<p>^ Good point!</p>
<p>Texas</p>
<ul>
<li>Lay prestige at my upper class public high school -</li>
</ul>
<p>Columbia (aka the Ivy in NYC), Harvard, Stanford, Yale</p>
<p>Duke, MIT, Penn, Princeton, Rice, Vanderbilt</p>
<p>Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins, Notre Dame, Northwestern</p>
<p>Cal Tech, Chicago, Emory and WUSTL</p>
<p>Ahaha alam1, sadly, monstor344 is probably right. Here, you either LOVELOVELOVE Duke, or you hate it enough that you dare not speak the name haha.</p>
<p>I live in Ohio.</p>
<p>Harvard/Princeton
Yale
CalTech/MIT/Stanford/Penn</p>
<p>Columbia
Johns Hopkins
Duke
Cornell
Brown
Dartmouth </p>
<p>Emory/Rice/Vanderbilt
Notre Dame</p>
<p>Chicago
Northwestern/WashU</p>
<p>I’d love to rank Chicago higher—I’m most likely matriculating there—but it’s virtually unknown outside of academia here.</p>
<p>crs1909</p>
<p>I doubt it very much if Emory is more prestigious than Berkeley in Texas.</p>
<p>“Lay prestige at my upper class public high school”</p>
<p>Aren’t “lay __<strong><em>” and “upper class </em></strong>___” mutually exclusive?</p>
<p>I don’t think so. I think “lay____” pretty much refers to somebody who is completley uninformed about the subject material. In this context, I would think it refers to just about anybody who has not done any sort of legitimate research into colleges.</p>
<p>Tennessee:</p>
<ol>
<li>The University of Tennessee (you’d be surprised—students with UT-level-or-higher grades who don’t go to UT are considered traitors, even if they’re going to Harvard)</li>
<li>Vanderbilt</li>
<li>Harvard</li>
<li>Stanford</li>
<li>Princeton</li>
<li>Yale</li>
<li>Emory</li>
<li>University of Southern California</li>
<li>Auburn University (don’t ask)</li>
<li>Duke</li>
<li>Columbia</li>
<li>Cornell</li>
<li>Penn</li>
<li>Ole Miss</li>
<li>University of Alabama</li>
<li>Dartmouth</li>
<li>Liberty</li>
<li>Baylor</li>
<li>The UCs</li>
<li>Brown</li>
</ol>
<p>“students with UT-level-or-higher grades who don’t go to UT are considered traitors, even if they’re going to Harvard)”</p>
<p>I haven’t lived anywhere where it would be “traitorous” to think one is too good for the state flagship. But I have certainly lived places where it was thought to be rather pretentious and too-big-for-one’s-britches to think that one’s mental capacity was so vast that it couldn’t be filled at the in-state flagship.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Haha, recently during a press conference in the Dean Dome, a visiting coach referred to dook as “The D Word.”</p>
<p>RML: Berkeley isn’t in the USNWR top 20, so I didn’t include them. If I did include them, I wouldn’t know where to place them because their profile is pretty low here. The few people that do apply there are people that moved from CA.</p>
<p>If had to do a ranking of the 20 most prestigious/‘you’re going there, congrats’ schools…</p>
<ol>
<li>Harvard</li>
<li>Stanford</li>
<li>Yale</li>
<li>Columbia</li>
<li>Rice</li>
<li>Duke</li>
<li>Vanderbilt</li>
<li>UTexas</li>
<li>Princeton</li>
<li>Penn</li>
<li>MIT</li>
<li>Brown </li>
<li>Cornell </li>
<li>Dartmouth</li>
<li>Texas A&M</li>
<li>NYU</li>
<li>Notre Dame</li>
<li>Johns Hopkins</li>
<li>SMU (I live in D/FW)</li>
<li>Northwestern</li>
</ol>
<p>*Brown, Cornell and Dartmouth all get the same ranking because of the fact that practically no one here applies to these schools but yet everyone thinks they’re good because of the Ivy association</p>
<p>*Notre Dame appeals to the more conservative and religious kids. Hopkins appeals to the Pre-Meds. Northwestern (along with Stanford and Vandy) recruits our football players, raising their profile at our school.</p>
<p>Reporting from the UK - this is what I guess the average person would reply if I asked them what were the top US universities:</p>
<p>Harvard
Princeton
Yale</p>
<p>erm…</p>
<p>Oh yes - Columbia</p>
<p>erm… let me see</p>
<p>Caltech? Is that a university?</p>
<p>And MIT…</p>
<p>Harvard… did I say that already?</p>
<p>(My son applied for Berkeley, UCLA, USC, NYU and Columbia, by the way - and those definitely make my list!)</p>
<p>crs1909</p>
<p>My point is, just because fewer students apply to Berkeley from your state makes it a less prestigious school. Few Texans apply to Oxford and Cambridge. Does that mean Oxford and Cambridge aren’t prestigious in Texas? I’m not here to argue. Just making a point.</p>
<p>RML: well, at what point did i say i was basing my assessment on the views that the whole state of texas has?</p>
<p>Catholic school in Texas:</p>
<p>Harvard
Stanford
Princeton/Yale
Duke/Rice/Notre Dame/[Georgetown]
Vanderbilt/Wash U
Cornell/Penn/Columbia/Brown
Emory/Northwestern/Dartmouth/Chicago/John Hopkins/MIT
CalTech</p>
<p>crs1909, right. I lost that part when you said: “in my public high school in Texas.”</p>
<p>fair enough. </p>
<p>but still, makes me wonder why Emory is viewed more prestigious than Berkeley in your high school. In fact, according to US News, [Best</a> Colleges - Education - US News and World Report](<a href=“http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/national-counselor-rank]Best”>http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/national-counselor-rank)</p>
<p>lol RML why do you hate Emory… makes me sad 
lol</p>
