I think you protest too much about Michigan-Ann Arbor. It has zero members in the Senate for undergrad and only six members in the current House. Even in political science, it has more than 2x the number of students Yale has. Georgetown is arguably elite in the US, but doesn’t command the same prestige as HYMS internationally.
@borthwesty, please provide us your definition of elite as prestige wasn’t what was asked?
I guess it depends on which one you pick - I’m going with #1;
1 - a select part of a group that is superior to the rest in terms of ability or qualities.
2 - a group or class of people seen as having the greatest power and influence within a society, especially because of their wealth or privilege.
They mean the same thing to me. Stanford is more elite than WashU. Do you disagree?
What’s your definition?
@northwesty, ability is the same thing as privilege? It’s hard to imagine that it’s as easy to get people to go to St. Louis as Northern Cali - just sayin…
@northwesty
Both Yield, and Acceptance rate can be to easily gamed to the point to that you end up measuring how well a self-fulfilling prophecy works and not actual excellence.There’s ED, need aware admissions, heavy marketing to internationals and students in poor area, removing supplimental essays or making them optional, test optional etc. However it’s very difficult to game good outcomes. The best measurement of prestige is not YTAR or Stats even if they give you a list that you deem acceptable. The question one should be asking is why do you have preconceived notions of which schools are elite that when devising a measurement system to officially determine “eliteness” one looks for a desired result or commonly called confirmation bias. However a better way to determine prestige is to look at the institutions which care about it most; Law, Business, and to a lesser extent International relations. It doesn’t matter that Northeastern has higher stats than UMich or Vandy has a better YTAR than Cornell, which schools place better in these fields, who do hiring managers and grad school admissions officers value more. You’ll get even more interesting results.
This was US News first ranking for national colleges when it was just based on reputation, which you would think is a reflection of being elite:
- Stanford
- Harvard
- Yale
- Princeton
- Berkeley
- Chicago
- Michigan
- Cornell
- Illinois
- MIT
- Dartmouth
- Cal Tech
- CMU
- Wisconsin
If you’re elite back then, a lot would have to happen to move out of the elite or into it right? Well, then USNWR included SATs, acceptance rates, yield and the publics got hurt. This is a good top ten list, and it’s fair. I’d take issue on Illinois over MIT, Dartmouth and Cal Tech, but just because you’re an ivy doesn’t mean you’re more elite than Michigan 'and Berkeley, two elite institutions.
I like this list and will take it even with Illinois at 9 (since ohio mom made a good point that you can’t make a list and then edit to your liking). Why are the other lists better?
Vandemory – so what’s your list/definition? Who is a player (i.e. actually excellent) versus a poser and why?
No I was just correcting you.
YTAR does NOT take care of Berea, actually.
FWIW Berea is tuition free, not full-ride free. And applying is means-tested (they don’t allow upper middle class and rich kids to even apply). But for those 33% accepted, the cost is about the same as the free tuition deals at HYP et al.
If you you bring in 25/75 SAT/ACT scores, well THAT “takes care of Berea”.
I am not arguing that it is elite but if you rely on YTAR alone, it is.
“FWIW Berea is tuition free, not full-ride free.”
Did I not say this:
“Schools that are TUITION FREE and/or military academies are obvious sui generis types of schools.”
@northwesty - so are Yale, Harvard and Princeton if you make under $65k (which is about the cutoff to be allowed to apply to Berea).
So what?
@VANDEMORY1342, agree outcomes is a good one, but it’s hard to pull that information as while you can search on LinkedIn by company and institution it doesn’t allow you to filter undergraduate as compared to graduate, so it works well for LAC’s but not when comparing same to uni’s.
As an example, I researched Goldman Sachs employees from a bunch of the top-25 LAC’s, and did find some distinctions;
Amherst - 258
Bates - 45
Bowdoin - 131
Carleton - 60
Colby - 97
Colgate - 226
Davidson - 54
Hamilton - 189
Haverford - 79
Middlebury - 272
Pomona - 75
Swarthmore - 84
Vassar - 131
Wellesley - 216
Wesleyan - 25
Williams - 243
The Federal Service Academies are an interesting category unto themselves.
