Funny you mentioned Duke. Duke was such a hot school(hit #5 on USNWR back then) when my graduating HS class was applying to colleges in the mid-'90s that it wasn’t unheard of for many high stats students who really wanted to attend Duke end up feeling despondent for the “consolation prize” of HYPS.
One friend who was the highest average rejected by Duke according to GC reports and his own admission ended up attending Cornell on a full-ride FA/scholarship package.
“Depending on ED to give full-pay students an extra boost doesn’t make you elite. If you are truly elite, you want the best students you can get regardless of ability to pay.”
This is a good measure of elite-ness. No ED. No merit aid at all. Need blind/full need. Which also means everyone else without need (40-50% of students) is a full payor at the full private school price.
That’s a very short list. HYPSM and Georgetown are the only ones I can think of off the top. Anyone else fit that bill among the top unis/LACs?
Agreed.
By that standard, my LAC definitely doesn’t qualify as elite.
You could even throw some shade at HYPS for using SCEA, which is kind of like ED in practical operation. And Gtown too, which uses “restricted” early action.
MIT is the purest elite I can think of.
“If your family is full-pay, and your kid is high-stats who wants a flagship experience AND a private school vibe, you would probably choose Duke or Vanderbilt or Notre Dame over USC if elite reputation is what you are after.”
The vibe at Duke, Vanderbilt and Notre Dame is very different than USC. For one thing, despite the old reputation (which seems to die slowly), Duke, Vanderbilt and Notre Dame are rich kids schools and USC is not any longer. Those 3 are all at the top for having more students from the 1% than from the bottom 60%. If making sure your child attends school with very few low income students is your goal, then those 3 are good choices. But those are schools my kid didn’t even consider.
I agree if you are chasing “prestige” you should avoid USC. It’s building its reputation by reaching out to expand opportunities to deserving low-income students. It’s building its reputation by offering great merit scholarships to recruit top students regardless of need instead of offering an easier admissions process (ED) to students whose families are so very rich that the $70,000/year tuition means little. In the long run, I think the USC approach is better. If they were offering merit aid instead of financial aid I would object, but they are recruiting low income students with excellent need-based financial aid along with giving merit money.
Finally, Berkeley and UCLA are great schools but there is a reason that many students are warned that they might have to spend 5 years there. USC has the money to recruit professors and they are using it. The other name for it is “University of Stolen Colleagues”. It doesn’t have “prestige” but that’s because prestige is often based on privilege more than merit. It didn’t stop USC from having both a US and International Rhodes Scholarship winner this year. And while choosing between USC and Berkeley is a matter of preference and cost, USC vs Duke, Vanderbilt or Notre Dame would have been easy. Those are great schools but they are also very privileged and rich. And USC, despite old reputations dying hard, is not.
And yet, few would choose MIT over Tish for Acting or over Cal Arts for Animation or over Julliard for Oboe Performance
If we aren’t willing to get into targeted specifics this is doomed to be a pretty “low grade” “elite” conversation…
“These 45000 people at USC are not as elite as the 50000 at NYU!”
You mean “These 45,000 people at USC are not as elite as the 45,000 at UCLA or the 40,000 at Berkeley or the 21,000 at Harvard or 28,000 at Columbia.” (Since you seem to be combining undergrad and grad students.)
@obsever12
Actually I think the model that Duke has is better. Notre Dame is a different animal as it’s Catholic and what not. But eventually providing amazing financial aid will affect the institutional financial health. USC has 18,000 undergraduates and around 20,000 graduates to provide financial aid for. This will add up and with an endowment of 4 billion spread out between so many students. They can’t keep this up I don’t think. Vandy is in a similar situation however the have a lot less students with a lot more wealthy students to cover any costs. The difference for long term success isn’t wealth per say, it’s financial health which is different than wealth. And it’s also the intellectual tenacity of the student body. A student body that strives for innovative research and to become leaders in their field.
Just because Vandy has a lot of wealthy students doesn’t mean they are financially healthy. They need all of those wealthy students to provide great fin aid to the others. There was an anonymous letter written by a Vandy professor ( I’ll try to find it again) that denigrated the school for it’s fin aid policy. It stated there was not enough money for faculty raises and research, that’s important. I can only imagine that USC will go through similar issues if not worse than Vandy’s. USC has so many students to provide for with limited resources, and while being private with little state allocation, resources are thus spread very thin.
NYU other than Stern or Tisch was basically, the NYC area equivalent to USC to an extent…with better academics.
Though a closer analogue to pre-early '00s USC in the same period would likely be schools like GW or BU which were both considered lower academically back than than NYU.
Well, that is what THE and many ranking systems do. Does the number of cited papers by Cal EE have any effect on the film student? The number of Oscar winners from USC any effect on the systems engineer major?
Any discussion of “elite” that can apply to 40 or 50000 people is simply broadstrokes that has little relevance for any specific student’s decision.
As THE themselves state, the 200 schools (1% of all colleges/universities) they rank are “the elite.” They use that actual word.
So, bragging rights is fun and all, but again - all else being equal - few honest opinion brokers would tell your aspiring film director to choose MIT over USC CA, few would tell an aspiring Fashion Designer to attend CAL over Parsons, few would suggest an student who wanted to do nuclear engineering should choose Penn over GATech.
