It was a change or die moment for many. And the days of preferring a C student who happens to be a White, Episcopalian student at Exeter (fourth generation Harvard man), over an A+ student at Stuy who happens to be Jewish or Asian had to end. It is hard to claim to be a meritocracy while systematically keeping out your more meritorious applicants!!!
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I’m not sure why posters continue to conflate fit with prestige. They are entirely different things. Noone is arguing there are not fine universities producing well educated graduates at a huge variety of universities - that doesn’t make them prestigious. And yes name recognition is paramount to prestigious. If the university mentioned or printed on a resume doesn’t elicit a positive response - it’s not prestigious in that context.
Now there is absolutely a difference between widespread prestige, vs regional or industry. One could go further and add international - which is why so many international students are obsessed with a handful of names as they fear returning to their home country with a degree from a school that will carry little weight in their home country.
If one is pretty certain on their career goals, I can understand wanting to look at how schools are viewed in those circles. It can get the resume a second look. I can also understand students who are very unsure of their path wanting a school that will be well regarded in a variety of industries. Others are free to disagree and let other criteria take precedence in their college searches. I just fail to understand is why those people want to continue to describe fit as prestige.
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I think in a democracy you always have to consider the possibility that the have-nots will eventually find a way to political power. Even in Boston. 
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There are 17 National Labs in the USA working on cutting edge scientific issues.
I doubt that most people in the US (the taxpayers) could name more than 2… maybe Argonne? Los Alamos?
That doesn’t mean the other 15 aren’t prestigious. They are HUGELY influential in many different spheres and are hugely prestigious. But that have poor name recognition.
Is it your contention that the lack of name recognition undercuts their prestige?
How many people in the US know what the Fields medal is? Or the Abel prize? People can name every single Housewife in Utah (and their spouses, current spouses) but have absolutely no concept what the “top tier” (or “prestigious”) designations look like outside of popular culture.
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I’ll admit that I was exaggerating - but only exaggerating, the pattern is there.
Ahhh, I see. I didn’t see EA broken out in the CDS, but I was in a hurry and may have just missed them.
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I also think over time there was a big picture recognition that it benefited upper-class kids with high financial, social, and political capital (aka “white shoe” kids) to mix with kids from middle or even lower-class backgrounds who nonetheless had high intellectual capital (aka “brown shoe” kids). Of course the brown shoe kids also benefited from getting access to those other forms of capital through their white shoe classmates. The benefits of this specific sort of mixing/networking was a sort of obvious implication of industrialization, and the generally more dynamic and innovation-driven economies that resulted from industrialization.
Some of the “Gilded Age”/Second Industrial Revolution sort of private universities were more or less formed by socioeconomic elite families with this concept in mind. Older private colleges and universities may have had to adapt (indeed, some colleges became universities in a way that can be seen as reflecting these trends).
And then I think after WWII, with the GI Bill and in general a boom period for US business globally, and Third Industrial Revolution, aka Digital Revolution, these trends accelerated.
Things like the Chetty study, from this perspective, can be seen as in some sense documenting how SOME brown shoe kids can still sometimes benefit from mixing with a disproportionate number of white shoe kids. On the other hand, the fact MOST of the kids will get just as much benefit from attending other modern universities with fewer white shoe kids reflects the reality of how the US economy has in fact evolved. At least somewhat.
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Believe me I know lving in Georgia. No one has heard of the school I went to or my husband went to (Williams) because why would they? But that lack of name recognition by the average person doesn’t impact us in any way.
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When I am hiring, if I see someone went to Agnes Scott or Kalamazoo, I assume they are smart, independent, great critical thinking skills. They definitely get a second look.
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I’m saying they are prestigious in a certain context - the specific industry, but no they don’t have wide-spread “prestige”. Again doesn’t mean they are doing amazing research, doesn’t mean people in the industry don’t see them as prestigious. But prestige, by definition is how OTHERS see something. So something can be amazingly prestigious in certain circles and absolutely meaningless in others.
Interesting question IMO. People love the best xxxx you have never heard of lists. But are those prestigious?
Yes, and at least nominal diversity helps them market themselves to greater ranges of potential students with messages implying that “students like you can thrive here”.
That said, racial/ethnic diversity is more visible than SES diversity, so there is stronger marketing pressure on racial/ethnic diversity than SES diversity. SES diversity is also more expensive in terms of financial aid costs and reducing incentives for alumni and other donors.
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This is a variation on the “it’s prestigious to those who count” bedrock belief that has been the board’s fallback position for as long as I’ve been here.
For many students and parents on these forums, a major fit factor for them is prestige (in terms of how they see it).
To the extent that prestige aligns with selectivity, use as a fit component appears to be common, since colleges tend to see lower yields from “overqualified” admits than from admits who were reaching for the college.
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Yes. There are some parents and students who are sort of waiting to be given permission to stop running the rat race. I don’t remember the conversation, but apparently I told a woman at a party about chasing merit, and that it had saved our family a lot of money while still providing a good education. A couple of years later I met her again at a different party and she thanked me because until then nobody in her social circle had ever said it was ok to decide not to pay for the highest ranked school a kid could get into. And their family just couldn’t really afford it (or could, but it would have been a bad decision in their case) and she had felt very stressed and trapped until out story had “given permission” for her to set a budget while still paying attention to fit and rigor etc.
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The way our family used prestige in decision making was to first find a range of schools, all of which were good fits, and from there, pick the most prestigious they were admitted to. But fit was the first thing, and we didn’t sacrifice fit for prestige.
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Would you also say the same things for maybe other 50-100 schools, LACs and universities combined? If that is case, it seems the prestige is diluted too much.
So being on the Supreme Court is prestigious- because “regular folks” have heard of it, but being on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals is NOT prestigious because you’d need to be someone who reads a newspaper to understand how prestigious the appellate judicial system works?
I’m not following the “if it’s only prestigious in certain circles it’s not prestigious” argument. There are various awards given in different disciplines that represent the pinnacle, “lifetime achievement” type honors in different branches of science (including engineering) which are comparable to a Nobel prize, but in categories which do not qualify the scholar for a Nobel.
Does winning your own branch of sciences highest accolade- where the voters are your actual colleagues and sometimes competitors and collaborators, typically from around the world from the most august institutions on the globe– not count as prestige, even though the guy you play golf with has never heard of it?
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Although this is in some sense semantics as well, in my view it isn’t very helpful to define “fit” so broadly as to include every possible basis for preference.
The way I would use the concept of fit in this context, it refers to factors that are very specific to that individual, as opposed to factors that are broadly-shared among college-bound students generally. And if the idea behind “prestige” is that it is something that attaches to every student who enrolls at an institution regardless of their individual attributes, that seems to me like pretty much the exact opposite of something which is very specific to an individual.
Every school is prestigious to someone.
If you are from rural Kentucky where few go to college, Murray State - the Harvard of Kentucky - is prestigious.
Yet, for some students, Rice or Emory aren’t presitigious.
It’s all perspective.
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