<p>I agree that rankings aren’t everything–if you look at my undergraduate university, UCSD, we’re what–#35? I still got into Kellogg, Wharton, and Fuqua for my Ph.D. in marketing coming from a “non-elite” institution. But there are certain glass ceilings (like salary potential) that schools want to boast because overachieving students care about these numbers. Sure, one can land a job in IB or consulting from any school, but if a student can get more opportunities with the same amount of effort from one school versus the next, they’ll choose that school that gets more OCI opportunities. I have a strong resume and did land a few offers from consulting firms post-graduation, but those came from pulling strings through friends already working there and NOT because employers came to our university looking to recruit–a luxury that is disproportionately geared towards some arbitrary “elite” sample. From what I know, there are a lot of recruitment events occurring at NU/Kellogg, but would I compare these numbers to Penn? No. Is it unfair that many consider IB to be the only widely-used metric to determine how prestigious a school is in comparison to its peers? Perhaps, but there are a lot of correlates (with many qualifiers, caveats, and exceptions, mind you) from those prospects to how well a school’s graduates do in general.</p>
<p>And of course, if anyone here thinks I’m trying to bash on NU in any way, I’m not. There’s a reason I’m choosing to spend the next 5 years here, but you can’t blindly compare what current/incoming students think about the school versus a layman. NU is amazing and has some top-ranked programs that are heralded as the best in their fields (Medill, Kellogg Marketing, etc.), but it doesn’t hold the same brand recognition as “Harvard”, “Wharton”, etc. to an audience that isn’t keen on looking at individual programs versus entire schools. This is sometimes seen as a problem by those looking to increase NU’s reputation, but why is this perceived as a problem at all?</p>