Which schools will continue to be the most sought after in the next decade? Which ones will hit a downward trajectory?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:More losers: Woke Seven sisters (excuse me, “siblings”) colleges, aka Smith, Bryn Mawr

+1 slacs are dying anyways.

[Anonymous]

U. Utah will be a major upswing over the next couple of decades.

Reasons?

1. Domestic demographic dividend unlike most states
2. Beautiful location (ski/snowsport access way better than Boulder for example)
3. Cost - very easy to get in-state in Utah after living there for a year
4. Attractive student body
5. Not woke

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Ivy degrees will be the equivalent of state schools in 20 years. The polish is off and they will continue to crumble.

You are delusional. I agree state schools will grow even more in importance but in no future will Wisconsin or Rutgers or Penn State hold as much cachet as Harvard. Dream on!

- State school grad

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:HYPSM will be just fine. Chicago, Rice, Northwestern, etc are not going anywhere.

The Biggest Losers: Dartmouth, Bowdoin, Williams, Amherst, etc. They'll be bitten by the hand that fed them - athletics. These schools will receive the same "woke agenda" accusation as HYP (perhaps correctly), but the second punch is the one that will connect: the many articles that will be coming down the pike about the full pay downhill skiers, sailing, and fencers (etc). These colleges are building classes that are either Pell kids paying zero and St Ann's squash who are paying full fare. That makes for a dysfunctional classroom experience that holds zero appeal to the rest of the world.

Other winners:

The Next Michigan: MN, Iowa, Illinois, Oregon .. basically any flagship with a college town and a football team. (Schools like UCs, UT Austin already in the Michigan category)

Revenge of the Nerds aka "I know what I'm paying for": Purdue, Case, CMU, RPI, WPI, Texas A&M, VT.

Hail Mary: ND but also places like Santa Clara, Loyola Marymount, Gonzaga, Dayton, U of San Diego, Marquette.

I disagree with the point about athletics because I think athletics are what will save these schools from being perceived as uselessly woke. For better or worse, the athletes are the ones that keep the deep ties to Wall Street, IB, etc going at the elite schools. They also bring a group of students to the schools who are perceived as hard workers who aren’t annoying and who can handle hard competition. Basically, the athletics programs bring kids to the schools who don’t melt down when faced an opinion they don’t like, who have been forced to get along with team members whether they like them or not, who can handle losing, and who have a lot of discipline. That’s appealing to many competitive employers and has been for many years.

Now if (say) Amherst College guts its athletics programs, I suspect you will be right about the decline of the school. Turning Amherst into another Reed will not be great for the perception of the school. But right now, athletics is one of the only things that is preserving the reputation of these schools from being seen as producing uselessly woke and out of touch graduates.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Going to take contrarian view: with AI developments I think colleges that attract the future Steve Jobs’ - like a Reed or a St John's, Annapolis will become highly coveted.

Remember, no more coding jobs…the computers will code themselves but how technology and tech integrate into our lives - the way Jobs chose glass over plastic from his class on calligraphy at Reed - will be highly valuable skills: liberal arts for the win.

umm sure ... you should try using chatGPT to write some code sometime

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:HYPSM will be just fine. Chicago, Rice, Northwestern, etc are not going anywhere.

The Biggest Losers: Dartmouth, Bowdoin, Williams, Amherst, etc. They'll be bitten by the hand that fed them - athletics. These schools will receive the same "woke agenda" accusation as HYP (perhaps correctly), but the second punch is the one that will connect: the many articles that will be coming down the pike about the full pay downhill skiers, sailing, and fencers (etc). These colleges are building classes that are either Pell kids paying zero and St Ann's squash who are paying full fare. That makes for a dysfunctional classroom experience that holds zero appeal to the rest of the world.

Other winners:

The Next Michigan: MN, Iowa, Illinois, Oregon .. basically any flagship with a college town and a football team. (Schools like UCs, UT Austin already in the Michigan category)

Revenge of the Nerds aka "I know what I'm paying for": Purdue, Case, CMU, RPI, WPI, Texas A&M, VT.

Hail Mary: ND but also places like Santa Clara, Loyola Marymount, Gonzaga, Dayton, U of San Diego, Marquette.

