Denison, SMU, Alabama, U Richmond, Colby, Trinity, Washington and Lee, Villanova (for wealthy Catholic families)– off the top of my head, these were the “top destinations” for the children of the elite. Not the “Dad’s a poli sci professor, mom’s a federal judge” elite- but just plain vanilla wealthy people who have a business to hand down to their kids. They don’t want their daughters working too hard on academics if it means not getting into the right sorority or hanging with the right crowd. They don’t want their sons working to hard if it distracts them from their golf game, fraternity shenanigans, or the other “bonding” activities with their peers.
Parents own a refrigerated trucking company. 2500 trucks and a few dozen warehouses. Non-union. They have partial interests in companies which represent the rest of the grocery supply chain. Maybe they’ll sell when they retire, maybe Chip or Martha (with Martha’s future husband) will take it over. But either way, they don’t need no fancy “book larnin”. They are wealthy, they donate to charity, they don’t need any signaling beyond their affluent lifestyle. They don’t aspire to Bill Gates levels of money, and other than the numerous photos of them with the Governor, a president or two, and their Senators which dot the family room, they don’t aspire to a big public footprint.
I’m not sure who you consider academic elites, but a lot of the academic highflyer kids I see targeting “prestigious” colleges these days are talking about going into fields like Finance, and particularly the most lucrative positions in Finance. I’m not sure they always really know what that means, but the people who work in those positions essentially have as their clients people who already control a lot of money. And you only get so far being a pure numbers cruncher, to really advance you need to be the sort of person who actually can build trust relationships with clients like that.
Same deal with the kids who dream of being entrepreneurs and such. The worker bees are not the folks actually meeting with the people with the money these ventures need.
Of course if you just want to be a successful doctor, working engineer, or so on, you don’t need to think in these terms. And you don’t need to go to a private university with an unusually high percentage of Top 0.1% kids either.
And of course that is what will actually happen to most of these kids hoping that attending a “prestigious” college will launch them into the Top 0.1% as well. It won’t work out like that, they will just end up “normal” top 2-5% sort of successful.
All this is leaving out the actual aspiring academics, like people who want to be professors and such. Most of those people will ALSO not get that result, it is really hard to pull that off, and expensive to try (particularly in terms of opportunity costs). But those are the sorts who might actually think about the long game, all the way through a PhD. And those are the sorts who then might disproportionately choose LACs and such, understanding their role as the first step along such an academic path.
Of course some choose research universities too. I think the true academicky kids, as opposed to the academic highflyers gunning for Finance careers and such, often cross shop research universities with top departments in their intended field and also top LACs, at least when they are being advised by people who actually understand the paths to academia in the US.
Plenty of academicky kids have a preference of either big or small. I tried to get my kids to consider LACs but a school of that size was just… nope! For my daughter especially, only the biggest schools would do
And I know lots of kids prefer small, too!
But sure, kids who do not have a size preference may cross shop.
I agree, the truly elite know they are sellers, not buyers, of status in college.
I also note that as blossom also indicated, at least traditionally, and still to some extent some places, exclusive fraternities and sororities and similar were the intended mechanisms for networking, assortive mating, and so on. Brooks and Buffy and such were not intended to do all that in the Gen Pop at their large public university, but instead through these sorts of exclusive societies, the kind that might well actually have an identity across colleges.
And even places like the Ivies still found ways of doing that within their own populations.
Yes, that is true too. I didn’t mean to imply they couldn’t have such a preference, just that they were among the subpopulations more likely to cross shop.
I’d also note this can be a bit field specific. Like, it is sort of just obvious that the economies of scale in something like engineering make it at least difficult to offer at a small school, unless perhaps it is completely STEM-focused small school. And even then, there aren’t that many of those. So if you want to be an engineering professor some day, you may be mostly looking at research universities.
English, say, is not like that. Not that no kid who wants to be an English professor would prefer research universities, but they are going to find a lot more competitive options among LACs.
There is a spectrum of behavior of course. My kid who is in finance tells me that they are not capital constrained. They are talent constrained. At least half the entering cohort each year has immigrant parentage. They are all hard STEM. Little social skills Etc - all the usual stereotypes. Maybe they can spell the word stock. No networking with moneyed people when on campus. You can interpret that whichever way you want.
Obviously it is written for a general audience and undoubtedly oversimplifies things, but it also tracks what I have seen actual investment bankers talk about. Or for that matter commercial bankers (my wife worked her whole post-MBA career in a commercial bank).
There’s an arms race for talent between the top finance firms and the top AI labs. These titles are meaningless. The relevant networking is with your peers on both the coasts. Not with some old money person in your college whose dad is worth 50mm
To the point made by @neela1 about an arms race for talent, I’m advising the kids I meet that a wise post-college path is take is to take virtually ANY job at a reasonably-established tech firm (if they are interested in tech; it doesn’t have to be Anthropic) or ANY job at a reasonably-established Wall Street firm (if they’re interested in finance; it doesn’t have to be Goldman), and then spend most of their 20’s working hard, learning industry-specific skills, and expanding their networks.
BTW, this also coincides with the time most college grads are out shopping for mates too and learning to live independently, so their 20’s are a period of “time famine” (and possibly into their 30’s too). You don’t get to “time affluence” until you reach our age and are able to hang out on these parent boards.
I may have posted this before, but this fun article examines why certain schools are always featured in Hollywood plots. Does this correlate to prestige? No, since we already agreed that ‘prestige’ is impossible to precisely define…. what’s going on here is more of a vibe or a signal or some shorthand to quickly communicate something about a person. https://www.vulture.com/2022/09/why-does-every-teen-in-every-movie-want-to-go-to-yale.html
We live in an area where there are many well known prep schools…where many of the students are from well known families and/or from very wealthy families. While they might have trusts, many of these families also have family “foundations”. As noted by @ChoatieMom these families don’t need to worry one bit about which college their kids attend. And in many cases, they don’t have to worry about the kids and future careers either.
Now, having said all that, the families we know are very humble and down to earth folks…and honestly do not flaunt their wealth or notoriety for any reason.
They attended a wide variety of colleges (the ones I’m talking about are close in age to my own kids), and have entered adulthood responsibly. And that is what matters to them, and their parents.
No college prestige discussions…and back when my kids were applying to college, the “rankings” were just not viewed much at all.
If you ask folks in my generation (boomer) whether prestige is “still” about Ivies and Rankings, most would probably wonder what “still” means in that question because for their generation, rankings especially didn’t matter, and not everyone went to an Ivy.
That was paywalled for me, but that sounds exactly right.
They may have touched on this, but Harvard can have some negative shorthand elements sometimes, like that the person who wants to go to Harvard specifically might be a bit egotistical, materialistic, power-hungry, etc. Yale for whatever reasons more reads to people as the “nice” smart people school, where intellectuals and creative people and so on would most want to go.
Of course plenty of Yale grads end up right next to Harvard grads in finance and so on. But the popular perception is what matters for these pop culture purposes, and so it makes sense writers and directors and producers and such would sometimes prefer Yale for certain characters, so as to avoid some of those negative elements to Harvard’s popular perception.
At my fancy college, there was a friend of a friend who was really trying to keep people from learning her middle name. It turns out that was because that name was literally on one of our buildings. And she just wanted to have a normal college experience.
Prestige is only a concept to those who don’t have it. If you have it, it doesn’t matter what you wear/drive or where you live/went to school. None of those things confer what the truly elite already have.
This is also what our son found at boarding school. The kids with household names found them more burden than blessing. They wanted to blend in; you’d never be able to pick them out by looking at them.
