Chem - You have to un-check the previous college each time you add one to the LinkedIn search engine. No way there are that many small college graduates at Goldman!
I ran the same search and came up with this:
Amherst - 52
Bates - 8
Bowdoin - 33
Carleton - 10
Colby - 24
Colgate - 56
Davidson - 8
Hamilton - 33
Haverford - 14
Middlebury - 59
Pomona - 13
Swarthmore - 21
Vassar - 18
Wellesley - 34
Wesleyan - 25
Williams - 59
"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:
Peer reputation is still a big part of the USNWR formula. If you just use that subjective measure,you get:
HSM
YP
UCB
Col, Cal Tech, JHU
I don’t think this list is that great. As another poster on CC once said, you know you have the ranking system about right when people complain that UCB and UMich are ranked too low. : )
Elite by definition means a small number in a society; it implies rarity. Schools like UCB, U Michigan and Wisconsin that have 15000 freshmen admits and thousands of transfers just don’t have the rarity needed to be associated with the notion of “Elite”.
Neither of these definitions fully captures how the Ivies do admissions. Maybe, 25% of Harvard’s admitted class comes from wealthy and powerful families. The rest come from regular upper middle class and below families. The remaining 75% aren’t chosen purely on stats or any other objective ranking of student ability. Instead, they look for a diverse and interesting class, as if they’re in pursuit of the perfect cocktail party. So if you asked the Ivies themselves to define elite, I think you might get definition
well Harvard got 10 people who definitely weren’t boring, in fact they were so exciting with their racists and misogynists posts that their admissions were revoked.
"I don’t think this list is that great. As another poster on CC once said, you know you have the ranking system about right when people complain that UCB and UMich are ranked too low. : )
lol good point, being in the bay area I do think very highly of Berkeley and probably biased in that respect. Berkeley is considered elite out here in California, in fact more elite than all but Harvard and Stanford, maybe MIT. Students (with no cost basis) have selected UCB over most of the ivies except Harvard and MIT. Elite universities should produce elite grads right? UCB’s grads accomplish a lot, take up leadership positions etc.
Michigan - One of their grads co-founded Google, another co-founded Sun, so they have a lot of street cred here. And I’ve worked with a lot of UM grads (to be fair, some went to the grad schools) and they’ve done real well out here. I also see them in non-stem fields (journalism) so they like UCB have a broad set of strong disciplines.
So if a school is elite, it should be elite everywhere right, and ivies not named Harvard are considered excellent, but not elite across the board. Harvard is the only school out here that can take away a Stanford admit, possibly MIT for engineering. That’s what eliteness boils down to right - yield?
If I worked near NYC and came across Yale, Brown, Columbia grads in investment banking, I would probably think them to be producing grads that change the world.
Here’s another outcome measure, based on where billionaires went to undergrad. While I would like to see a list normalized to undergrad population, the only Ivy which doesn’t make the list is Brown. It’s not clear to me if they count dropouts like Zuckerberg in a university’s total.
Considering the article doesn’t seem to distinguish between billionaires who are self-made…especially from low-income - lower-middle class origins, using billionaires as a metric is meaningless.
For instance, Donald Trump’s kids are included and his own father was already a well-established real-estate developer/landlord in the NYC area(granted the outer boroughs).
In short…the schools didn’t seem to make much of a difference except in a sense that it was an attractive enough to serve as an effective country club rather than being educational institutions which strongly factored into their success…even as narrowly defined as accumulating a large amount of cash/assets.
An elite school by definition is one in which some of your classmates will be powerful. Whether they will be self made billionaires, get there due to family connections, or inherit the family business directly is irrelevant to judging whether a college is elite.
One thing is for certain the more the state politicians get involved in the state universities the more they fall in the rankings and lose their elite status. You only have to look back 20 years to see a few of the state U’s making the top 10, now you don’t see any in the top 20. This is a trend that will continue. as the private schools don’t have to deal with the state. In the not to distant future USC will overtake UCB.
I disagree with both @cobrat and @roethlisburger. You don’t have to be “self-made” to be considered elite and you can’t credit the university with the making. Bill Gates came from a wealthy family yet he was certainly elite in his field while making billions (increased his wealth 1000X). Musk also came from a fairly wealthy family yet he’s the probably one of the top elites out there (he’s at the top of my list). On the other hand, you have the children of elite people going to those schools. They’re elite based on their family wealth, not necessarily what they’ve done or will do.
