Why is Georgetown so "prestigious"?

Colleges & Universities Georgetown University
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<p>*and georgetown also has very little international recognition. common people in asia and europe can’t name beyond the the HYPSM. just go study abroad and go around asking, i can tell you that’s for a fact when people asked what school i was applying to. *</p>

<p>Georgetown does extensive international travel for undergraduate admissions, as well as hosting visits from quite a few international schools. So I can’t make any judgments about “common people,” but of the schools internationally that send significant numbers of students to selective American universities, you can rest assured that their counselors and heads know about Georgetown.</p>

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<p>visiting is diff from adjuncts. for example: georgetown law has visiting faculties who are there for only one year. so does the college. as you can see in their website, adjuncts/affiliates are classified as different from visiting. vising often stay for 1-2 years. adjuncts stay for longer.
[Georgetown</a> Law - Georgetown Law - Faculty and Administration](<a href=“http://www.law.georgetown.edu/faculty/]Georgetown”>Faculty & Research | Georgetown Law)
<a href=“Faculty & Research | Georgetown Law”>Faculty & Research | Georgetown Law;
[People</a> - Department of Philosophy - Georgetown College](<a href=“http://philosophy.georgetown.edu/people/]People”>People | Department of Philosophy | Georgetown University)</p>

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<p>visiting is diff from adjuncts. for example: georgetown law has visiting faculties who are there for only one year. so does the college. as you can see in their website, adjuncts/affiliates are classified as different from visiting. vising often stay for 1-2 years. adjuncts stay for longer.</p>

<p>This is true in some contexts, such as the Law Center, but not in others. Eric Langenbacher has been a Visiting Assistant Professor since 2002, for instance (see [Georgetown</a> University](<a href=“Georgetown University Faculty Directory”>Georgetown University Faculty Directory) ). Donald Daniel has been a Visiting Professor since 2002 also ( see [Georgetown</a> University](<a href=“Georgetown University Faculty Directory”>Georgetown University Faculty Directory) ). In this case, “visiting” refers to the fact that you are not occupying a tenure-track position. It is oftentimes used when a department wants a particular person as a faculty member but does not want to - or cannot - commit to creating a tenure-track position for them, with all of the bureaucratic hoopla that entails.</p>

<p>Academia is a really weird place sometimes.</p>

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<p>“common people in asia and europe can’t name beyond the the HYPSM. just go study abroad and go around asking, i can tell you that’s for a fact when people asked what school i was applying to.”</p>

<p>Please stop being entirely ignorant. There are 3.8 billion people in Asia, give or take, and 700 million of them (a little less than 1 in 5) can’t read, but you think that the “common” person in Asia has heard of Yale? I beg you to crawl out of the upper middle-class hole you live in and learn a little something about the average person in the world. </p>

<p>“sp since duke and northwestern has campuses in china and the middle east so it doesn’t even have to be the educated.”</p>

<p>Please learn how to use Google. I would try, “Georgetown Qatar”.</p>

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<p>@potatoes345, way to resort to personal attacks. stay classy.
BTW, if you had read the whole passage, lhd555 in that post didn’t say that Georgetown didn’t have international recognition. He simply just said that the other schools are well represented in the world. Way to misread everything in that post. In fact Georgetown was not mentioned in the post at all<img src=“Search%20Georgetown%20in%20that%20post” alt=“/U”>. So please learn how to read, you should also try to search “Georgetown” in that post.
Also, how do you know that he/she is not from asia? not from a lower/middle class community? You immediately believe he/she is upper middle class. Maybe you should actually stop being “entirely ignorant”. Oh yeah it’s funny how your statement also proves gunit5’s statement:</p>

<p>If 1/5 of them can’t read, they don’t know Georgetown either. </p>

<p>Congrats on helping him/her prove his statement while resorting to personal attacks.</p>

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<p>^What? You think that my point was that the world’s billions of impoverished and illiterate people have heard of Georgetown but not the other schools mentioned? Seriously? The point is this: name whatever college you want, and most people in the world have never heard of it. They are far too busy living and dying, struggling to find clean water, fighting AIDS and malaria, or desperately trying to feed their families in the face of drought and famine to spend one minute thinking about American universities. </p>

<p>Insofar as “common people in asia and europe can’t name beyond the the HYPSM” was meant to imply that common people in Asia and Europe can name Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and MIT, it was a ridiculously ignorant statement (admittedly, lhd555 may not have meant that, but then why not just say that most people can’t name any of these schools). Most of the people in the world don’t care at all about the “prestige” of any university. Only a lucky group of wealthy, privileged people care AT ALL about where someone goes to school or have any opinion about how Georgetown compares to George Washington or how Haverford compares to Harvard.</p>

