such powerful tools.
Well, I’m with you. My observation is that most folks will either use lists to validate preconceived conclusions, or dismiss the list.
You’re on a roll.
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The college going population is not a monolith.
In music circles, Julliard, Curtis, etc. are the top of the pile.
Among Catholic families whose kids are in parochial schools, it will be Georgetown, Notre Dame, BC, Holy Cross (depending on region/parish) with Villanova/ Providence/Fairfield at the next tier, and Stonehill, Seton Hall etc. nipping at their heels.
Among Modern Orthodox Jewish families, Yeshiva University (Stern college for women) is the top of the heap. Barnard used to be an acceptable, prestigious option but given some of the politics at Columbia has become both less prestigious and less popular. Among the Ultra-Orthodox, many of whom do not encourage college at all, Touro (especially in the health professions) is the one and only option for undergrad, but the field is wide open for graduate school where the fear of eroding religious standards is less of an issue (students more mature, often married, students very focused on getting professional training and not making friends).
These discussions about “generic prestige” ignore all these sub-groups. Which may be small individually, but represent sizeable portions of the college-going community who really don’t care about Top 20 lists in some magazine.
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1,000 percent.
Also, as you touched upon earlier…for many/maybe most students, choosing a college based on ‘prestige’ and/or any notion of fit (beyond financial) is a pipe dream.
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I’m not buying it.
I am saying, contrary to many of these recent posts, that for those kids who actually do value prestige, it is not useful advice to dissuade such kids from thinking about prestige. Instead, I feel it is better to give them a framework for thinking about thinking things through more carefully.
So I would advise the following to such kids:
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Yes, there are absolutely more important things than prestige, like the factors that @heavyweightcollege lists (academic fit, student fit, cost, etc.).
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But, in response to @blossom, if you are in the fortunate position of wanting or being able to consider college ‘prestige’ – recall that I previously wrote “for kids who care about attending a prestige school (and of course not all college-bound kids do)……” – then there is a more nuanced framework to think about prestige. As opposed to “hey kid, I don’t think you should consider prestige at all”.
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Yes, it is true that ‘prestige’ is not precisely measurable, and prestige (like attractiveness) has different strokes for different folks, but most high school kids have a general sense that some schools are meaningfully more prestigious than others – I gave several examples above – even without any regard for what an external service like US News publishes.
[It is a strawman to think that that Americans need People Magazine to tell them that Jennifer Lawrence and Ryan Gosling are attractive people. No, I don’t believe most kids outsource their thinking on college prestige to outside ranking lists in this way.]
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And I would warn them: defining ‘prestige’ based on one department or major is risky because 70%+ of college students change their minds on academic major while in college. For example, if a kid valued NYU for its prestigious film school and the networking opportunities NYU confers to its film graduates, but that child later changed their mind about the academic field she chose in high school, how would that she feel?
[Like Mr. Bennett in Pride & Prejudice who regretted his marriage to Mrs. Bennett, because what he valued in his youth changed from what he valued when he knew more about himself.]
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You’re basically saying that prestige is important to people who think it’s important. That’s a textbook illustration of a tautology. Also, I’ve been kicking around this forum quite a few years, and I find that very few posters actually ask, “Which college is more prestigious?” They generally want to know, “Which college is better at what I’m looking for?”
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College Confidential thrives on diverse viewpoints, but it isn’t a debate society. Repeating the same perspective in different words doesn’t create a new argument, and it rarely changes minds. If you’ve already shared your thoughts, consider exploring other threads to give other voices some space.
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That’s interesting. At the time I went to Berkeley Law, USC stood for University of Spoiled Children (as consistently relayed to me from my Cal, Stanford and UCLA classmates). No doubt USC has “moved up”, but to Stanford or CalTech levels?
I did grow up and worked on the East Coast. Penn State is a fine school, but reputationally, I would not put it on par with UVA or UNC if we are talking publics. The better students in my hometown would choose Univ of Delaware over Penn State, especially kids interested in engineering. I also wonder what the cross admit data is for Pitt vs Penn State.
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I think that is fair. The “top” Eastern publics are traditionally UVA, UNC, and actually the University of Michigan (traditionally you could see lots of, say, NJ kids at Michigan). But again for engineers specifically, Michigan would stay at the top, but I think Penn State would go above UVA, or of course UNC. Instead, engineering kids would also be looking at Virginia Tech or NC State in those states, or Georgia Tech.
I think for quite a while, Pitt was seen as maybe not quite as desirable as Penn State, particularly outside of Western PA, but I think at least part of that was urban colleges in general were seen as less desirable. Since the retreat of the big urban crime wave and gradually improving living conditions in post-industrial cities like Pittsburgh, I think Pitt’s location has switched from being a net negative to a net positive, not least for OOS students.
Interestingly, in my circles, not a lot of people actually applied to both. I’m in the Pittsburgh region, so a decent number of kids applied rolling to Pitt. For some it was more a “Safety”, others though were targeting it for specific academic purposes (lots of premed kids were happy with Pitt), or maybe hoping for Honors, or so on. Others would instead only apply to Penn State, sometimes because of something like engineering, sometimes family ties, sometimes they just wanted to be farther from home for college, or so on.
Of course I’m sure some people apply to both, but interestingly I just checked Parchment’s tool, and it had it as 50-50 with grey numbers, meaning they didn’t have enough data for statistically significant results. Interestingly, they DID have enough data for Pitt versus Ohio State to be colored numbers, (38 Pitt/62 Ohio State), and for Penn State versus Ohio State (26 Penn State, 74 Ohio State). I checked Rutgers too, that was also red/green, and that one was 82 Pitt/18 Rutgers (!), 27 Penn State/73 Rutgers. UConn, it was red/green 64 Pitt/36 UConn, but just grey for Penn State 43/UConn 57. Delaware, red/green for both, 36 Pitt/64 Delaware, 30 Penn State/70 Delaware.
This is still low-quality data and it would be easy to overread it. Still, I feel like this is a bit of a pattern emerging. Pitt may well be a bit more competitive for OOS students than Penn State these days, and in fact not a lot of in-state students may really be looking at both. Pitt may then be the most competitive for OOS students in nearby large coastal metro areas looking for a “cool” urban college alternative to their in-state flagship options. Penn State can still get some of those too, but can’t really offer the same lifestyle proposition.
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The guys on the ends are sharing an ensemble. How embarrassing. Or maybe it was, “You wear the shirt and I’ll wear the shorts. As long as Muffy stands between us, no one will notice.”
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Probably an exaggeration of USC’s prestige, although it is one of the more prestigious private colleges in California (despite its former reputation).
Beginning College Students Who Change Their Majors Within 3 Years of Enrollment says it is more like 30%, but starting at the student’s first declared major, so it does not include changes of intended major while the student is still undeclared (and the data is from 2012).
Of course, if you count changing from undeclared to any declared major as “changing major” (even if the declared major is the one that the student always intended), then the percentage could be much higher.
For some odd reason, Rutgers seems to have negative prestige among many NJ students, even though it is considered a respectable state flagship by those outside of NJ.
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My feeling is Rutgers is definitely another college that has (rightly) experienced an improvement in perceptions in recent years, and not least OOS. I sometimes wonder if it had been called the University of New Jersey if it would have had less of a branding problem.