<p>To anybody who remembers the 1960’s it was clear that Berkeley was a special place…but this had to do with its prominence in political and social activism at least as much as its academics. Is it possible that those theatrics didn’t endear Berkeley to a lot of folks in Texas, to the point that they ignored the memo on its great academics? I had relatives in the middle of all the Berkeley stuff in the 1960’s, and when I visited them back then, even IN Berkeley the activism was definitely upstaging the academics.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Those skills are indeed highly valuable; I’ve never said otherwise. Unfortunately, the problem is that those skills are not being taught, at least not directly, within the vast majority of the college course curriculum that we have today. The suspicions that students raise regarding the utility of their educations is sadly true: most of what you learn in school, you will never use.</p>
<p>Take an engineering education, which while arguably the most practical and market-oriented undergraduate degree program available on a relative basis, still does little to fulfill the stipulations that you had previously stated. With the possibility of the senior design course, engineering students are generally not provided significant opportunity to tailor solutions to customer requirements, analyze alternative approaches, or think outside the box. Rather, a typical engineering course consists of derivations of a long sequence of equations, culminating in problem sets and exams that require students to apply those equations within a highly circumscribed set of conditions that allow for few (probably zero) degrees of freedom as to how to calculate the answer. </p>
<p>For example, if an engineering thermodynamics final exam question asks me to derive the general mathematical relationship of the vapor/liquid equilibrium state of an N-component chemical system at thermodynamic equilibrium as a function of temperature and pressure, I’m not allowed to argue with the ‘customer’ (read: the test proctor) that that’s not what is truly required, nor can I package a presentation based on reliable metrics, nor am I allowed to think outside the box to generate alternative solutions. Rather, I have to compute the demanded mathematical derivation in the precise manner that the exam key demands, and if I do not, then I fail the exam. </p>
<p>Again, don’t get me wrong. I wish that college courses would teach and train those attributes that you described. But the truth is, for the most part, they don’t. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Mostly on-the-job training and experience, which I suppose could be deemed ‘osmosis’. Job experience is the manner by which most people actually develop the highly desirable attributes you enumerated. Practically everybody who has ever spent time in the workforce will tell you how much they learned in the first few years of working as far as how to actually succeed in the real world, which indicates how little they actually learned in school that was useful. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Ha! Even I’m not quite that cynical. For example, even I would argue that consulting and finance do provide some utility to society, although exactly how much is clearly an open question. Furthermore, the venture capital industry, for all its recent problems and rent-seeking behavior, does provide important stimulus to high-growth entrepreneurial firms. I am convinced that the US would not be the world’s leader technocapitalism without the VC industry. Other nations look at the US in awe at the fact that we can incubate and rapidly develop multi-billion dollar tech firms in merely a few years. In contrast, the leading tech firms in foreign nations usually decades, and in many cases over a century, old. Nokia, for example, was founded in 1865. </p>
<p>Speaking of leading tech firms, many of them also utilize, frankly, highly ‘elitist’ hiring policies, particularly when they’re still small. For example, consider the hiring policies at Google, circa 2003:</p>
<p>For the most part, it takes a degree from an Ivy League school, or MIT, Stanford, CalTech, or Carnegie Mellon–America’s top engineering schools–even to get invited to interview. Brin and Page still keep a hand in all the hiring, from executives to administrative assistants. And to them, work experience counts far less than where you went to school, how you did on your SATs, and your grade-point average. “If you’ve been at Cisco for 20 years, they don’t want you,” says an employee.</p>
<p>[Can</a> Google Grow Up? Google is one of the best things to happen to the Net. So will its IPO, expected this spring, be a must-buy? A look inside reveals a talented company facing trouble. - December 8, 2003](<a href=“http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2003/12/08/355116/index.htm]Can”>Can Google Grow Up? Google is one of the best things to happen to the Net. So will its IPO, expected this spring, be a must-buy? A look inside reveals a talented company facing trouble. - December 8, 2003)</p>