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<p>

Wow, way to insult the entire lower class people. You do realize that people of lower social-economic background care a great deal about education. It’s called self-improvement. Why has the top schools, especially Harvard and Princeton, enact such intense financial aid campaign. And for you to blow Asia and Europe off is quite insulting to those people too. You obviously have never lived in another country nor have experienced lower socio-economic statuses. I for one came from the lower class in Asia (parents: farmers) and let me tell you:
Education matters A LOT, especially today. Every student aims to get into the best colleges. Many of my cousins have moved from China to America for college. So to call them ignorant and don’t care about schools is ridiculous. Also, you obviously have not went to school in another country because you would have known that in high school, people know about Harvard. In many asian schools, people aim to go to harvard. Oh yeah, those students are not rich, many of them come from working and middle class family. Unlike america where people splurge on brand name goods, asian families invest heavily on education. Asian families seek out to send their kids to the best high schools, even if it means making their kids study like crazy in middle school for the entrance exam. Furthermore, asian families spend their life savings on tutorial services, test preparation and on college tuition. “prestige” matters a lot in asia, especially China. If you graduate from a top American college, you can be hired as a top manger at some chinese companies. If you ever spend time in chinese schools, you will realize that they have learned a great deal of english and they do know what HYPSM is. To them, those are the only schools they know really. They measure every other american schools to that standard. If it is not as good as Harvard, then it is not good.
So don’t think they are ignorant. Even students in rural school know english.
Unlike America where government is trying to scale back education funding, Asian countries, especially china, places emphasis on education funding. Students are admitted to college based on a very comprehensive 2-3 day long exam. It’s not your normal ACT. Imagine final exams covering every subjects for 3 days. So don’t think other countries don’t care about the prestige of universities. I know for a fact that Asian students in Asia know a lot about American schools. Heck they at English than some Americans, and they learn English better than we learn foreign language sometimes.
Again, they know HYPSM, don’t assume that because there is so many illiterates that the common people (middle, working class) don’t know anything about American colleges. You should realize that every country tries to compete with america and what better way than to send their students to american colleges.</p>

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<p>ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!</p>

<p>What was the original question?</p>

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<p>I should remember not to feed the ■■■■■■, but here goes once last attempt. </p>

<p>First, I never said that most of the people in the world don’t care IF you go to college, I said they don’t care WHERE. Yes, education is something that many people worldwide attach a very high value to, but only 6.7% of the world’s people are fortunate enough to hold a college degree (see [6.7%</a> Of World Has College Degree](<a href=“HuffPost - Breaking News, U.S. and World News | HuffPost”>6.7% Of World Has College Degree | HuffPost College)), so the petty distinctions between top American universities aren’t the issue. </p>

<p>Yes, many people from Asia and Europe have heard of American colleges and dream of/or succeed in attending them. I know many such people, and they do not represent merely the extremely rich, but their experience is far from typical. I again direct you to the fact that less than 1 person in 10 worldwide is fortunate to have post-secondary education and that 16.5% of the world population is illiterate (according to UNESCO figures for 2010 [Statistics</a> - Literacy 2000](<a href=“UNESCO UIS”>UNESCO UIS)). </p>

<p>As a sidenote, I just assume when people say “common” or “average” they mean something along the lines of median, but I think the problem here may be that when you say “common” you don’t mean that. If you don’t think that “common” means median, then you’ll have to provide another definition and we can work from there. Using median as our starting point, though: there are 6.8 billion people in the world. For the median “common” person to have heard of Harvard, that would imply that at least 3.4 billion people have heard of it (and less than 3.4 billion people have never heard of it). Let’s consider what that would mean.</p>

<p>Probably the most recognized name in the world is that of Jesus. Christianity is a 2000 year old brand and literally millions of people over the centuries have devoted their lives to raising awareness of that brand. Nonetheless, the Joshua Project (a religious advocacy organization) estimates that 2.79 billion have never heard of Jesus (see [Joshua</a> Project - Great Commission Statistics about Peoples, Countries and Languages](<a href=“http://www.joshuaproject.net/great-commission-statistics.php]Joshua”>Global Dashboard | Joshua Project)) and thus that about 6 billion people have. Do you really think that Harvard has 2/3 the brand recognition that Jesus does?</p>

<p>College name is only something that matters to a very small segment of the world’s population, although it is true that an increasing number of the people who care are in China and South Korea.</p>

<p>As I alluded to above, your reference to the “middle class” as the “common people” is probably the source of our disagreement. Different people estimate the size of the Chinese middle class differently, but I am not aware of a single estimate that puts it at more than 50% of the population, though some analysts estimate it’s headed there by 2020. Fairly typical estimates put the middle class at something like a quarter of the Chinese population.</p>

<p>Worldwide, median income is around $1700 a day - that’s nothing like middle class. About 1 billion people live in daily hunger, 2.5 billion people live without adequate sanitation, a billion people can’t read or write, and 7 children out of every 100 don’t live to see their fifth birthday. Most people in the world have never of Harvard or Oxford or Georgetown or Ohio State, and they have much more important things to think about.</p>

