<p>What’s more important/what would you choose? Assuming that the cost of attendance was equal, you liked both schools equally, etc. (basically - all other factors equal, except prestige).</p>
<p>Would you choose a more prestigious school or a more prestigious program?</p>
<p>For instance, for business, would you choose:</p>
<p>Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business (consistently ranked in the top 20 of undergraduate schools)</p>
<p>or</p>
<p>William and Mary (generally considered more prestigious of a university, but ranked 29th best business school by Business Week).</p>
<p>Depends on what you want to do. If I wanted to do business, then I would go to Indiana but if i wanted to do anything else, then i would go to William and Mary.</p>
<p>good thread, ive always thought about that. i dont really have a direct answer, but i would probably go for the school’s prestige. i only say this because i am one of the people who isnt 100% on what they want to do, so each program is very good, but maybe not great. otherwise you could go to a school that is good for nothing but engineering, figure out its not for you and want to go to business, only to realize your schools business program is practically non-existent.</p>
<p>This is an optimization problem. Choose the schools with the best overall balance of prestige vs program. But the program quality is more important than prestige. I would take Carnegie Mellon for engineering over Harvard or Yale any day, for example.</p>
<p>By the way, I’m not talking about instances where the difference in ranking is so small that they’re so close, but rather when there is a wide gap in the rankings.</p>
<p>Now that I think about it, program prestige can be so much more advantageous than university prestige. Of course, if one goes to Standford or Harvard, it really doesn’t matter because all of the programs are amazing- that’s university AND program prestige. But there are tons of top CEO’s who went to Arizona State, which aside from its business school and honors college kind of sucks. You definitely have advantageous with a well-known university however, the most blatant being that if you wanted to change your major, you wouldn’t get screwed over by bad programs.</p>
<p>Personally, I would choose university prestige if I wasn’t sure of my major and program prestige if I was hellbent on a major.</p>
<p>Or if your have two possible majors, or a general field of major interests, I’d pick a program that has program prestige in my general area over one that had prestige in general but was not known for my area. For instance, as a theater\writing person, I’d pick Kenyon College, which is very strong in both, over MIT any day. So if you’re pretty sure what general area you want to go into (Humanities, Business, etc.,), pick the school strong in that area over a school with more prestige but weaker programs in your area.</p>
<p>(of course, now that I’ve said that, I’m going to magically learn how to do physics and math next semester, and I’m going to want to go to MIT and they’re going to read this post and hate me…)</p>
<p>Ha ha, silverchris9. I don’t think universities will look through these forums to see who doesn’t think their respective universities are fabulous in every way. I wouldn’t worry. :P</p>
<p>Your best bet is a well-ranked program at a prestigious institution. If that doesn’t happen, I would say come back here with your specific situation. It’s hard to evaluate how much prestige matters without knowing what kind of schools we’re dealing with.</p>
<p>I agree. Even more importantly and with the exception of the preprofessional undergrad programs (i.e. engineering, nursing, etc.), the vast majority of college students will not upon graduation get jobs that are linked to their major. Think about it. Most history majors do not become professional historians. Most psychology majors do not become professional psychologists. Most poli-sci majors do not become professional political scientists. Most math majors do not become professional mathematicians. It hardly matters how good your particular program happens to be if you, like most people, don’t end up working within that field anyway.</p>
<p>Lest anybody choose to disagree that most people won’t end up working in their chosen field, allow me to present some data. Consider the reported jobs of grads from UCBerkeley in the various subjects I mentioned previously. I think we can all agree that Berkeley’s programs in all of those subjects are highly ranked. Nevertheless, most grads end up in jobs that have little to do with what they majored in. For example, it’s not at all clear to me how becoming a teller coordinator for Bank of America has to do with history. It’s not clear to me how working as a manager at Round Table Pizza has anything to do with political science. It’s not clear to me what working as a ‘crew member’ at Trader Joe’s has to do with psychology. It’s not clear to me what working as a waiter at Kell’s Irish pub has to do with mathematics (maybe to calculate tips really really fast?). </p>
<p>Again, this isn’t some scrub school we’re talking about here. This is Berkeley. If most students at even Berkeley end up in jobs that have nothing to do with their majors, what do you think happens at other schools?</p>