Agreed. I was responding to a post about why someone might choose a state flagship over MIT.
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I didn’t say any of that.
I’d also argue that you’re downplaying a bit too much the degree to which the MIT graduate body represents a tail end of the bell curve. The overwhelming majority of students don’t have what it takes to get in there on academic merit. It’s pretty hard to score 800 on the math section of the SAT and that place is full of those people.
Mind you, I didn’t attend MIT nor did any of my children. I’m not in the fan club. But it is what it is.
It is that deep. Their talent pool, that is.
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This reminds me of bickering about various college sports teams, in some cases supporting colleges that we have not even attended.
Incidentally, anyone making college application decisions will not look at any of this seriously. They are often better informed than what most of this discussion entails.
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Is that a problem? I would think a willingness to “support” a college that doesn’t represent one’s own platform would be indicative of a more objective POV. Isn’t that a good thing? If we all just pick our favorite colleges and argue that they’re the most prestigious, it seems like it’s going to be a pretty limited discussion.
This is a discussion about prestige, which is an inherently subjective topic and not only affected by, but almost entirely hostage to, personal points of view affected by many things, including social milieu and bias.
I’m wondering what “informed” has to do with it. What in the thread have you read that indicates a lack of being informed? Can you be specific?
There are some parents and students on these forums who seemingly consider prestige (as they define it) as the most important factor in their definition of fit.
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Most people who went to the said college will feel less strongly about the place, btw — not that their place is bad, but that many other places can be pretty decent. I am speaking from my own experience, and the experience of my kids.
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I see few (actually I haven’t seen any) posts where anyone has copped to that. I’ve seen plenty of posts by people sincerely (and persuasively) arguing that prestige is important and is ok to consider. I’ve seen none where a parent or student conflates prestige with fit. Fit is almost always brought up as the alternative consideration to ranking and things of that nature.
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For a broad class of kids that want a high paying job, and are agnostic about major, prestige is fit, because it helps in achieving the desired outcome.
I’m not following.
If you ask a kid from MIT, s/he would tell you that it’s ok, and there are other schools that are equally good and equally prestigious. And they are not being modest.
I have a strong preference for maximizing advantage by going to the most prestigious college (I think there are peer colleges in groups — it’s ok to pick from amongst the group) — the benefits of various kinds last a life time, even if they are gradually declining with time.
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I think these graphs from the Chetty study can be fun to consider:
You have to be careful interpreting these because they are controlled for test scores. If you didn’t control for test scores, all of them would look like rising lines, just some steeper than others.
With that caveat in mind, you can see Caltech basically has a curve that looks like a prominent research public . . . like Cal, for that matter. MIT is a little different, but really not that different from Cal’s OOS curve.
OK, so does this socioeconomic resemblance to Cal make MIT and even more so Caltech more, or less, "prestigious”?
Again these questions don’t answer themselves, but if your idea of “prestige” is opportunites to network with the already socioeconomic elites, not just the upper middle class but true upper class, Top 0.1% sorts, well, then MIT and Caltech are not a great choice for maximizing those opportunities.
Dartmouth, on the other hand . . . .
Or in fact USC. Or Vanderbilt or Georgetown. Or even Michigan or UVA.
There are some basic truths here about where the already-elites actually send their kids for college. Again, I would not dictate you need to see that as defining prestige. But if you do, you probably want to do it right, and not rely on something like the US News rankings, what not-already-elite kids and parents are telling each other, or so on.
Edit: By the way, there are some fun stories in the details of all that. Like, Georgia OOS. For certain sorts of “Deep South” elite families, that is actually not an unfamiliar story. Chicago also has a “fun” curve–tracking standard Ivy+ until it nosedives in the Top 0.1. Maybe more ED can help? And so on.
I have clearly lost the thread here.
If you were to ask a curator at the Metropolitan Museum to tell you if their institution is the most “prestigious” in the world, they’d tell you that the Louvre, National Gallery, British Museum, Prado, Rijksmuseum, etc. were all equally prestigious- depending on what particular era, region, medium, etc. you were asking about.
And it wouldn’t be modesty, it would be true. That in no way undercuts the prestige of any of these institutions- it’s just reality that no single institution can be comprehensive on every single dimension. And in fact- if you were a scholar of Georgia O’Keefe, you’d skip over this entire group and head to Santa Fe to view her works, study her notes and other documentation, and see her output in the context of where she painted and what she saw out of the corner of her eye. And if you wanted to study the work of Chagall, you wouldn’t even need a museum- many of the enormous installations need to be seen in the context of the buildings they hang in.
