Not disagreeing with anything you’re saying - spot on - but will add that Tulane also has an EA round and although they do not separate EA and RD for reporting purposes, the general sentiment seems to be that the acceptance rate for RD is low single digits and EA a bit better.
A lot of “prestige” is based on reputation. The perception that the school is academically strong, attracts high performing students and that there is an association with wealthy/successful/famous people. That is why the Harvard name has such high value - most people have heard of it and know it is prestigious (Presidents, SC justices, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg etc). Yale, Stanford, MIT and a handful of others also enjoy this kind of widely recognized reputation - on the other hand, equally elite schools - Rice, WashU, all the top SLACs - might be known among people that need to know, but the general public is largely unaware of them (outside of their regions).
4 Likes
Right, but if the people who need to know are the people you care about, then the top LAC does the trick.
4 Likes
I attended a SLAC myself and am well aware of the benefits. That doesn’t change the fact that name recognition is low outside this area. If you asked the man on the street about prestigious universities in the US, they’d most likely come up with Harvard - maybe MIT or Stanford or Yale. That’s because most people don’t care about prestigious universities. It’s immaterial to their daily lives. This is especially true when you get out of the Northeast.
8 Likes
But often times, people ultimately care about their friends, family, and immediate peer group.
First they care about USNews but that peer group brings the second guessing later.
It’s often meaningless to impress a stranger; many want the validation of those they know today - and that often doesn’t happen once/after the decision has been made.
The USNWR rankings do seem to give an impression that the criteria is an attempt to reverse-engineer common perceptions of prestige among universities in the US, while “filling in the blanks” for universities not known to the reader.
Of course, common perceptions of prestige may not match the effect or non-effect of prestige in particular contexts (e.g. admission to specific kind of graduate program, hiring for specific kind of job, etc.) where it may actually matter or not.
3 Likes
Gotta chime in here. You’re not wrong; we definitely need to support the UC-Merceds and other high mobility schools. But let’s be honest, the highly rejective colleges and universities aren’t in the diversity game out of the goodness of their hearts; the smart ones realized a long time ago that the future leadership of the country would not belong solely to a small number of wealthy families along the eastern seaboard. They’re looking to hedge their bets.
2 Likes
I recently witnessed this same phenomenon in real life. One of my kid’s friends is going to Amherst. Kid told me the friend’s parents are quite disappointed the kid is going to a no name school. They are immigrants and in their circle, nobody is impressed with Amherst. Meanwhile, the kids go to a top private school in CA. Most of the parents at school (and kids) know Amherst is a super-elite school with high prestige. Thus, the same school has zero prestige with the kid who is going there’s immigrant parents, and super-high prestige at the kid’s high school.
So much of prestige is reputation amongst others for being top quality (however one defines that). There are very few schools that are almost universally seen that way. I’d probably argue outside of Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge, the others are very context specific (I’m not sure even Stanford or Yale can sneak into that category). I guess I’d also argue the Ivy League brand also has somewhat universal prestige (though that may be changing), even if the individual schools do not (lots of people did not even know the one I went to is an Ivy League school). And the thing about reputation, it is only loosely connected to the actual facts.
4 Likes
Part of my point was the Ivy League schools are NOT in the ‘diversity game’.
1 Like
Sorry to all for bringing up this point but liberal arts colleges outside the top 50 might be losing their shine. Likely this is a result of financially-driven closings, the focus on ROI (new sign of prestige IMO), and the lack of name recognition that they never really had.
3 Likes
But @Franklynn said “top” LAC, so your point does not seem to contradict what they said at all.
3 Likes
And yet- for most people who care about actual education and intellectual inquiry, and perhaps you had a kid who never found his or her people in HS, and didn’t want the rah rah rah football environment…
Would you prevent them from applying to Wittenberg or Carleton or Beloit or Brandeis or whatever your kid’s preferred environment might be?
I love me a good flagship university. But think about the last five kids you know who dropped out/transferred/”took time off to re-evaluate” from your state’s flagship…. some eventually return, some never do, some find a more suitable path as a photographer or wedding planner or some other entrepreneurial thing that doesn’t require a degree (which is great). But PERHAPS Lawrence or Hobart or Agnes Scott might have lit the fire (and been a better social fit) than sitting in a lecture hall with 699 other students?
6 Likes
Not I!
But the post is about prestige.
1 Like
I was going to joke you would have to beat me to it, and then I realized I was probably already covered with “Unparticular” . . . .
