<p>Let’s say I get into Stanford’s English department and that of a prestigious LAC like Colby or Middlebury.</p>
<p>Which do I go for considering my career goals involve ultimately working for a magazine like The New Yorker or Vanity fair or a good publishing house in New York City?</p>
<p>Whichever one you think you will learn the most and have a great time… Employers don’t care about ivy league schools, though it’s definitely a plus.</p>
<p>@eligarar, how am I supposed to know which? Both seem equally interesting and liberating :/</p>
<p>Visit them perhaps?</p>
<p>I am an international student. Can’t afford a ticket to the states atm.</p>
<p>OP. Sorry to break your bubble…but the odds of you getting into Stanford as an international applicant will be extremely low no matter your credentials…so, it is rather moot to even start thinking of the “hypothetical” choices or decisions you WILL have…without the WINNING LOTTERY TICKET in hand…</p>
<p>[Stanford</a> beats out all of the Ivy League schools by having the toughest admissions rate of all | Mail Online](<a href=“Stanford beats out all of the Ivy League schools by having the toughest admissions rate of all | Daily Mail Online”>Stanford beats out all of the Ivy League schools by having the toughest admissions rate of all | Daily Mail Online)</p>
<p>…first try to get in…then post this question in December if you get in REA or in April if you get in regular decision…</p>
<p>…and in reference to your question about the English Department’s prowess at Stanford…it is TOPS just like computer science or engineering:</p>
<p>[Top</a> Ranked English Programs & Colleges ? U.S. News University Directory](<a href=“Web Page Under Construction”>Web Page Under Construction)</p>
<p>[Top</a> 50 arts and humanities universities - Times Higher Education](<a href=“http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/2012-13/subject-ranking/subject/arts-and-humanities]Top”>Subject Ranking 2012-13: Arts & Humanities | Times Higher Education (THE))</p>
<p>You posted earlier that you got a 1700 on your sat…you should start looking for colleges that you would have a chance at. Not to say you don’t have a chance at Stanford, but you really don’t. Haha</p>
<p>@23THEMAN23, I pushed it up to 1900</p>
<p>I wish people didn’t dismiss others and their chances on the basis of a few silly numbers, as you have done, 23THEMAN23. I know a few international students who went to and are at Stanford, and one of them had a 1760 score, and one 1950, neither of them with a cure for HIV or something else to make up for it. It’s really not about the scores and I wish people on CC knew better than this. Of course I’m not denying that high numbers would help, but they’re not everything. :)</p>
<p>AdamAshraf, ignore 23THEMAN23. While your score is rather low by Stanford’s averages, that doesn’t in any way disqualify you; nor is “the man” qualified to comment on your chances.</p>
<p>This thread has gotten off topic. </p>
<p>Stanford’s English department–like all of its departments–is ranked in the top five. You simply cannot go wrong obtaining an English degree here. Just this year, for instance, Professor Adam Johnson won the Pulitzer Prize. </p>
<p>But having said that, you can also get a stellar English education at many other universities and LACs. </p>
<p>Colby and Middlebury–the LACs you mention–do not have names as powerful as that of Stanford. LACs with the most powerful brand names would be the so-called “Little Three”: Williams, Amherst, and Wesleyan. I’d throw Swarthmore and Pomona in there as well. </p>
<p>If you do find yourself in the extremely enviable position of having to choose between Stanford and Little Threes, Swarthmore, or Pomona, then your decision should come down to fit because you’ll be able to receive an excellent education at any of them. Educated, well-informed employers will regard degrees from these institutions in the same way. However, members of the general public may be more impressed by the Stanford name.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>None of these schools have a powerful “brand name.” That’s not why people choose LACs. They choose them because they offer an education that is equal to or better than many of the top universities (including Stanford). And Middlebury most certainly belongs on any list of top LACs (as does Bowdoin, Carleton, CMC, Haverford, and a few others). In case you weren’t aware, Midd is tied with Pomona as the 4th highest-ranked liberal arts college in the country.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Excuse me, but if you are talking about the traditional publishing industry and magazine journalism, those LACs most certainly do have powerful brand names. Arcadia is right that (a) prestige is not limited to Williams-Amherst-Wesleyan-Swarthmore-Pomona, (b) Middlebury is generally seen as close to or equivalent to that group (although, honestly, not by me), (c) there are many others, too, with generally excellent reputations.</p></li>
<li><p>You should understand that print journalism and traditional high-end publishing are two industries that are dying a spectacular death. While people do still get jobs in them, jobs are fewer and farther between, pay less, and are less secure than they were 5, 10, 20 years ago, and the trend is consistently downward.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Watch The Last Days of Disco. Thirty years ago, publishing houses didn’t pay entry-level employees enough for them to live in New York without independent wealth. Guess what? They still don’t, and what they pay now is probably lower relative to the cost of living in New York. I actually know a kid who has a job offer from the most prestigious company in book publishing – who went to one of the high-quality LACs named, by the way, and absolutely got an internship through the college – and it pays very little. And they will probably hire one or two people this year.</p>
