@gallentjill my daughter’s friend did her undergrad at a small, low ranked private school with a 79% acceptance rate and had no problem getting into medical school. As I mentioned earlier, she is currently at an Ivy. I am not saying that this is the experience of most… but it was her experience.
A twist in this conversation is that while some institutions have prestige, other institutions have the reverse, a reputation for being over-priced and catering to mediocre students.
I did feel Hofstra was disappointing when I went for graduate classes, but my experience aside, some schools do have to deal with negativity even when they may have unknown strengths.
Specifically on Long Island and the NYC area, schools like Adelphi, CW Post and Hofstra are struggling with negative perception locally and have reacted by marketing to more out of state and foreign students.
It’s not that everyone here believes you need to spend a lot to go to a school with a good reputation. It’s just that SUNY and CUNY schools like Queens College, Hunter, Baruch, Brooklyn College and Stony Brook are held in much higher regard—have much more prestige—and are reasonably priced. And with the new Excelsior Program, are free for many local students. All of these schools now have dorms for those who want to live on campus or nearby.
So how does a school’s reputation that skews towards the negative—party school, easy schools, etc—effect a student’s outcome career-wise and for grad school?
In the pre-med forum section, it is commonly said that medical schools do not like to see pre-meds doing that to avoid competition in their primary college or university.
I am well aware of all of this. That is why part of the plan is to spend very little for undergraduate. High merit aid is one of the options we are evaluating. That will leave money for med school or to finance additional schooling if she finds that med school is not right and needs to change careers options.
@uskoolfish I have not ignored your thoughts on Hofstra. You have raised issues to investigate. However, not everything that you raise is applicable to our situation. By the way, the public schools you mentioned are on our radar as well. That said, I think @lookingforward is right and that we should now refrain from negative comments on specific schools. It wasn’t my original intent to list the schools I had in mind, but I responded to a different poster asking for them. My original intent was to keep it all hypothetical.
@BearHouse Thank you for sharing your thoughts and experience!
SJSU CS has not gone unnoticed by prospective college students.
http://www.sjsu.edu/admissions/impaction/ indicates that, for fall 2018, the eligibility index threshold for CS was 4725, which was much higher than for most other majors there (many as low as 2950, which is the minimum for frosh admission to the least selective CSU campuses and majors).
Eligibility index = GPA * 800 + SATRW + SATM. GPA is calculated by the CSU method ( https://www2.calstate.edu/apply/eligibility-index and click “GPA calculator”). Some theoretical GPA and SAT combinations that barely meet the 4725 eligibility index for SJSU CS for fall 2018:
4.0 unweighted => 4.33 CSU-recalculated GPA, 1270 SAT
3.7 unweighted => 4.03 CSU-recalculated GPA, 1510 SAT
In contrast, for the least selective majors at SJSU, an applicant with a 2.5 GPA and 950 SAT would have been admitted at the 2950 eligibility index.
“It would be much more interesting to see actual hiring results rather than what employers want others to think they hire based on.”
I don’t think companies can disclose such things as it would violate bunch of privacy laws. The studies on what colleges feed into which companies is done by scanning resumes on job sites and Linkedin profiles. That being said the articles are right in concluding that prestige of undergrad is not important in high tech, whether it’s here in silicon valley or Seattle or Texas.
^^^ lot of info on Linkedin if you know what to look for. It’s easy for colleges to say Firm X is a prominent recruiter / employer on campus. Go to the Linkedin site for the school. See how many kids work for Firm X. In what role? Where? for how long? Compare that to how many kids go to the school. And how many are in a certain major.
Broadly stated, School X may have 100 alumni at Company Y but has 20k students. School A may have 50 alumni at Company Y but has 4k students, so school X has 5 times the students but only twice the placement. I would argue your chances are better at School A. Then you dig down deeper and find out the # of kids in a major is 10 times the number of A at X so the disparity is that much greater. An extreme example would be 20k students, 2000 in a major , 500 graduating, 100 placed from school x. 4k students, 200 in a major, 50 graduating, 50 placed. I’d much rather be in the smaller school. 100% of the graduating class placed at firm X (or similar firms). To me, that is a great example of the ecosystem the smaller, and perhaps more prestigious school has. It’s designed to send kids to top companies.
I realize that would be an extreme case but you can easily see the pattern by digging into the numbers on Linkedin.