This always struck me as one of the weaker parts of their methodology. I feel like it would be more compelling if they had an independent indicator of elite firms.
Yep, and in fact even in their region, particularly if a college is DIII, I think some of these places still might not be very well known (except among the sorts of families who actually attend them or at least know families who do).
I have seen some people suggesting things like this for decades now.
Meanwhile, many of them keep getting more applications, keep enrolling students with higher numbers, keep getting wealthier as institutions . . . .
I do think there are what you might call regional and local LACs that are struggling, sometimes even closing. But the number of “national” LACs that have generally benefited from the increased national and international nature of selective US college admissions is, I would suggest, more than 50.
Would you argue that sub-top 50 LACs ever had prestige? I never thought of them that way despite the fact that many are excellent schools.
I love Agnes Scott, my kid almost went there, but I would not call it prestigious. Even the LAC my kid is going to, which is in the “top 50” if you care about rankings, is not someplace I would call prestigious. The school has a lot of excellent qualities but prestige is not what I’d highlight.
I guess I’m confused on why you are raising LACs outside top 50 on your what is modern prestige thread.
4 Likes
I think that again depends on your definitions.
Take an LAC like Kalamazoo College, ranked #67 currently in the US News.
I went to a middle- to upper-middle class public HS in the Detroit area, generally considered among the top tier public high schools in the state. Top students tended to go to Michigan, sometimes other top publics like Cal or UCLA or such if they wanted a change of scenery, sometimes Ivy+ and such, and sometimes LACs. One thing that wasn’t common back then, though, was going to LACs outside of the Upper Midwest.
There was a pretty well-known “hierarchy” among the LACs. If you were willing to look outside Michigan, places like Oberlin or Carleton might be considered top choices (typically for very different sorts of kids, I note). Inside of Michigan, though, Kalamazoo was pretty much the consensus top LAC, and would attract the sorts of top students who could go to Michigan but preferred an LAC.
OK, so in the educated, professional class social circles of Metro Detroit, Kalamazoo was both reasonably well-known and very well-regarded. Does that make it prestigious? I would say it could, depending on the definition.
By the way, Oberlin is currently ranked #58 by the US News. Oberlin was definitely an LAC that had a positive reputation well outside of just Ohio. I sometimes think it is fun to check out this 1960 Life Magazine college review to get a feel for how people thought back then:
Oberlin is quite high up their list by test scores, and the narrative includes quotes like, “One of the top schools in the Midwest academically”.
Obviously some things have changed since 1960 (although some things less so–I find some of the narrative comments still amusingly on point).
But anyway, point is Life Magazine had no problem including lots of LACs in its review in 1960 that are not in the US News Top 50 today.
Some people will then argue that means these colleges must be less prestigious than they used to be. And again, if your definition is based on some zero-sum peer competition game that is scored with US News rankings or admissions rates or something similar, then sure. But if you are thinking more in absolute terms, where there is no particular rule that some new colleges rising in academic reputation must mean others are falling, then I don’t think it is so much the case that these colleges always have worse reputations. They are just sharing their traditionally good reputations with more colleges these days.
Although again individually, some have changed their positioning, and indeed their very nature (see, for example, Antioch’s story).
2 Likes
I’ve never understood the bit about Ivy grads having a better chance of working at places that employ a lot of them already - why do you need a study for that (networking)? Also, do they control for geography? I live in MA - 40% of Harvard alumni (or thereabouts) also live in MA. Ergo, you are more likely to find Harvard grads working at MA companies - is that a function of attending Harvard or a function of location?
5 Likes
IMO, the emphasis on diversity was less about “hedging bets” on who will run the country in the future (note: the gap between the haves and have-nots is increasing, not diminishing) and more about responding to growing criticism that these elite schools disproportionately cater to affluent, well-connected families. Expanding access helps protect their public image and institutional legitimacy.
These universities are businesses, and they’ll do what’s best for their business.
8 Likes
Regarding applications, since they are up more than 50% over the last 10 years… has something to do with it IMO.
maybe Rhodes and Oberlin, but directionally agree
1 Like
Absolutely. Also graduates of Suffolk which I guess the folks on this thread would claim is a total unknown outside of Massachusetts. And if you’re a teacher (or have kids in K-12) you are going to know a LOT of graduates of Wheelock, Endicott, Salem, Framingham. And if you are a CPA, you’re going to have colleagues (or a boss) who went to Stonehill.
Folks do pretty dumb research sometimes.
1 Like