Are you responding to yourself? |
| It’s not prestigious if nobody has heard of it. |
| I don't recall WashU being viewed as prestigious when I was in HS, so that affects my view -- see the thread on what schools were not selective in the 90s/early 2000s but are now. |
I'm from the midwest, and it was somewhat prestigious in the 90s. Not as prestigious as UChicago, but definitely on my radar when I was applying to colleges. |
So you're just old. Anyway you all can hold onto ivy prestige as long as you want to, but the rest of the world isn't. You can tell by grad school rankings and placement in finance, ivy schools like Brown have fallen behind Emory, Vandy etc. WashU isn't far behind them. The government and media are against the ivys, it's inevitable at this point. |
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Prestige is a funny thing. For most grad school admissions and employment opportunities, WashU will serve your child well, although there are programs such as engineering at Cornell that are substantially stronger than WashU.
Nonetheless, I do think that Ivy branding is real and gives you a second chance to impress someone when they fail to recognize the name of your school. You can simply follow up with "it's an Ivy." If you want prestige and name recognition, go to an Ivy. Plus, you can refer to yourself or your kid as an "Ivy Leaguer." Now that sounds prestigious. I still remember a professor at my decidedly non-prestigious West Coast university bragging to me that his son had graduated from Williams. When he realized that it failed to register with me, he explained that it was "essentially an Ivy, like Harvard." I remember thinking to myself: why didn't the kid just go to Harvard? No knock on Williams or WashingtonU, but general name recognition and branding are important if you want to be sure that people recognize prestige. I'm not sure WashingtonU has enough of this if prestige is your goal. |
| Nobody heard of Nvidia and its CEO--and now it's one of the Magnificent 7. |
| Hopkins is a great comparison. Both schools are best known for their medical schools and are in cities that may not be as attractive to college kids. Both also lack the name recognition outside of their regions that schools of similar rank have. Hopkins doesn't have the Washington name issue, which is a real thing outside or certain circles. |
How about Northwestern? Is it a step higher in term of pre-med? |
Great logic. Tom Hanks went to a community college, so going to a community college is a great way to become a movie star. |
| some schools just cannot overcome their location |
You just proved a great point about prestige; context matters. You had no reason to be impressed, as a student you didn’t matter. But his actual peers would be impressed by Williams and that would be where it might matter. |
Northwestern leans more toward arts/music and communication/journalism. It is probably one or several steps lower in terms of pre-med. Not that there's anything wrong with that. |
It is not prestigious now either |
| Huge difference. No comparison. I grew up outside the USA and no one there has heard of Vanderbilt or Wash U |