<p>Anything that is in the top 20 cannot possibly be “underrated.” It’s already rated exceedingly highly! What more do you want? It’s rather like arguing that people on the Olympic team who didn’t win the gold, silver or bronze must be “underrated as athletes.” Uh, no, they are still among the top athletes in the world. Northwestern’s among the very top universities in the country. What’s not to be proud about?</p>
<p>The Question: Why is Northwestern Underrated?
The Answer: Why? Is Northwestern underrated?</p>
<p>Most likely, NU is not under-rated. If we carve out HYPSM, and look at the next 15 or so Universities, you will find them all to be all excellent. The choice of one school over another largely comes down to factors such as the relative strength of specific departments, geography, feel of campus (including big school vs small school, etc.), and financial packages.</p>
<p>All of these schools provide an excellent education and excellent employment or grad school opportunities. Whether one is number 7, number 12, number 15 or number 18, really has little to do with education or post-graduation opportunities, and to a great extent the debate of the specific ranking is kind of silly. So, it really comes down to what you are looking for in a top-tier school.</p>
<p>NU is clearly in this tier of schools, and I think there is near-universal agreement that this is where it belongs.</p>
<p>The only real exception is what we’ll call the Ivy Factor. There are many who would argue that there is a real advantage to any Ivy League School, regardless of its ranking. In certain fields (east-cost investment banking?), the Ivy Factor may be real – though most likely less so than it was 25 years ago – or maybe in the current world, this is vastly overrated. There’s no real point in discussing it. Either you believe in it or you don’t. But even most Ivy Factor believers will admit that it has little or nothing to do with quality of education.</p>
<p>So, to the extent NU is underrated, it’s because it’s not an Ivy, and there are no foreseeable circumstances in which it will ever become one.</p>
<p>Once one looks beyond this fact it’s recoginized as an excellent top-tier university.</p>
<p>one of the NU student profiles lists a guy who will be an analyst at Goldman Sachs after graduation. so NU has just as much hold as an Ivy even in that financial market</p>
<p>Having one (or a handful) of students picked up by GS (or any other BB) is not that remarkable when Wharton gets dozens recruited every year. The distinction between NU and some of the “upper-tier” Ivys is that some are heavily recruited (i.e., Wharton, Harvard, Columbia) while others aren’t. This doesn’t prevent someone from getting employed there (I have two friends from UCSD working at GS and Citigroup next year as Financial Analysts, but I’m sure no one would try to make the comparison between UCSD and Ivys for number of opportunities). There is no inherent ceiling imposed on any school,–especially one like NU–but some schools have a much much stronger hold in banking.</p>
<p>But more importantly, placement or lack thereof in ONE given industry isn’t really a measure of a university’s “goodness.” NU likely beats all other top 20 universities with the possible exception of Yale in terms of having its graduates work in Hollywood and on Broadway X years out from graduation, but for some reason that’s never cited as why NU is “better.” It’s amusing watching all the lemmings salivate over i-banking as THE career. It’s not. Indeed, if a university is too situated towards becoming merely or only an i-banking feeder, that’s a negative in my book. What makes a university great is the diversity of what its student body is searching for – that your classmates do all kinds of neat, great things after graduation, not just march like lemmings towards Wall Street.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Exactly. Very well said. It’s ludicrous to consider anything at this level “underrated.” Look, the only people who are distinguishing / differentiating between #7 and #12 and #18 are high school seniors. No one in the real world thinks that way, at all.</p>
<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>
<p>
</p>
<p>It’s neither fair nor unfair. It’s just stupid.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Depends on where your audience is. I respectfully submit - you’re from California and so what’s “prestigious” to you is different from what’s prestigious in Chicago, in New York, and so forth. For example, there are plenty of California-based CC’ers who engage in discussions about the relative prestige of the various UC’s who aren’t really aware that none of those schools, with the possible exceptions of Berkeley and UCLA (and UCLA mostly because it’s known for sports), make the radar screen in other parts of the country. Which doesn’t make them not fine schools. It just speaks to the fact that what one considers prestigious is based on where one grew up / lives / works, that’s all. In certain areas, Northwestern has more than enough prestige to get anyone anywhere (as does U of Chicago). I don’t make the mistake of thinking that my prestige-meter (shaped by growing up in the East, and now living in the Chicago area) reflects everyone, everywhere; don’t make the same mistake with your prestige-meter either.</p>
<p>I’m a Kellogg MBA-er myself – marketing and org behavior. I submit that most “laymen” don’t know either Wharton or Kellogg, and don’t <em>really</em> know anything about Harvard other than “top school in the country,” the same way that the Mona Lisa owns “best painting.”</p>
<p>Very true and good post. Also nice to finally find out about a graduate student on this board :)</p>
<p>I think CC (given its partiality to Ivys and other East-centric schools) has a narrow focus on the notable industries proximal to NY/Wall Street. Like you mentioned, Californians do have a different picture in terms of “prestige” because many students upon graduating do tend to stay (more or less) in the same geographic region, so we see mainly other Californians. The UCs/Stanford do send a lot of people into Media/Marketing in Hollywood, and I’m sure that’s not just a function of a good education–but also proximity; much like Wall Street may draw those students in the Northeast. If we were to only look at some notable Midwest corp/consulting firms like P&G or McKinsey&Co, we’d see a large proportion of NU and UoC kids going there for those jobs–these placements tend to be overlooked by CCers generally, who knows why.</p>
<p>I guess my underlining final point is that I honestly couldn’t care about ranking. I never really let it determine where I’d be headed for my career/post-graduate education, and just made the best of my situation. I wish UCSD had a better brand name at times, but the school doesn’t determine my success–likewise to those at NU. Prestige has some advantages which help students sometimes succeed with less effort (once again, OCIs), but it isn’t a make-or-break, especially for a school with a caliber of that of this school. I definitely didn’t want to generalize to anything outside of the financial market since my original “long” post was directed at this statement:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>…which I still isn’t true, at least today. NU is great for many things, but there are other schools that will hold your hand escorting you into Wall Street.</p>