I only know Cal Tech because of Big Bang Theory. And MIT is where Howard Wolowitz got his MA in engineering, which according to Sheldon is a subpar education. But he did build the space toilet, so must be an OK school for practical things like that. And of course Leonard went to Princeton. So in terms of the Princeton vs MIT matchup, I guess it just depends if you are Team Howard or Team Leonard.
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They are equal in prestige but different in location, vibe, priorities, etc. If you were lucky enough to be admitted to both, your personal preferences would recommend one over the other.
I have always thought of Princeton as the HYPSM member that is the most focused on undergrads. (you can add Chicago, Penn, and Columbia to that, and Princeton still has the greatest % of undergrads).
I have always thought of MIT as Caltech with much greater breadth – humanities and social sciences exist at MIT.
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And Princeton was most instrumental in developing the atomic bomb…
According to Sheldon, engineers aren’t scientists and MIT is a trade school. So I guess that should help guide the OP. 
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Typically, Berkeley, Columbia and Chicago are considered to have contributed the most to the Manhattan Project.
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Debatable. Szilard and Fermi were at Columbia, but moved the research to the University of Chicago, which is where the first sustained nuclear reaction occurred.
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Confidence intervals overlap, cannot say!
(It didn’t save the school choices, have to re-enter)
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Why should we?
To me, based on my experiences with certain cultures,
Prestige = bragging rights = “I’m better than you”.
American culture to me:
work your butt off, no matter where you go to school
= sense of accomplishment/self
= success
=Feeling good about yourself and your family.
I don’t need to show where I went to school to prove that I am successful.
Prestige doesn’t replace the ability to work well with others and the ability to communicate effectively with your coworkers.
My husband, a Stanford grad, hires and fires people from “prestigious schools” who are too snooty to work on certain projects. These young “prestigious graduates” are shocked when they’re the first to be laid off.
Play nice with others because it doesn’t matter where you went to school because you end up at the same jobs, doing the same thing as your in-state grads.
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I’m not sure parchment.com represents a true measure of prestige. Many kids make their choices based on personal fit – so if a kid wants to go to school in California, and they are choosing between Stanford and Yale, they’ll choose Stanford according to that fit variable (all else being equal).
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And many also make their choices based on which school gave them a better scholarship or more financial aid. So “revealed preference” doesn’t necessarily tell you which school the student thought was a better school, or even a better fit for them.
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right – that’s another main driver. (financial fit)
As long as we’re moving away from notions of prestige and toward various fit variables based on the kid, that’s a step in the right direction.
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Note that while Einstein held a long-term position at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, he did not have much (if any) of a formal affiliation with Princeton University.
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Some kids even choose to go to LACs!!!
(You would pretty much never do that if you cared about broad popular recognition over educational quality.)
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Depends on where overseas your relatives are. Wellesley name carries a lot of weight in one Asian country with billion citizens.
I agree, but some internationals grow up experiencing a much different situation, hence the disconnect. The story I like to tell is from a long time friend who visited Samsung and LG years ago. The Samsung engineers (10+ at the meeting, of varying levels of responsibility) were all PhDs, many had studied abroad in the US and spoke english well, and many also did undergrad at Seoul National. When they later visited LG, my friend joked whether they too had a large contingent of Seoul National grads. The VP of Eng replied that no, Samsung hires all of those grads and the other companies get to fight over the remainder.
The VP may have been embellishing a bit, but it was true that hardly any of the LG engineers spoke english, none had studied abroad, and only a couple were from Seoul National. I’m sure there are stories about Tokyo Univ, National Taiwan, IIT, and a host of others similar to this one.
But, the OP should realize that in the US, “success is the best deodorant”, so if you are doing what it takes to make the group, project, company highly successful, not many will care. Prestige will make a difference in the early stages of a career, but between Princeton and MIT, I doubt it will make any difference at all. You should spend your energy looking at what different kinds of research each place (and professors) is/are doing, and try to see which one sounds more interesting. Back in the 80’s, both UCB and UCDavis were working on different pathways to control the timing of ripening certain agricultural products… one could have chosen one school or the other if they were savvy enough to know the difference and thus which expert to work with (btw UCDavis won that contest…)
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Ah, but the OP asked about Americans. Give most Americans the name of a famous LAC and ask them whether it was a college or a Vice President, and they would bat about .500 . . . .
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Right.
Average American can’t tell you who lives in 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. But that person will know who lives in a pineapple under the sea.
Edit. Got my address wrong…
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The answer is no one. No one lives at 1700 Pennsylvania Avenue.
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Not meant to be serious, when people started talking about fictional characters I thought the thread had gone in a lighthearted direction.
I don’t see a distinction in prestige between Princeton and Yale. I didn’t meant to imply parchment was an unbiased source of prestige, it was just a “haha look this tool says there is not a clear winner” (for many reasons).
Sorry about any confusion that may have caused.
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I assume you mean among the elite and wealthy of that country. Not that the school name would be broadly recognized by the average citizen.
In any case it illustrates the broader point of all the responses here - that there are a lot of famous and prestigious schools in America.