And that’s not even getting into grad programs.
This fixation with over some macro determination of University (not even colleges within universities!) “status” is silly (save when it becomes harmful.) There simply is nothing elite about a discussion or ranking at applies to 20-60000 people with a 20-25% annual turnover rate as well btw.
@cobrat
“NYU other than Stern or Tisch was basically, the NYC area equivalent to USC to an extent…with better academics.”
I don’t know what that comment means. But why wouldn’t you compare with UCLA because the USC and UCLA admission rate is essentially the same at 16% (with no ED or EA)? And NYU accepted 27% of its students. I’m biased but I believe USC has far better academics than NYU for undergraduates and the experience is not comparable at all.
@VANDEMORY1342
You make an interesting point about USC – they are certainly spending money as if they aren’t concerned with it running out. I do think they have some deep pockets and being larger also means they have a lot more alumni to tap. The new USC Village is opening in August and it may result in even more students applying. It would be a shame if they run out of money and can’t serve as many low-income students.
There are some “prestigious” colleges that, frankly, are not nearly as difficult to get admitted to than USC is IF you are very wealthy and can apply ED. They tend to be more selective in the RD round because a relatively high % of the class is filled. Middlebury’s ED rate is nearly 50%! 22.8% of their students are in the top 1% and over 85% of the students are in the top 40% in income. Claremont McKenna accepts 35% of its ED students. They have a class of around 330 students but 207 were admitted ED. Nearly 20% of them were in the top 1%. Only 6.7% came from the bottom 40% in income. At USC 11.6% came from the bottom 40%. It’s similar to Harvard’s (UCLA and Berkeley are at the top with 19% and 17% coming from families at the bottom 40%). Wash U has only 2.6% in the bottom 40%.
On the other hand, USC does admit more students for January and they are very welcoming to transfers as are Berkeley and UCLA. So that probably games the rankings a bit. But USC is no longer the University of Spoiled Children.
I was speaking of the situation 20-30 years ago as I thought I made clear in that post.
@cobrat It was clear to me.
I agree with you. I think college admissions was far better before US News got into the business. Students applied to the school they liked and attended their favorite to which they were admitted. They didn’t worry whether Johns Hopkins was 10 rankings higher than Georgetown if they liked Georgetown better. They didn’t choose Vanderbilt over Tufts because Vanderbilt, at 12 rankings higher, was clearly superior. In truth, I think that most of the students still don’t parse the rankings like their parents do! There are students who love the vibe at Colgate and students who would never choose Colgate over Wesleyan and Harvey Mudd – despite Colgate being the #12 ranked LAC and those other two not even in the top 20!
So parsing which schools are elite or prestigious depends where one lives, who one hangs out with, and what one wants to study. I wasn’t arguing that USC belonged with Harvard, Stanford and MIT. But I also don’t agree with people who still believe that the students there aren’t similar in ability (albeit less rich) than students at Vanderbilt or Wash U.
Thank you.
@observer12
If USC didn’t artificially cut their freshman class by 2000 students, only to accept them as transfers 1 year later… There acceptance rate would be about 10% higher.
There’s nothing wrong with Middlebury’s ED rate if those students are wealthy full pays. Full pay students are not only desirable but an obligation to remain up and running. So I have no problem with full pays having an easier time being admitted.
@VANDEMORY1342
“I have no problem with full pays having an easier time being admitted.”
But getting back to the original question, does that make Middlebury more “elite” because they have so many full-pays relative to students in the bottom 40% of income? If having a high % of families with incomes over $630k willing to pay full fare marks you as an elite college, then Wash U., Colorado College, Trinity (CT), Colgate, Middlebury and Vanderbilt are among the most elite. (And I believe they all do ED admissions.) And MIT, U. Chicago, Cal Tech, Swarthmore, Berkeley with among the lowest % of high income students would be among the least “elite”.
Please don’t take that comment seriously. If I had to really name elite schools, I would say Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Cal Tech and Berkeley are the best at admitting a true merit-based class. (I would put U. Chicago up there as well, but this past year was their first at adopting ED so it may affect the admirable job they have been doing to have a class where the very rich don’t outnumber students in the bottom 60%.
I’ve been reading VANDEMORY1342’s comments on USC with the impression that he/she doesn’t really know much about USC. The above quote confirms that. If there’s anything that USC is not, it’s money-starved. USC has a ton of money that it’s sunk into resources like new classrooms, equipment and professors. If you walk around campus you can easily see that.
@simba9
New buildings is not indicative of financial institutional health. I can show you the fact book/CDS of many schools Emory, Vandy, and UChicago to be exact, it would show you that they are in the black by only a few million every year and they are still building, in fact Emory is building a new student center this year. I would be willing to bet USC is worse off as those other three schools are much smaller and UChicago and Emory have more money.
So you’re saying USC is struggling with financial issues? Do you have any actual evidence of that?
USC raised more money in 2015 than any schools except Stanford and Harvard.
http://time.com/money/4195204/2015-donations-colleges-universities/
Also, USC is a non-profit institution. I’m going to guess that Emory, Vandy and UChicago are in the same boat. They don’t need to show that they’re making big profits on any kind of income statements or balance sheets. If they did, they’d be criticized for focusing too much on making money.