So the notion that an MIT student considers Harvard, Cal Tech, Tsinghua, Oxford, Cambridge, equally or more prestigious really tells you nothing except that the ocean of human learning and achievement is vast and deep. And that many college students know that.
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I thought that was exactly what I said
Yes, “prestige” can have different meanings depending on whether earned merit / achievement is the focus, or networking with (often old) money and power is the focus.
Indeed, Vance Packard in his 1959 book The Status Seekers mentioned how the prestige within HYP was greater for the old money types content with “gentleman C” grades than for the academic achievers and strivers earning A grades. Things have changed since then… but the academic achievers and strivers do provide a veneer of academic eliteness for the LDC hooked students.
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I recently ran across a clip from the movie Moneyball on YouTube (please don’t ask what my YT algorithm looks like!). In it, Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt) is asking Peter Brand (played by Jonah Hill), the new analyst that does data analytics, where he went to college. Peter answers “Yale”. Then Billy asks what did you major in. “Economics”. The implication was that Peter was smart and perhaps knew what he was talking about.
What colleges could you substitute in for Yale in this major motion picture that would elicit the same response of, “this kid is probably smart and knows what he’s talking about”? I think almost all of the Ivies would work (except Brown? I’m less certain if it’s well known enough.) Stanford works extremely well. I think some of the big D1 private academic schools like Northwestern and Duke would work. Berkeley, Michigan, and UVA probably work but not quite as well. I’m less sure of UCLA except the movie takes place in California, so I suppose it would have played nicely. Maybe if the movie were based in the south Vandy would work. MIT might work, but you might need a very quick aside to ask why the character studied econ at MIT.
I think if he had said “University of Chicago”, most people would NOT immediately recognize it. It would be a pure “if you know you know”, and I’m not sure how you could follow it up with anything except someone literally saying, “Uh, it’s actually one of, if not the, preeminent school for economics.” Not great for a movie.
If Peter had said “University of Maryland” then I could see Billy following up with, “What was your GPA?” or even a “top of your class?” He’d have to show some proof that he’s smart.
All this to say that the Yale brand is doing quite a bit of work in giving the character instant credibility with very little asked afterwards. He could be dead last in his class and still get that credibility. That seems like prestige in a broad context.
And sidenote that the Peter character, while a composite of many people, is loosely based on Paul DePodesta, who went to Harvard.
Somehow the assumption is that the academic elites want to network with the old elites. I think this is largely not true. The academic elites want to network with each other. They just don’t care about the other folks on campus, and have no respect for them. The old elites want to network with each other. Some old elites may also want to network with the academic elites because the academic elites are the ones that are going to move and shake things in the future. It is possible that a few academic elites want to network with old money elites. But cross pollination is usually not as prevalent because of lack of chemistry.
We saw where the truly already-elites send their kids to college – anywhere they want because they don’t need a college to signal status, they already have it. It was really interesting to see that neither of the two most famous students in our son’s HS class even applied to Ivies, and the rest of that bunch were all over the place. I think it’s the not-already-elite who believe that the perceived prestige of certain colleges will help them move to a different tier or better circles.
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I think there are some assortive mating interests though, that determine some college choices even amongst the very elite. DE Shaw was known to have donated to several different colleges in advance of his kids’ applications.
My guess is if you were writing a script for an intended-to-be-popular TV show or movie, and you wrote the “smart” character went to, say, Penn, your director or producer might well pull out the proverbial red pen and turn that into something else like Yale or Harvard. They would argue there was too much chance of someone confusing Penn for Penn State or something like that, so let’s just use a safe choice like Yale or Harvard.
Same deal with Chicago. Is that a public school? Why risk the confusion.
Dartmouth, say, would probably be pegged as an Animal House reference, or something like that.
Cornell, that’s the joke school in The Office, right?
Brown? What even is that?
I think you are right MIT could work for a scientist or engineer, but likely not a economist.
MAYBE Stanford if you wanted a specific West Coast character. But otherwise, probably just Harvard or Yale.
I think this would also happen to references to the power conference colleges you listed as well. The argument is people would perhaps see those as athletic references, and so again safer just to go with a smart person school not known for athletics, like Harvard or Yale.
So that’s why almost all “smart” characters in US pop culture are depicted as having gone (or as wanting to go) to Harvard or Yale, unless perhaps they are doing something particularly STEMy, in which case MIT can also work.
My point is if this is the definition of prestige we are working with, it is very likely a short list. Like it almost surely excludes most of the Ivies, Ivy+, T20s, and so on.
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None of the families I’m talking about required donations anywhere to ensure anything for their kids. 
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