Thank you!
There’s a Yale grad actively participating in this thread and that mistake went right over his head or he would have pointed it out. But I stand humbly corrected by the quick-witted MIT grad, and at that on a matter not involving math or engineering! Showing once again that place graduates no slouches.
You do your alma mater proud, @tamagotchi !
So odd that you posted that ProPublica article on D.E. Shaw. I learned from it that one of my fav graduation “skits” has his daughter in it.l (and Hillary Clinton). She (not HRC) is now a Hollywood screenwriter with a very funny series, “Adults”. https://youtu.be/wI6a1t-M_48?si=qSpd4RKkidMOo32h
Bingo.
If families from the top percentiles didn’t actually care about where their kids attended college, you wouldn’t see almost 40% of the kids of the top 0.1% by income attending these colleges, and another 20% attending “Highly Selective” colleges.
If it wasn’t important to wealthy families tha their kids attend an “elite” college, why is it so difficult to get rid of all of the admission policies that benefit Old Money, like athletic, legacy, and donor admission boosts?
Many of the Old Money families seem “down to earth” or “humble” when engaging with people who are not in the top 1% or wealthier, because they don’t feel that people in the lower 99% by income are a threat to their social status or income streams. You would be able to see just how not humble and not down-to-earth they will be if they feel that their perceived status is threatened.
They don’t “flaunt their wealth” in a way that is obvious to you, because they are not trying to impress YOU. Other members of the top 1% by income know how wealthy they are, though. You may not know that your acquaintance owns half of the county, but you can be absolutely certain that their congressman, their state representative, and their mayor knows that fact.
They also don’t think that their wealth or their fame relates to any conversation that they are likely to have with you, or with anybody who is not also within their income level. It’s not something that a person can simply slip into a conversation, if their conversation partner is not very wealthy, without bringing the conversation to a screeching halt.
If you’re talking about home issues, do you want them to say “I don’t worry about that because I have a custodian who takes care of that, and we’re not worried about the costs for repairs”. If you talk about how well your kid is doing at college, do you expect them to say “our kid, who has a $150 million trust fund, is doing pretty well at college too”?
To be honest, Americans have such low standards for the Very Wealthy. People seem to actually be impressed by the fact that a very wealthy person is not mentioning their family wealth and their own income in every conversation. I’m sorry, not starting every conversation with “My Family Owns Half of NYC” is not “being humble”. It’s the most basic conversation etiquette.
Finally, if the top 1% were so “humble” and “down to earth”, they wouldn’t be pushing billions of dollars lobbying (and pressuring) politicians to keep taxes on Capital gains so low, or to eliminate estate taxes on the very wealthy. They wouldn’t be putting so much money and effort in maintaining all of the legal loopholes that allow the wealthiest Americans have lower tax rates than people with median incomes either.
A “normal college experience” does not include attending a “fancy college”. She wanted to cosplay as a person from a “normal” family, and like all cosplay, her notion of “normal” was very much the product of a fanciful imaginary idealized notion of “normal”. A college which has 70% of their students from the top 20% by income does not provide a “normal college experience”. I am pretty certain that nothing about her college years was even close to the experiences of 95% of American kids who attend a four year college.
The simple matter is that there are people that are educationally inclined and people that are not. People that are educationally inclined will focus on their kids getting the best possible education regardless of how much wealth they have. I have seen people worth several hundred million dollars care immensely about their kids education. And the folks that are not educationally inclined care less, regardless of the wealth they have. Most of the time these groups don’t mix very well, either socially, or for marriage. One person’s prestige is different from another person’s prestige in this context. Just because someone has 2500 refrigerated trucks, someone who is educationally inclined will not marry the person with the trucks if the person with the trucks is not sufficiently educated. Those are just different worlds. Both of my kids are / will be in finance. They don’t even hang out with people that they think are bro type. To each their own.
Incidentally my kid told me very young that through the centuries, education has been far more heritable than money in most societies
I think anyone who knows schools (or are on CC?) will think highly of MIT and Cal Tech, know that the standards for admission are high, and no one is going there because they think it is cool (or they will soon be gone).
Here where I live, average people don’t know about the admissions standards. It’s Stanford they all want to go to, and maybe UCLA or USC. If you put MIT, Cal Tech, Stanford, UCLA and USC grads in a room, I don’t think most people would think MIT and Cal Tech are more prestigious, but the Stanford gal may get a few nods. It is just that the average person, won’t know the spcecialty schools, but around here they know Stanford (we’ve had more than a few Stanford grads like John Elway and Ed McCaffrey who we all ‘know’ from watching the Broncos). In the midwest it might be Notre Dame that is bright and shiny. In Florida, Miami. Also, people probably don’t know Olin or Julliard or Cooper Union, especially those in the west, just don’t know the schools that are niche schools. Honestly, many probably haven’t heard of Cal Tech or MIT unless they watch Young Sheldon.
But is prestige defined by the number of people who know about and are impressed by a thing or is prestige inherent in the thing itself? Which gets us back to @jym626 ‘s post:
For example, I’d never heard of the Lasker Award (one of the most prestigious biomedical research prizes), but that doesn’t detract from its esteem.
!!!
Finance is FILLED with bro types! Unless we are defining bro types differently.
Look at who heads many of these firms. Arguably more “bro type” than not.
Yes. You are right. They chose to go into a part of finance that doesn’t have bro type people. Not a fit for them. There is respect for hard work and competence across the boundary of your own type, but no wow factor about prestige because someone is from Wharton or whatever.