While they’ve always been considered elite within the armed forces, the level of eliteness in the eyes of the SES elite or high achieving HS students varied depending on the public perception of the US armed forces,
For instance, while the Service Academies during and the post-war period before the Vietnam War were considered elite and drew topflight HS students from across the US, that wasn’t the case in the latter part of the Vietnam War until sometime in the mid-'80s according to accounts ranging from older HS alums* from that period to written accounts by Academy alums from before/during that period.
This was likely one factor in why an older neighbor who attended our public magnet was considered to have “lost his mind” by his father and most of his HS academic peers when he turned down a full-ride FA package to MIT to attend Annapolis in the mid-‘80s whereas by the time I started at the same HS some years later, the reaction wouldn’t have been nearly as strong as by that point, the Service Academies’ perceived prestige was back to being considered elite by even topflight HS students.
- Those who graduated from HS in the mid-'80s and earlier all cited the "Vietnam War syndrome" and the widespread antipathy about the military in that period. Consequently, even the officer corps wasn't considered a desirable career path....especially for the best and brightest.
A couple of brothers a year or two apart from that period who enrolled at West Point in the early '80s as recounted by HS alums who knew them graduated somewhere well in the middle of their respective graduating classes. They weren’t considered topflight or even “above average” by peers in their respective graduating classes. In contrast, those from my HS graduating class 10+ years later were all at least top 15% or better.
We certainly thought our son had lost his mind in entertaining service academies. The NE boarding schools are certainly not feeders for them. Our son was the only one in his class to choose one. In our opinion, he had much better options, but he is very happy where he is, we support him now that he is there, and we’ve learned quite a bit about them along the way. I believe the academies are elite but not in a way that is relevant to the discussion here.
I’m a bit mixed* on this one as their academics certainly are taught at levels comparable to many elite colleges according to many academy alums I’ve known/worked with. It’s a reason why there’s usually a few cadets who ended up getting dismissed for deficiency in academics at the end of each semester.
Even the genuine genius type older cousin felt so even after deciding after one year that the career military officer career path wasn’t for him and finished his undergrad at Caltech as an EE major. While he felt he needed the greater academic challenge Caltech offered and provided, he felt the academics at his and other service academies were comparable to those of elite universities.
- I disagree with USNWR classifying them as LACs as the service academies are a category unto themselves and should be regarded/respected as such.
Service academies are a category unto themselves. It makes little sense to compare them to anywhere else.
Our son is dealing with the need for greater academic challenge by pursuing time and special interests directly with department heads and experts. The brain trust (and facilities!) are there, but priority one at the academies is turning out military officers, so the scholars in the corps need to advocate a bit for themselves if they seek stretching beyond a given curriculum. Our son has been astonished at how well his requests have been received and how available those instructors are (night or day) no matter how imposing their rank.
USNWR considers the academies LACS mostly due to size. The corps at USMA, for example, comprises roughly 4,400 cadets. There are only 42 EE cadets in our son’s class and none of his classes exceed 20 students, some fewer than 15. Also, all classes are taught using the Thayer Method which is a Socratic form of teaching similar to the Harkness Method used at many of the boarding schools. This type of interplay and intense student focus does not work in large classrooms.
I do agree that size is not the best metric to use in categorizing the SAs, but “Service Academy” would create a bucket of only five schools with five different military missions. However, if you want to see how “elite” and “prestige” are debated even in that small bucket, go over to serviceacademyforums.com and you will see just how fine those hairs can be split.
Go Army! Beat Navy!
Any LinkedIn stuff only goes so far with outcomes. Kids end all over the place, depending on their smarts, drive, work ethic , etc. If you really are aiming for Goldman Sachs, you might want to have your kid target certain colleges. But for most kids and families, it’s a non issue. Go to the best fit college at a reasonable price, , do well, have a great time, make a lot of friends! And build a great career and life from there.
