Which schools do you think are elite colleges and universities.
This is a knee jerk reaction. Your perception of the school as a whole. Not your specialized knowledge of what schools are good in your field. No checking rankings online. No fighting the hypothetical. What schools would change “Good for you, you got a degree” into “Wow you graduated from XXX University.” Again this is perception not how they may actually be. There are probably many better schools that don’t have as much hype. Remember the criteria is elite not well respected. I’m only putting down US schools because that’s what I know.
All of the Ivy League
MIT
Stanford
Duke
Caltech
Johns Hopkins (medical school)
University of Chicago
Duke is literally ranked 8 in the nation–ahead of 4/8 Ivys.
Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Stanford are their own set. Admissions to those is a different game, and they have cache that none of the others do. Once you expand that circle even a little, it gets messy–every school you add suggests on that’s ALMOST as elite, and there’s no place to draw a line–it’s a spectrum. If I add Columbia, does that mean I need to include Duke? If we have Columbia and Duke, how can we say Johns Hopkins is NOT on the list? And if you do that, honestly . . . and it just goes on like that.
So much of this is regional. Rice is prestigious everywhere, but it’s MORE prestigious in the West. Certainly more prestigious than the lesser Ivys (Cornell, Dartmouth, Brown). Notre Dame is more elite in the Midwest. Berkeley is not seen as “almost Stanford” outside of California, though it is certainly well-known. Then there’s the LACs–among people who know, Middlebury and Williams and Bowdoin and Amherst say a LOT about who you are and what your background likely is like–but there’s others that have never heard of them. I’d honestly put CalTech in that same boat: if you know about tech at all, you understand what it is, but lots of people don’t.
Outside of the Big 5, I don’t think it’s a think you can define.
I’m not sure I’d include the entire Ivy League. Harvard, Yale, Princeton and probably Dartmouth for sure, though.
My definition would be a school difficult to get into which provides graduates with a halo effect - in other words non-grads think graduates are extra-smart and/or talented.
I don’t deal in halos. I run technology development across a broad portfolio and I only care about results. Fast talking and flash doesn’t survive the interview process.
In STEM, elite universities turn out graduates across a broad range of STEM areas that consistently arrive as impact employees. Little training required, short learning curve. At the PhD level, they arrive as “the smartest person in the room” and solve important problems as soon as they have a desk and computer.
At the elite level, there are schools that are consistently excellent across the board (Stanford, MIT, Caltech, Berkeley are examples that come to mind) and there are universities that are very good across the board but achieve greatness only in select fields (Carnegie Mellon, UCLA, UCSB, Purdue, Georgia Tech, Rice, Columbia, Cornell, University of Colorado at Boulder, etc.)
Don’t get me wrong, there are excellent students at a lot of good universities who can also show up as impact players. But the consistency (outside of specific graduates from specific professors) is not as good.
And even mediocre schools can turn out employees that turn into gems. It’s just that a fair amount of polishing is necessary.
Internationally, I’d add ETH Zurich, Imperial College, Delft, and Twente to the list.
The halo effect is going to vary depending on what field of study you’re talking about. For decades Michigan State had an outstanding reputation for agricultural studies, the University of Missouri for journalism, Cornell for hospitality management, etc. While their graduates were highly desired in those fields, it didn’t necessarily translate to any better reputation in general.
Acceptance rate is only one factor, but the list of top schools based on that shows some interesting variation.
For example, Julliard is extremely prestigious but in a narrow field. I’d consider it elite. The military academies have very low acceptance rates but I’m not sure that is a measure of elite status.
Yeah, there are several I’d consider elite in specific fields. Georgetown Law, for example. Johns Hopkins International Relations.
I advise parents and kids on college all the time in terms of bang-for-buck and evaluating funding. I’ve always maintained that there are very few schools worth paying a premium for. If your kid isn’t going to a truly elite school the kid’ll do just as well to go to a cheap state school - possibly doing bonehead courses at a local community or tech school - and move on.
Because the simple fact is that, two years after the kid gets a bachelor’s degree, no one will care where it came from unless it was truly elite. Even then it better be a springboard to an elite graduate school. To (mis)quote Robert Heinlein, “Albert Einstein with a bachelor’s from Harvard will wash bottles for Joe Thumbfingers if Thumbfingers has a Masters or PhD from a decent school.”
My oldest just went through the process last year. She was pretty highly recruited but also unfocused on what she wanted to do. We visited a bunch of schools but she choose Roanoke College in Virginia. It’s a decent school and she’s got a 92% ride there and she’s already got a research assistantship and will be presenting a paper as a freshman at a conference this summer. She’d never get the assistance nor the opportunities at a school higher up in the rankings.
In my old field of petroleum engineering Colorado School of Mines, UT & TAMU are the three best in the world. Generally any thing geotechnical Mines is world renowned but if it doesn’t go in the ground or come out of the ground they are just good. But probably only quarter of the school is only good instead of world class.
Specialty schools should count UC Davis is an amazing AG school and has a huge halo effect as long as you’re dealing with plants or animals. I’ll be interviewing there in the fall to hire an oenoligist and I know now they’ll have had a world class education that is better than any one as Cal Tech or Stanford or Cal. Unless you’re running for public office and just need code for smart most people are looking at a small pool of schools that teach what they need.
If it’s just the perceptions of the general public then remove University of Chicago. Duke only makes the list from maintaining name recognition through basketball.
I don’t know how the Seven Sisters are thought of these days. They used to be considered the Ivy League for women.
The term elite (for colleges and universities) has always just made me think of private schools with really high tuition. Especially the ones where you can get in by family connections even with a weak application.
So any University of [State] doesn’t strike me as “elite,” regardless of the difficulty of acceptance to the school.
I don’t think most people would even recognize the term Seven Sisters. I heard of the term but had to click the link to see which schools it referred to. The Ivy League is now the Ivy League for women.
I disagree about Duke. I know as just a dumb muggle I would be impressed if someone was accepted to Duke law or medical school.