Obviously Finance is an enormous field in general, with lots of different types of positions.
Depending on your definitions, “academic elites” in HS who are interested in Finance might not be particularly clear on all this yet. If they do have a relatively well-developed understanding, different kids might have different ideas of what sort of career path in Finance might suit them.
To the extent this is part of what well-informed kids are thinking about when choosing colleges, that of course is fine. I don’t think it is going to lend itself to a generic prestige list, though. It once again seems to be pointing to instead having a nuanced understanding of the different roles that different colleges can play in different career paths.
Is this the Rutgers son who was perturbed that Rutgers wasn’t opening doors for him? Seems like he’s doing fine if he’s got a job lined up, in finance, in a sector that interests him and is not particularly prestige obsessed, no?
Yes it was the Rutgers son. It was a very difficult year. Trust me when I say this. I also know his interview process relative to others from a different college, at the same company — and the process is different. There is enormous luck involved in getting an interview — this is what the peeve is about.
There is luck involved in every stage of the corporate hiring process. Every stage.
The hiring team is sitting at a decision meeting- they saw 20 finalists and the target for this particular entry level team is 14 hires.
Do you really think there is a meaningful difference between the 14 getting offers and the 6 turndowns? One of the interviewers comments “She is writing her senior thesis on political corruption during Reconstruction- it sounded really cool” and the other interviewers nod. It sounds cool. So she’s in. Another interviewer says “Joe is teaching himself Korean because his college doesn’t offer it, and he’s fascinated by Korean culture and business practices”. Everyone says “Sure, Korea. Someday we may need to flex someone from the US to the Seoul office”. So Joe is in.
Etc. Nobody has a disqualifying comment to make about the turndowns– after all, it’s a final interview round. It’s just that Candidate A was up the night before with a sore throat and was not at her best. Candidate B is a perfectly qualified professional in every possible way but he skipped breakfast and one interviewer commented “he seems low energy”.
Luck, luck, luck. Who gets an offer, who gets a callback, who has figured out how to turn their biggest deficit into an advantage, some fields are so competitive that luck is the primary differentiator.
I got turned down (in a final round) decades ago for a job I really wanted because I had on my resume “Board member for regional NARAL chapter”. Every interviewer up until then either ignored it, didn’t see it, or didn’t care. I had the luck to have my final interview with someone who a friend of mine who worked at the company described as “the only vocal Pro-Life Evangelical in the division”.
Oh well. Two lessons learned from the experience. Either scrub your resume of anything that someone, somewhere could find objectionable, or accept that sometimes you will be in front of someone who finds you offensive and gross. That’s lesson one. Lesson two is that you can’t handicap Lady Luck.
Blossom — I have seen extra process steps for Rutgers kids at some places. This is just an observation. I can also tell you that the response rate to sending resumes to actual job postings is really low from Rutgers relative to responses for other kids I know. I am sure there is all the other fuzziness that you mention. I am not denying that. I am telling you that there are also extra obstacles.
I’d expect that the majority of the US population has heard of MIT. However, I’d expect the majority wouldn’t be familiar with Caltech (not “Cal Tech”), such that California Institute of Technology would seem equally prestigious to Illinois Institute of Technology – both are tech colleges they haven’t heard of.
In terms of fictional media, Caltech appears in the Big Bang Theory universe. I can’t think of any other references among media that is well known by general population. The 1980s movie Real Genius is often credited as being Caltech. However, the university in the movie was named Pacific Technical University, so I expect few will make the connection.
However, MIT frequently appears in popular media. If someone is supposed to be smart and techy, they often are associated with MIT. Examples include Tony Stark (Iron Man), Will Hunting (I realize he was not a student), Benjamin Gates (National Treasure), Sam Becket (Quantum Leap), 21 movie (MIT blackjack team), and Fringe (Peter faked credentials as MIT grad and Walter was Harvard → Oxford/MIT). I could list dozens of others.
As has been noted in the thread, the general population having at least basic familiarity with the college is not the same as being “prestigious.” Instead different groups are going to find a different list of colleges “prestigious” and different people are going to care about some of these different groups and not others. If you want to be a top musician or actor, Julliard is likely to be quite prestigious. If you want to be a top pilot, I’d expect Embry-Riddle Aeronautical to be prestigious. When I was growing up, I was interested in Harvey Mudd and considered it prestigious. When I mentioned I was interested in the college to people in my upstate NY high school, literally nobody had heard of it – either students or teachers. With no standardized definition of “prestigious”, I doubt there the thread is going to come to an agreement about what colleges are prestigious.
Among the forum member population, I think Hunt’s prestigiosity rankings (see Ranking Colleges by Prestigiosity ) are as good a list of any. Hunt’s final ranking in the thread is copied below. The unit mH is mili-Harvards.
not I
Maybe some watch the Rose bowl parade and have heard Cal Tech mentioned there 
Right. Most Americans couldn’t tell you what the Fields medal is, but that doesn’t take away from its prestige.
Maybe ‘prestige’ can be simply defined as the institution’s ability to transmit a SIGNAL of high reputation, capability, or value to a specific audience whose recognition you deem important to receive such signals.
A few rarefied schools have universal prestige (e.g., Harvard, Yale).
Most others only matter to specific audiences (e.g., Juilliard, Caltech, UIUC for computer science, Deep Springs).
High school kids and their families need to internalize that picking schools on “universal prestige” is not feasible except for maybe 5-10 rarefied institutions in the world.
And certainly they should not confuse “rankings” from magazines and newspapers with “prestige”.