I’m sure many dopers graduated from prestigious schools. What exactly did you think of the experience then and now?
I went to a large state school and was an average student. I still wonder what life might have been like had I done the work in high school, negotiated with my parents, and gone to a more prestigious school.
Was it a waste of money? The time of your life? I’m interested primarily in undergraduate opinions.
I knew a guy who went to MIT and loved it. Felt he was a comparative moron, but also felt he was competing with the best. (he was a competitive sort – also liked the fact that he could play football there.)
I went to Tulane for undergraduate school. Loved it and would pay twice the money to go back. New Orleans was great and the school had a great mix of hard-core academics combined with New Orleans style socializing. You could tell that most of the students were serious and on their way to big things. 80% of Tulane students go on to more post-graduate education which is among the highest for any school in the nation.
I went to Dartmouth for graduate school. It is the smallest school in the Ivy League and has a drop-dead gorgeous campus right on the New Hampshire-Vermont border. I loved it too although it was very different than Tulane. It had much more of a country-club feel and smelled of old money even though students came from all walks of life. Another student and I were walking across campus one when he stopped and said “You know, I don’t see any fat people and I don’t even really see any ugly people walking around here. Do you?” He had a point. Dartmouth is like this little Garden of Eden where nothing is unpleasant.
You can get a great education at most schools. However, very competitive and elite schools just have that certain something that makes them worth it. Being around all those brilliant and future successful people makes you realize what you can do too and pushes you in that direction. I definitely think it is worth it and is one of the better investments you can make in life. Where you go to college tends to follow you around forever in American society.
Actually, U.S. News in 2006 ranked Tulane at #43. (Other pubs may rank it higher; it’s all subjective anyway.)
Duke is today ranked #5, but was undoubtedly lower back when I was a student there…
Tulane was in the 30’s when I went there and Dartmouth is always around something like #7. Tulane has got a fight on its hands now after Katrina so I am just hoping that it hangs on rankings be damned.
I think that anything in the Top 50 is a “top school”. The U.S. has almost 3000 colleges and universities. They cluster at the top pretty tightly and most of prestigious ones have programs within the university that are among the absolute best of anyone.
It is pretty easy to brainstorm a list of 50 schools that most people consider very prestigious and you can easily keep going from there.
The Ivy’s are all considered ulltra-prestigious even though schools like Duke, Stanford, Caltech, amd several others consistently beat some of them in the rankings. I have been on lots of college campuses/ There is more than enough prestige to around to handle a fairly good sized list.
I’m an undergrad at Stanford right now. Since I’m still there I don’t have a lot of perspective, but so far I would call it a mixed experience. On one hand, it’s neat to be in a community of people who think it’s normal to be intellectual (kind of like the Dope 
), and I’ve made good friends with some really interesting people. On the other hand, even the half of the student body that parties is super socially observant (read: awkward).
One thing that I really dislike, that I think is unique to the elite university, is that Stanford is sort of creepily Big-Brother-like. The surrounding community is very expensive, so nobody (5% of the student body) lives off-campus. That limits the convenient social scene to university-registered frat parties, or hanging out in university housing (San Francisco is about an hour’s drive away). There IS a very relaxed drug and alcohol policy - it’s sort of a “we trust you to make your own decisions and deal with the consequences” kind of thing. Practically, it’s nice, but the fact that anything rebellious you could do is university-sanctioned sort of makes it feel wierd and sanitized - especially since it’s already sort of a nerdy wannabe version of those crazy things anyway (see above-mentioned social awkwardness).
I guess that sounds negative, but I’m happy I’m there for several reasons:
-It’s been much easier for me to meet people who I really feel that I have a mutual understanding with, than it has been for my friends at state schools.
-I really do think the academics are great, and one nice aspect of the academic hand-holding (did I mention that? There’s a bunch of that) is that you do get a chance to take small classes with awesome professors. I’ve had some morons, to be sure, but on the whole they’re brilliant and they work hard to make themselves accessible.
-At the least, it’s been a very educational experience, in terms of seeing how the next generation of the establishment is created.
-Related to that, there’s the whole name-recognition thing. Although I haven’t been in the job market yet, I have already definitely seen how easily impressed people are by it.
Feel free to ask me anything else - I rarely feel like I get to contribute this much around here!
I’m a hop, skip, and jump away from shimmery and obligated to point out that we’re on Year 4 of a Big Game Winning Streak. 
(see my post in the Professors Say the Darndest Things thread for why)
I love it. We’re pretty sink-or-swim (and I confess to having done my share of both), but most of the people are pretty smart and do more swimming than sinking. The relative-moron thing is a definite problem - no matter what class you take, someone has decided that it’s going to be his life’s work and that he’ll work 30 hours a week on it to blow it out of the water. On the other hand, it’s tremendously rewarding when you manage to keep up. The drugs-and-alcohol thing is even more pronounced - pot is just a tick above jaywalking on the police’s list of priorities, and there are signs up on Telegraph Avenue reminding people that it is officially a drug-free zone.
The only complaints I have are that by the time I figured out what I wanted to do with myself, I had too much momentum going in the direction that I thought I’d wanted to go while I was in high school. Give me a child until he’s fifteen and all that. That’s a more-or-less universal engineering thing rather than a Berkeley thing, though.
All said I’d still come here, but probably under a different major. Cal engineers are great, but the price is the breadth of scholarship that everyone else gets.