@gallentjill – I think that in your case-- or in any case where grad school is anticipated --then it is far more important that the college be “reputable” rather than prestigious. “Reputable” would go very far down the US News rankings and include most state “directional” colleges and a lot of colleges listed in the US News “regional” rather than national listings. It would obviously require that the school be accredited, and might exclude some online programs not associated with major universities. In other words, the point is simply that the grad school is going to recognize and acknowledge the undergrad degree as being legitimate and worthy of consideration.
The colleges you mentioned certainly fit that requisite. CC parents can debate all they want – but the grad schools are going to consider and accept many students from those schools. I do think MCAT scores will be very important-- so the real question is going to be how well prepared your daughter will be for that.
@calmom Yes! I love the distinction between reputable and prestigious.
It’s the student for sure. A great student can go to a less prestigious college and do just as well (maybe trying a little harder or trying the same level), but we all know usually, there is a reason why a certain college is prestigious, and it’s not because it’s ranked high on US News. I submit even without specific rankings, certain colleges will be sought after by those who can afford the costs. And if you cannot afford the cost, you should not go there. Benz and Prius both get the job done, and Prius is better if you are a lazy person like me who doesn’t like to stop by gas stations often to fill up the gas.
But one thing that is very important to me based on my own experience is that the college be strong across the board unless you are 100% certain that you will pursue only one specific field. I switched my majors 5 or 6 times in college but the college I went to was pretty strong in many areas, so I went in thinking I should major in engineering (I had 790 in SAT math so this was not an unreasonable decision on my part), but I found I was not suitable for this field and switched to CS, Bio, Econ and finally settled on English Lit which I found I enjoyed (not loved) and in which major I found very easy for me to get As, whereas I got Cs, Ds and even Fs with disinterested effort. Therefore, one thing I will want for my kid is that the school he goes to be strong in many areas of studies, and based on this, schools that fit this requirement are usually prestigious ones, although some state flagship schools fit the bill also.
In choosing between Berkeley and Stanford, the schools which had strong programs across the board in the region where my kid probably wanted to live and work, we chose Stanford because for us (CA residents) the difference of costs between the schools did not offset what we wanted for our kid. OTOH I myself was willing and and quite receptive to - as I said many times in this forum - my kid going to University of South Carolina Honors College on big merit money as a NMF and some other merit money. But again the thing that gnawed at me was the fact that most programs at Univ of South Carolina were not as strong as those at Stanford except for Intl Business, but my kid was not sure he wanted to major in IB. He also was not sure whether he wanted to go to a graduate school. The fact is for many kids, they are not sure of what they want to major in or even go to graduate school. Therefore if you somehow get into one of those schools which have strong programs across the board - and if you can afford the cost - it makes a great deal of sense to send your kid to that school which I submit would be quite high on the prestige scale even without all the specific rankings. I realize many people have different goals, and frankly most people don’t get into certain schools so it’s no use to talk as if going to that school was a viable choice. For example, I would not talk about or waste time comparing and choosing between Harvard and UCLA, simply because my kid did not apply to Harvard and has no idea if he could have gotten in.
If this is important to a particular student, I would suggest that in addition to a school having great options across the board, it should also be one where switching majors is relatively easy. That seems to be true for some places and some majors, but not all. I’m not sure how easy it would be to switch INTO CS or engineering in many places.
Yes. Correct. At Stanford, you can study any field you want. A great point. At many other schools, that is not the case. You can transfer from Engl Lit to CS if you wish. That to me is valuable. It stinks if you cannot switch majors.
@ucbalumnus I’m sure the pre-med forum has lots of wisdom. I like to tell people that if they survey 10 psychiatrists on the right decision to make, they are likely to get 13 different opinions. I suspect that might be the same with college admissions. All kidding aside, there are many paths to careers in medicine and each person has to follow their own unique path. Since GPA matters and high MCAT scores matter, I encourage anyone to pursue whatever path they need to take in order to ensure those happen. I have a lot of personal anecdotal evidence that prestige of the undergraduate institution does not matter. But I understand that others may dispute that.
My advice to my daughter is based on my own experience, of course. It may or may not be good advice. People have to make their own decision in life as to whether a recommendation is sound counsel or not. BTW, I also advised her against finding an internship over the summer. There is more than enough time to join the rat race. Instead, she found an interesting summer “coding” class to take. Of course, she is not taking this coding class at her rigorous LAC so it may end up being a total waste of time as per future employers… 
Of course the prestige of the UG does not matter that much for a goal oriented kid. Like I said Benz and Prius both get the job done if the sole goal is to get to from point A to Z. Anyone who says to me that my kid could not accomplish his goal because he went to Univ of South Carolina instead of Stanford is suspect.