“An elite school by definition is one in which some of your classmates will be powerful. Whether they will be self made billionaires, get there due to family connections, or inherit the family business directly is irrelevant to judging whether a college is elite.”
Billionaires are only indirectly powerful, Buffet could be since he can influence markets, and Jobs for sure if he was alive would be powerful since millions of families are Apple families where they only have Apple products. So maybe Tim Cook, however Buffet graduated from Nebraska, Jobs withdrew from Reed and Cook went to Auburn. Because of the market power of Walmart, the Waltons would be too, and they went to Arkansas.
The power at least in California would be with the governor Brown (Berkeley), the two Senators (Howard, Stanford) and local congress (no ivies).
Outside of Harvard, the power of the ivies is primarily in the supreme court, which is significant no doubt.
Given that eight of nice SCOTUS justices are Harvard Law S alums, outside of Harvard, power of other US schools is only in one swing vote. But Thomas doesn’t swing…
"One thing is for certain the more the state politicians get involved in the state universities the more they fall in the rankings and lose their elite status. You only have to look back 20 years to see a few of the state U’s making the top 10, now you don’t see any in the top 20. This is a trend that will continue. as the private schools don’t have to deal with the state.
The rankings changed because US News added things that were biased against the public schools, and to sell more magazines:
The publics do not play the ED game, do not waste money on marketing themselves (my relative told me his kid got like 20 mails from Chicago and WashU and maybe one from Berkeley).
“In the not to distant future USC will overtake UCB.”
Lol, it may, but that doesn’t mean it’s a better school, parchment which I know has its critics as 67% choosing Berkeley and 33% choosing USC. My guess is that may be a little old, it’s probably 80% UCB and 20% USC.
I don’t equate eliteness with the amount of one’s wealth unless it’s self-made and especially if the self-made individual was from low-income/lower-middle class origins as then one can plausibly argue the college/university they attended had a critical role in facilitating that wealth-building.
Another issue with counting those who inherited their wealth is that it confers far more respectability/gravitas than is warranted in their case. In short, giving them the kudos for hitting a home run when they already were born on third base rather than someone who hit a home run from batting at home plate as one normally does.
That and you could also have rich anti-intellectual idiots populating an institution of higher ed which IMO…detracts from and undermines the supposed eliteness of the academic institution itself if one is seeking a genuinely academically elite college/university for an education as opposed to a country club in all but name to hobnob with one’s supposed “social superiors”.
Bold statement. First it would need to overtake UCLA, before UCB. Also, UCB’s CoA is roughly 1/2 the cost of USC. So in terms of value, maybe never.
The list of test score averages is deceptive, because it includes some test-optional colleges. Bowdoin, Wesleyan, Pitzer, et al will not include their lowest-scoring students, because those students would have chosen not to submit scores for consideration.
The “Elite” reputation can vary within departments or divisions of larger universities. NYU or USC have extremely “elite” Film schools, with lower acceptance rates than Harvard or Stanford. CMU probably has the most “Elite” Computer Science program in the country. Wharton School at Penn is the most “Elite” undergraduate Business school. RISD is “elite” for visual arts, and Juilliard is for performing arts. I tend to think that questions about what’s “Elite” are sort of like asking for prices at Sotheby’s or Cartier’s. As the saying goes, “if you have to ask, you probably can’t afford it.” If you don’t know which colleges have the strongest national and global reputations in which fields, you probably aren’t a strong candidate. The most selective are looking for candidates who are interested in educational excellence, not brand prestige.
@woogzmama, if you look at the common data set for test optional schools you’ll see that those that don’t submit testing results is ~10% - so take a point off the avg. and the schools still perform very well.
I can’t fathom why inherited wealth is considered elite, calling them privileged I can buy into.
Also many Ivy League schools didn’t have top-ranked SAT scores back in the day, and others that were considered Regional then such as Notre Dame, Vanderbilt, Wash U have attracted more National and ever smarter students, at the same time others are seeing declines in scores or have fallen flat, times change.
So I am sticking with the smartest student populations and largest endowment per student, and the resultant resources available, as strong indicators of an elite school.
“Bold statement. First it would need to overtake UCLA, before UCB. Also, UCB’s CoA is roughly 1/2 the cost of USC. So in terms of value, maybe never.”
In the world according to USNWR, USC is already ahead of UCLA and just one inch behind UCB.
And there’s definitely populations of students (merit schollie winners, big FA recipients) for whom USC is already a better financial deal than UCLA or UCB.