@sevmom, these are actual outcomes of those that attended specific schools and was in response to a discussion about whether resultant outcomes were a better indicator of success than going in test scores - this was not a broad statement about targeting Goldman Sachs.
@northwesty @Chembiodad
Although it is used synonymously here. I do think there is a difference between elite and prestige ( or at least there should be) and there are gradients of each. Think of Roger Federer having attributes that can be measured as a 9/10 on insurance and a 10/10 on power or something like that as he is a parallel comparison to Harvard.
Let’s say elite can be measured by the inputs often measured here let’s say avg acceptance rate x<~30%, ENROLLED SAT/ ACT x>~1300, GPA x>~3.7UW etc. A school that performs minimum on these metrics can be considered to be some degree of elite( 1-4 maybe out of 10). Some might consider these minimum s to be a bit low, but they serve the purpose to illustrate that there are a sizable amount of “elite” schools in which if one does well enough all doors CAN be opened. However on the other hand prestige is harder to measure, as it’s a mix of output factors, useful research output, location, and intangible factors like impression, and frankly a lot of money ( billions with an S). So high job placement at coveted companies, placement at big law, placement in top graduate schools, great research with high NIH funding, a media presence or a presence in pop-culture are all important factors in what I would consider prestigious, as it is clearly more up for debate IMHO.
So my list would look something like this
Elite
Stanford
Harvard
MIT
UChicago
Yale
Princeton
Columbia
Amherst
CIT
Williams
UPENN
Swarthmore
JH
NU
Dartmouth
RICE
Brown
Cornell
Vandy
WUSTL
Tufts
ND
Emory
Carleton
GTech
UCB
UMich
UCLA
Vassar
CMU
Middlebury
NYU
UVA
UNC
Wake Forest
BC
BU
Prestige
Harvard
Stanford
Yale
Princeton
MIT
UChicago
UCB
UPenn
Columbia
NU
JH
CMU
Cornell
Dartmouth
UCLA
Vandy
Brown
Emory
NYU
Uva
UMich
GTech
Rice
WUSTL
UNC
Tufts
USC
I missed a lot but you get my point.
Another interesting thing about the US Service Academies is that West Point along with St. Cyr/Polytechnique in France were the pioneers in insisting that academy trained officers have something comparable to university educations in 1802.
In that period, a university-level education wasn’t considered necessary or sometimes even desirable for military officers in training.
For instance, in Prussia/Imperial Germany, the military officer training school system’s educational curricula was much more closely aligned with that of a vocational high school*…and most of its cadets GRADUATED and became probationary officers at 17 and commissioned at 18-19. In fact, the German Army didn’t even require its officer aspirants to have an Abitur until sometime after WWI.
And in the UK, one can still enter their military service academies(RMA Sandhurst, RAFC Cranwell, BNRC Dartmouth) straight from high school with 2 A-Levels as shown by Prince Harry though unlike 30 years ago, the vast majority of those entering already completed their university educations so only ~20% now enter as “non-graduate” cadets.
As for rivalries among service academies to see who’s most elite, the same splitting of hairs occurs in other societies. For instance, in my parents’ nation of origin, the Army up until very recently was the dominant service in numbers and in terms of influence…but the Academy itself considered the least elite of the 3 because the academic entrance requirements for the more technically demanding Naval and Air Force Academies are much higher than those for the Army**.
- While they tried to equate themselves with the German college prep Gymnasium, no one outside the Imperial German military believed the education provided by the German officer training school system was anywhere near comparable.
Especially considering those who desired the abitur had to stay an extra year or two beyond the year most cadets GRADUATED to start their careers as probationary officers for another 6 months to a year before being officially commissioned.
** With the possible exception of those who graduated from the Army Academy with high enough standing to enter comparable technical/prestigious branches…such as Army Aviation.
Heh. It’s a bit of an conflict within my extended family as I’ve had family members who served in both branches.