<p>Now, to be fair, Google is far less strict regarding its hiring practices now. However, 2003 was prior to Google’s IPO, which is precisely the time to join Google, as everybody who did so became rich. In contrast, nobody is going to become rich by joining Google now. {You may join Google for the interesting projects and ability to build a dynamic professional network, but not because you actually think Google will make you rich.} More importantly, it’s difficult to argue with success. However appropriate you believe Google’s former hiring practices to have been, it’s difficult to argue with the notion that Google has been by far the most successful Internet company in the world, having transcended the Internet itself (that is: if your website can’t be found through Google, it effectively doesn’t exist at all.} and, arguably even more importantly, having revolutionized the advertising industry. </p>
<p>One can also consider the example of the President himself. The differentiating academic credential that Barack Obama has provided him with the platform with which to launch his future career is that he was the first black President of the Harvard Law Review. If he had been the first black President of the law review at some no-name 4th tier law school, let’s face it, nobody would have really cared. His ascendancy at the Harvard Law Review gained him nationwide media attention and led to a book contract and $40k advance (in 1995 dollars) that eventually became the memoir ‘Dreams of My Fathers’. Think about that. Thousands of aspiring authors, many of whom have already written several works, can’t even get a single callback from a publisher. John Grisham, the most famous lawyer-author of our times, had to spend 3 years worth of his spare time writing his first book, ‘A Time to Kill’, without a publishing contract and then had to spend another year shopping it around various publishing houses before finally one that would agree to take it. Yet here’s a guy fresh out of law school who has never written anything before who’s not only being offered a contract, but also a 5-figure advance. </p>
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</p>
<p>This is an old idea for which I clearly cannot claim credit: this is precisely the Michael Spence argument that won him the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2001 for his work on asymmetric information and labor markets. Employees invoke a costly signal of educational attainment simply as a way to transmit their raw talent and their work ethic to potential employers, regardless of whether that education actually improved the productivity of those employees. In effect, employers use colleges as outsourced human resources departments to screen out those who don’t even have the wherewithal to make it through college at all.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I’m afraid I have to disagree: Harvard’s lay prestige means quite a lot. Granted, perhaps it shouldn’t mean as much as it does, and perhaps its lay prestige should be differentiated from its ‘true’ prestige, however defined. But that’s neither here nor there. The fact is, the lay prestige of Harvard (or any other school) serves to enhance efficiency by reducing information search costs. </p>
<p>The key difference between the lay prestige of Harvard and the lay prestige of the Mona Lisa is that anybody can visit the Louvre and view the Mona Lisa, and anybody can view reproductions of the Mona Lisa. But not everybody can go to Harvard; indeed only a small fraction of applicants are admitted, and that doesn’t factor in those who never apply at all because they know they won’t be admitted. {Let’s face it, if you graduated last in your high school class with straight C’s, you won’t be admitted to Harvard.} Harvard’s lay prestige generates interest in the school, but then Harvard’s admissions process ensures a high average quality of student. To be sure, not every single student at Harvard will be strong, as some relatively weaker students will inevitably slip through, but the average quality will be high. The Harvard brand name can therefore be taken as a mark of quality which allows employers and other parties to conserve on search costs when it comes to hiring and contracting. </p>
<p>The argument is similar to that of the economic value of brand names as information-conserving signals. For example, if I have great expertise regarding cameras, I may know that certain no-name camera manufacturers actually manufacture the best cameras in the world. Heck, I may even know how to assemble my own high-end camera by purchasing my own lenses, frame bodies, and shutters, all from vendors that only experts have ever heard of. But that’s only because I had previously invested the time to become an expert on cameras. Somebody who lacks that expertise is well-advised to purchase a name-brand product. Not everybody has the time or inclination to develop expertise on camera technology. Brand names therefore serve as information-conserving devices. </p>
<p>Consider the following opthalmologist who prominently displays his Harvard and Yale brand names on his website. The motivation is obvious: he’s attempting to attract clientele for his services. Let’s face it, most people are not experts on opthalmology. They don’t know which schools offer the best training in this field. They’re going to use Harvard and Yale as a signal of quality. </p>
<p>[OC</a> Eye Associates - Dr. Daniel C Kline, MD](<a href=“http://www.oceyeassociates.com/]OC”>http://www.oceyeassociates.com/)</p>