I have always wondered what was better: elite program at a so-so school or elite school with a so-so program/a program similar but not exact to your major? For example, McCombs school of business at UT Austin or Comp Sci at UIUC vs. Econ at Ivy’s and Comp Sci at Vanderbilt, etc. Which would be better for jobs and education?
Any input is appreciated.
It completely depends on the cost and the ability of the family to pay , but in general the better programs are better. In your examples, UIUC is the elite school for engineering/CS, and McComb is arguably better than any Ivy but Wharton.
And even though UIUC and UT are not private schools, they are not “so-so” schools.
Generally, I would believe people within your industry would know which schools have the best programs and consider them as highly or higher than ivies. You want the best training/experience for your major not simply the prestige of a school. Just my thoughts though.
Is your goal to learn the most, or put a name you hope people will recognize on your resume? Me… I’d vote for the former. It goes a lot further in life to be competent and have the deepest skill set/most knowledge.
It depends. No general rule. The Ivies/equivalents are bigger feeders in to the prestige industries than McComb, for instance.
But I’d say CS at UIUC or an Ivy/equivalent are both good.
Lol…are you really calling UTexas and UIUC “so so schools”???
Econ at Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, and the rest of the Ivies – even Yale and Brown – is very good. However, most Ivies do not offer a degree in Business… so directly comparing them to McCombs is not really proper.
Some of them also have strong CS programs. But aside from the strength of a particular program, you should also consider things like academic support, the availability of profs, career services, and networking connections.
Comp Sci is elite at UIUC, fwiw
@mom2collegekids Yes, in terms of overall rankings. No dig intended, all I am comparing is the elite programs there are Ivy caliber but the schools are not.
@prezbucky my bad on the econ thing, I meant to say this comparison for post-college job prospects. So Econ at elite or elite business at a non-elite school.
@AroundHere Yes, I am not referring to private schools being better, all I am saying is that compared to their elite programs the schools are worse. What I mean is that if i only looked at UIUC CS then I would think its an ivy league, but its not. No dig intended.
Remember that only approx. 1/3 of your classes will be in your major so you want the entire school to be strong. It doesn’t have to be Ivy to be strong.
That’s one of the great things about colleges and universities in the US: we have so many good ones. We might not be the best at K-12 education, but we blow everyone else away in higher education in terms of the number of highly regarded schools.
At the undergrad level, I’d say the school is the more important choice, for a variety of reasons:
Undergraduates don’t “live” in their departments the way grad students do. Really, you are not going to undergrad for a specific “program”. You’re going to get a bachelor’s degree, which is a well-rounded course of study in which a minority of your classes (around 33%, in most cases) are concentrated in one specific field. There are so many more factors about a university - career services and on-campus recruiting, student activities, internship opportunities, other course offerings across the university, location, student body makeup, etc. - that will probably affect you a lot more, to be really honest. Some of my favorite courses that actually influenced later decisions I made were not in the psychology department.
Many, many undergraduates change your major. How would you feel if you chose a college on the basis of a specific major only to decide 6 months later that you want something else? And I’ve seen lots of undergrads who felt absolutely sure of their major and career goals before college change after learning more, sometimes very quickly.
To that point, most strong colleges have strengths in many different areas. Harvard, for example, may not be THE best university for computer science or engineering - but it does have very strong departments in those areas, and a student who thought she was going to major in history but changed to mechanical engineering or computer science later will still get an excellent education there. Universities like UIUC and Purdue are often well-known for the strength of their engineering majors, but they also have excellent departments in the humanities and social sciences, too. Generally speaking, if you pick a good college/university that has the major you’re interested in the program is probably pretty solid, especially in very traditional liberal arts fields.
Lastly, most comparisons and rankings of program strength are actually done at the graduate level. But you can’t easily extrapolate undergraduate “program” strength from graduate rankings, because graduate programs are ranked on factors that are important for doctoral students but not necessarily meaningful for undergraduates. Some of the stuff trickles down, but a lot of it doesn’t. And those rankings tend to leave out any colleges that don’t have doctoral programs in that field, like small LACs and regional campuses.
@citymama9: That depends on the major. Yes, liberal arts & science majors typically take roughly a third of their classes in their major, but for engineering majors, the vast majority of their classes will be in engineering or engineering prereqs. That’s true for some other preprofessional majors as well.
Business as an undergraduate course of study may be the most interesting field to analyze, in that relatively few of the schools that regularly send their students to highly regarded graduate business programs offer business as a major on the undergraduate level – the majority, it seems, offer predominantly liberal arts curricula, either in universities or liberal arts colleges:
https://www.■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/infographics/top-feeders-mba-programs
It depends:
I will speak on the industries I have knowledge in because I have gone through the internship recruiting process:
For Management Consulting / Investment Banking / other types of “high finance” (ex: Private Equity, Sales & Trading, Hedge Funds, etc.): Prestige is paramount. Your major does not really matter much, so long as you can get a decent grounding of some finance/econ knowledge and learn things like Microsoft Excel on your own. Also, the major should be academic and not too niche or pre-professional. The Ivies and schools of that caliber will serve you best in this regard. If you are going to major in business and hope to “break in” to this industry, a top business school is in order (think UPenn Wharton, Michigan Ross, Berkeley Haas). Also, if you are in a very rigorious top Engineering/CS program with a great GPA, this can get you extra brownie points (although great GPAs in such programs are few and far between).
For Technology: Either a top Engineering/CS Program or an Ivy/Ivy-level school (like Duke) will help lots (especially for the top tech firms and hottest startups) - but it is not as necessary as the above industries where the school/program you attend is paramount.
FWIW, you can go to a “normal” school and break into any of those industries with enough hard work and commitment.
@juillet @citymama9 honestly, never really thought of it that way - my current school was the best academically of any school I was accepted to, but I also made the decision on the basis of the strength of the undergrad B-school. Fresh perspectives are always great! 
IDK about CS majors, but engineering majors would be better off if they went to a school with an elite engineering program.