<p>If you want to write for The New Yorker or Vanity Fair, get famous first. Your college has little to do with it. </p>
<ol>
<li><p>That said, I have seen recent college graduates break into prestige journalism, but generally after a fairly tough stretch of freelancing and starving. In my generation, people sometimes went directly from the Crimson or the Yale Daily News to the Washington Post, Time, or Esquire, or did that after a brief stint at a regional newspaper, but I don’t think that happens anymore, or very little. I think there is some advantage to going to a high-prestige university with a high-quality student newspaper and various student magazines, if you can, because the kids who do that spend way more time working on journalism and have stronger alumni networks in the industry. There really isn’t any equivalent in the LAC world.</p></li>
<li><p>None of this has anything to do with the English Department at Stanford and anywhere else. Only a few journalists or publishing people majored in English (more the latter than the former). In fact, if you really want to be in either industry, I would advise majoring in something else, so you could be seen as bringing some other substantive expertise to your work. (Not to mention having some other substantive expertise.)</p></li>
<li><p>Here’s the difference between studying English literature at Stanford (or any other top university) vs. Middlebury (or any other top LAC): </p></li>
</ol>
<p>First, Stanford has a huge faculty and a huge number of courses offered. You would have practically unlimited options. But at most you will really get to know only two or three faculty members well. It may be you choose them because they are great teachers, and then you concentrate on what interests them because that’s what they are teaching, or it may be that those are the faculty who teach the area that most interests you. If you go to an LAC, there will be far fewer faculty, but you will still really get close to only two or three of them. It is far more likely that you will wind up studying what the faculty you like want to teach you.</p>
<p>Second, while you can have a great relationship with your professors at Stanford, there’s no question you will have a closer relationship with your professors at an LAC. There are just way fewer people around, and fewer distractions. My sister-in-law is a famous professor in another discipline, at a large university, and she spent a semester as a visiting professor and a high-prestige LAC where she had close friends on the faculty in her field. She practically went stir-crazy, it was so quiet and and there was so little going on. I had dinner with her and her colleagues at the LAC and some students a few times, though, and it was really impressive how well the faculty knew the students and how close they felt.</p>
<p>Third, I think LAC graduates are less sophisticated and better prepared for graduate programs than their university peers. At Stanford, you will find yourself on the cutting edge of scholarship in whatever part of the field you decide to focus on. But no one will really take responsibility for making sure you have a strong and broad base of knowledge across many subfields. Apart from major requirements, which tend to be pretty weak, that will be your job, not the faculty’s. At LACs, the faculty are rarely doing cutting-edge work, but they absolutely take responsibility for making certain their students have a solid education in their field. </p>
<p>Finally, LACs don’t have (or only have a few) graduate students. My experience (at both another prestigious university and at Stanford) was that graduate students are a real plus. They are really smart, and can act as a bridge between undergraduates (whom they resemble, and who they can remember being) and top faculty (who are often a little other-worldly). They are interesting in their own right. Grad students I knew well in college went on to chair the English Departments at Yale and Harvard and the German Department at Michigan, and to be a famous writer-producer for television. They add volume and intellectual vibrancy to the community interested in any particular field. But, there’s no question that to some extent they compete with undergraduates for faculty attention, and it’s not much of a competition. They have career-long relationships with their faculty mentors, work their butts off 24-7 to please them, and were chosen for their promise in a process much more exacting and competitive than even Stanford admissions. Undergraduates may be equally smart, but know a lot less, are more arrogant, work less hard, have a lot more distractions, and come and go. So the faculty members don’t invest in them to the same extent. Except at LACs, where they do.</p>
<p>So it’s really two different ways of getting educated. Both of them are good, either can work fine. Some people will prefer one or the other. If you are lucky enough to have a choice among great examples of both, you can decide which is the best choice for you.</p>
<p>JHS. I agree with this quote.
</p>
<p>…moreover, I will reiterate, OP, please apply to a range of schools that you would be “seriously” interested in attending…then let the chips fall where they may…and, if you are one of the fortunate few to get into Stanford along with some of the LACs…then you can debate the merits of each school all you want and choose the school based on FIT, cost, etc…that time is not NOW…it is AFTER you get in…</p>
<p>Of course, there are lots of other things that you can do with an English degree these days 
However, as JHS pointed it out, publishing is probably not a good option.</p>