Northwestern is typically ranked about 12th to 15th in these things, I think. I didn’t focus on academics as much as I could have, but I managed to learn a lot, scholastically and otherwise. I also found some people I had a lot in common with - there were some ‘types’ there, to be sure - and formed some strong bonds.
I also found that journalism was something I really wanted to do, and I was better in those classes than elsewhere. When my freshman year started, it was my major, but that wasn’t the case. In time, I found aspects of journalism that I liked, and I improved my writing. It was never something I’d really worked on before. And knowing I could hack it at arguably the best journalism program in the States does do something for my confidence when I need it.
I did my MPhil at University of Cambridge… best decision I ever made.
Has opened many, many doors since.
In fact, the first thing my boss said to me when I went to interview was “ah, I see you’re a Darwin man… we used to row against you chaps and win most of the time”.
I commented on his college cufflinks, and how we used to beat Jesus at football, and from then on it was a cosy chat between Old Boys rather than an interview.
I went to Cornell University (graduated in '04). I know there’s a few other Cornellians on the boards - I think Cliffy went there before my time.
Cornell is absolutely beautiful, year-round, in my opinion. It was very isolated, but the town it’s in, Ithaca, has very good restaurants, bookshops, movie theatres.
I was not Greek, which meant my social life was somewhat limited, but that was fine by me: I met some wonderful friends and had a lot of great times. My department was small and very good; I got the advantage of having all the resources of a large research university with the feeling of being in a small liberal arts college. I did very well academically and enjoyed myself at the same time, though I know some of my friends struggled with the weather, the workload, or the social aspects.
Now I am at Oxford, which is also incredible, in a completely different way. It is very intense academically but it really forces you to learn. My college is small and friendly. I’ve got involved in theatre again which has been a blast.
The town of Oxford has its good and bad points but overall I like living here. London being 1.5 hours away isn’t half bad either. I’m so grateful that I have the opportunity to be here and I hope to stay to do more graduate work.
Daphne
Ahem
This thread is about prestigious unversities.
My commiserations for your loss.
I went to Ithaca College as an undergrad. Not known for it’s academic reputation.
I attened Johns Hopkins for grad school with kids who went to MIT, Harvard and other nice places.
I don’t necessarily think those kids got any better of an education as an undergrad. Yeah, the MIT guys had exposure to a lot of crazy stuff, but really, until grad school, I think most educations are pretty much the same.
You do, at least, get a real cocky attitude if you go there it seems, so there’s that. I don’t think you really missed out on anything.
I went to MIT, and loved it. Based on what I’ve seen of other colleges (I attended two grad schools and got to see and teach undergrads, and have been associated with other schools as well), some of the things there are very different – MIT requires more hard science and engineering, even if (as some folks I knew) you weren’t a science or engineering major (It is possible to major in Humanities at MIT). The courses also come in different varieties – generic intro physics, into physics for pre-meds, into physics “for poets”, intro physics “for masochists”. The calculus course was sort of assembly-line (take these six tests at any time during the semester and you pass). Everybody took calculus, chemistry, and physics. And had a selection of required humanities courses.
There was a lot of exposure to weird stuff outside the normal classes, as well – I learned assembly language and how to operate an electron microprobe and did geophysics and biomechanics research outside of normal classes. I don’t recall the range of opportunities there being available at the other schools I’ve been associated with.
Not cheap, though. I was fortunate to have won a scholarship. Everyone I knew there was on some sort of Financial Aid. And it’s much more expensive now.
When I was at Evergreen, it was ranked the top public liberal-arts college in the Northwest. Big fish, small pond and all; Harvard it ain’t.
Daniel
I shan’t mention the boat race, then?
Obviously, this is in reply to e-logic, that bloke from the ‘other place’ - my inferior coding is clearly due to my liberal arts education.
I went to UCSB undergrad, right when it was becoming more accepted as a quality school up there with Cal and UCLA. Great education but I really didn’t enjoy being in a graduating class of 4,000 - I would love to have my kids go to much smaller schools.
For grad school, I went to Kellogg at Northwestern - right when it was ranked #1 for the first time in BusinessWeek magazine - it was ranked #1 for a year or two after that as well. It was a great experience - small, collegial, great access to profs and job opportunities. Business school is basically a finishing trade school for executives - you can learn the same content at pretty much any business school - what differentiates one school from another is the quality of the student body, the quality of the professors and the companies that recruit there. In each case, Kellogg excelled - hence the #1 ranking, I guess. And Evanston is a lovely town with easy access to Chicago - which, while not so lovely, is truly a great, international, cultural city with tons to offer - I love it.
The college I attended might actually be the worst there is. However, I would say the college where I work is VERY prestigious! It’s a specialty school, and among other schools of this specialty it’s really the top. Gets a lot of press these days, too. I’m told that at enrollment events, the lines for students to talk to this school are twice as long as any other and that we turn down more students than the three next best combined. I feel very fortunate to be here even as an hourly employee.
Touche
Which college are you in? My younger brother was at Brasenose, and I lived with a couple of guys from University College last year.
A girlfriend of mine is a former Hildabeast, which she is rarely allowed to forget
I’m at Corpus Christi - in the words of Daniel Webster (referring to Dartmouth, I believe), ‘it is a small college, but there are those that love it’.