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<p>to be honest, both of you guys are ■■■■■■ for taking this way off topic, both of you guys can’t stand not having the last word…</p>

<p>may the thread die</p>

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<p>Georgetown just has a certain stately dignity about it that other higher ranked schools lack. Its age, Jesuit Catholic tradition (the Jesuit scholastic tradition can be traced back centuries before America’s founding), gorgeous campus in a historic village of a prominent city, internationalism, and list of illustrious alumni and faculty all contribute to its allure. The school is pure class. Simple as that.</p>

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<p>Dick Durbin</p>

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<p>This
[Academics</a> - Georgetown University](<a href=“http://www.georgetown.edu/academics/index.html]Academics”>http://www.georgetown.edu/academics/index.html)</p>

<p>and this</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.georgetown.edu/academics/meet-our-faculty/index.html[/url]”>http://www.georgetown.edu/academics/meet-our-faculty/index.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>and</p>

<p><a href=“http://witnesstohistory.georgetown.edu/[/url]”>http://witnesstohistory.georgetown.edu/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>“if you don’t get it, you don’t get it.”</p>

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<p>[Witness</a> to History - Georgetown University](<a href=“http://witnesstohistory.georgetown.edu/]Witness”>http://witnesstohistory.georgetown.edu/)</p>

<p>^ great site and they still have yet to profile people like Justice Scalia, former president Clinton, and current Defense Secretary Robert Gates! Not to mention A-list actor Bradley Cooper, indie film starlet Brit Marling (who turned down a job at Goodman Sachs to pursue acting) and indie film director Mike Cahill were all the buzz at Sindance Film Festival --and writer/producer Jonathan Nolan (director Christoper Nolan’s brother of “Dark Knight” fame.) Jonathan co-wrote the screenplay for that movie and several other major blockbusters.</p>

<p>Not to mention the writer of “The Exorcist” which was filmed all over Georgetown and the university’s campus!</p>

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<p>oops sorry, typo: “Sindance” should read “Sundance” and the breakout hit movie Marling, Cahill, and one other GU alum made together is called “Another Earth.”</p>

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<p>AND David Yates: director of the last four Harry Potter films.</p>

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<p>I apologize for my overposting and all the typos in the previous posts: (“Goodman Sachs” should read “Goldman Sachs” obviously) --and Harry Potter director David Yates attended Georgetown before graduating from film school in England–the other entertainment alums I mentioned, who are making a unique and major impact in that field all have Georgetown <em>degrees</em> and those are just a few. </p>

<p>For some reason the EDIT/DELETE option is off, I promise this will be my last post on the thread :slight_smile: …But basically yes, there are a diverse array of interesting alumni from all schools–but I feel that there’s something unique about the Georgetown character, which promotes a sense of global-mindedness and a heart for creating a meaningful impact that goes beyond just “job security” out of college. (Though of course you’ll find people like that everywhere.) The fields that Georgetown is not strongest in are in things like engineering.</p>

<p>I also think Georgetown is admirable for having a vibrant social life, without a Greek scene. Greek life, in my opinion, cheapens a school’s atmosphere and sense of “class” by promoting pettiness and high-school style exclusivity in some cases. There’s a conservative strain (I don’t mean political) running through Georgetown–a seriousness about the students, if you will, that seems to prevent it from having an all out “party school” / “animal house” type atmosphere or reputation that some other schools–even higher-ranked schools may boast of. Georgetown students on the whole seem to be more sophisticated and poised than your average bunch of smart people. Cultured. </p>

<p>Anyhow, here’s the Wikipedia listing of notable Georgetown alumni–</p>

<p>[List</a> of Georgetown University alumni - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Georgetown_University_alumni]List”>List of Georgetown University alumni - Wikipedia)</p>

<p>I find it interesting that the “Athletics” listing does not just include notable athletes–but also notable owners and managers of sports teams and sports leagues–such as a former commissioner of the NFL and the current owner of the LA Dodgers, Frank McCourt. Also interesting to note that Georgetown’s has an entire graduate program devoted to sports media and management. </p>

<p>According to the Wiki page, “Just over three percent of Georgetown’s 97,384 living alumni are listed in Marquis Who’s Who, the 14th highest percentage and eighth highest raw number among American universities as of 2000.[1] NNDB, the Notable Names Database, lists 289 notable alumni.[2]”</p>

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<p>It’s a good school that’s in the NE (if you count DC to be in the NE) and hence, gets plenty of good students from the NE which drives down the acceptance rate.</p>

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<p>-define prestigious
-invited to the ivy league
-admissions acceptance rates
-graduate occupations/ politics
-old and well established
-small class sizes= quality/ focused education
-diverse and gifted student body
-…etc.</p>