I agree. Harvard and Yale, in terms of social cachet, are well above Princeton. And while MIT gives you credentials in the scientific and tech world, it won’t give you the social standing of having gone to Harvard or Yale.
Really? I consider a diploma factory to be a place like the University of Miami: a playground for rich kids with a C average from the East Coast.
For the record I did not attend college so this is going skewer my view on what is “elite”.
I agree with Harvard and Yale being perceived as the two best colleges in the country. I think MIT and Cal Tech would be ranked above them in among certain segments of the population(the “nerd/geek” subculture for example). Me ,personally, I am really not impressed by where a person went to college because a lot of the people I know with college degrees don’t seem to be as smart as you think they would be.
I don’t think a lot of people hold the U.S. military academies in high regard. Though my view is somewhat skewed because everyone I know who was in the military were enlisted personnel and they mostly had a pretty negative view of the commissioned officers.
The military academies offer a limited set of Bachelor degrees, no advanced degrees. They generally don’t rank very high (if at all) on lists of the best universities, not because their graduates don’t have any competencies, but the main competencies are specialized (military) and aren’t easy to compare to other degrees.
Though my personal experience is that the Air Force Academy is (comparatively among the academies) quite good at STEM and even has a little bit of research that passes muster for inclusion in scientific conferences.
Curious, why not?
Vanderbilt and Rice, both trying to claim the moniker Harvard of the South
Another definition of an elite school is one that mysteriously works its way into the first three minutes of conversation with an alumnus.
Weather? We used to have weather like that at Harvard!
Indeed, the military academies are very tough to get into, and while they do have some prestige, it seems that this prestige doesn’t necessarily come from the education itself, and I don’t think of them in terms of being “elite colleges.”
Anything that is the “something of the something” isn’t really the anything of the anything.
I’m from Canada and there’s been a bunch of navel gazing about ‘elite’ schools since the cheating scandal came out down south.
Basically, Canadians are FAR more likely to say, “WHAT did you study?” over “WHERE did you study?” than Americans. I think I like this about us.
I guess that can be partway credited to the fact that we only have 15-20 universities that really matter. Really, McGill in the only real ‘elite’ school up here. Everything else is basically varying levels of pretty good, so it’s no big deal to go to UBC over the U of A or whatever.
Of the universities I pay attention to globally, McGill isn’t on my radar. I’d put University of Toronto and even UBC ahead of McGill.
If you’re talking engineering, the only school that I would put anywhere near the proximity of MIT, is the School of Mines, in Golden CO.
Probably because I got into USC, but didn’t get into Stanford or Berkeley. And I didn’t apply to any ivy leagues ,but highly doubt any of them would have accepted me.
Makes sense to me why a rich parent would bribe someone so they’d have the prestige of bragging that their kid went to Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Berkeley, etc…but bribing someone so your kid can get into USC or San Diego State or Cal State Fullerton is much harder to understand.
Yeah I’m going to say the academies are a completely different animal and hard to be even put into this conversation. They are elite in that you have to be appointed, enrollment is small, and competition is fierce. There are multiple degree programs and they are not military based. Of course they also received extensive military training.
It’s a well-known shibboleth that Harvard graduates never say the word ”Harvard” in situations like this. Instead they work in phrases like “I went to school in Boston.”
Fight On!
I would say it is certainly elite for Business, Medicine and Film. Miles beyond San Diego or Fullerton or that place across town.
We Johns Hopkins grads are required to correct anyone who calls it John Hopkins. Of course the only way to find out if they know how to pronounce it correctly is to tell them that we went to Hopkins, and hope they respond by saying John Hopkins so we can correct them. Or saying Johns so we can congratulate them.
A burdensome duty, really. But it is required.
Lord help then if they’re a vegan or do Crossfit.
I always say that I went to the good school in Cambridge.
When I was in high school, we heard that our math teacher had gone to Yale, so someone asked him. He only said that he went to a “small liberal arts school in New Haven”.