I disagree with the point about athletics because I think athletics are what will save these schools from being perceived as uselessly woke. For better or worse, the athletes are the ones that keep the deep ties to Wall Street, IB, etc going at the elite schools. They also bring a group of students to the schools who are perceived as hard workers who aren’t annoying and who can handle hard competition. Basically, the athletics programs bring kids to the schools who don’t melt down when faced an opinion they don’t like, who have been forced to get along with team members whether they like them or not, who can handle losing, and who have a lot of discipline. That’s appealing to many competitive employers and has been for many years.

Now if (say) Amherst College guts its athletics programs, I suspect you will be right about the decline of the school. Turning Amherst into another Reed will not be great for the perception of the school. But right now, athletics is one of the only things that is preserving the reputation of these schools from being seen as producing uselessly woke and out of touch graduates.

I find it a huge bonus when schools cut athletics to favor academics. Any school where the highest paid employee is the football coach is kind of a joke.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:HYPSM will be just fine. Chicago, Rice, Northwestern, etc are not going anywhere.

The Biggest Losers: Dartmouth, Bowdoin, Williams, Amherst, etc. They'll be bitten by the hand that fed them - athletics. These schools will receive the same "woke agenda" accusation as HYP (perhaps correctly), but the second punch is the one that will connect: the many articles that will be coming down the pike about the full pay downhill skiers, sailing, and fencers (etc). These colleges are building classes that are either Pell kids paying zero and St Ann's squash who are paying full fare. That makes for a dysfunctional classroom experience that holds zero appeal to the rest of the world.

Other winners:

The Next Michigan: MN, Iowa, Illinois, Oregon .. basically any flagship with a college town and a football team. (Schools like UCs, UT Austin already in the Michigan category)

Revenge of the Nerds aka "I know what I'm paying for": Purdue, Case, CMU, RPI, WPI, Texas A&M, VT.

Hail Mary: ND but also places like Santa Clara, Loyola Marymount, Gonzaga, Dayton, U of San Diego, Marquette.

I disagree with the point about athletics because I think athletics are what will save these schools from being perceived as uselessly woke. For better or worse, the athletes are the ones that keep the deep ties to Wall Street, IB, etc going at the elite schools. They also bring a group of students to the schools who are perceived as hard workers who aren’t annoying and who can handle hard competition. Basically, the athletics programs bring kids to the schools who don’t melt down when faced an opinion they don’t like, who have been forced to get along with team members whether they like them or not, who can handle losing, and who have a lot of discipline. That’s appealing to many competitive employers and has been for many years.

Now if (say) Amherst College guts its athletics programs, I suspect you will be right about the decline of the school. Turning Amherst into another Reed will not be great for the perception of the school. But right now, athletics is one of the only things that is preserving the reputation of these schools from being seen as producing uselessly woke and out of touch graduates.

I find it a huge bonus when schools cut athletics to favor academics. Any school where the highest paid employee is the football coach is kind of a joke.

Okay, but you aren’t a Wall St or IB hiring manager. And in no world does a college like Amherst have the highest paid employee be the football coach anyhow. The athletes at Amherst, Williams, etc are smart kids who have the added bonus of generally not being annoying and who have proof of being good team players. Regardless of what DCUM thinks, the fact remains that’s an attractive combination for highly competitive employers, especially in a world where employers are worried about uselessly woke new hires.

There is a reason the Ivy League started life as an athletic conference. There has long been a pipeline from Ivy athletics to super-competitive jobs.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:HYPSM will be just fine. Chicago, Rice, Northwestern, etc are not going anywhere.

The Biggest Losers: Dartmouth, Bowdoin, Williams, Amherst, etc. They'll be bitten by the hand that fed them - athletics. These schools will receive the same "woke agenda" accusation as HYP (perhaps correctly), but the second punch is the one that will connect: the many articles that will be coming down the pike about the full pay downhill skiers, sailing, and fencers (etc). These colleges are building classes that are either Pell kids paying zero and St Ann's squash who are paying full fare. That makes for a dysfunctional classroom experience that holds zero appeal to the rest of the world.

Other winners:

The Next Michigan: MN, Iowa, Illinois, Oregon .. basically any flagship with a college town and a football team. (Schools like UCs, UT Austin already in the Michigan category)

Revenge of the Nerds aka "I know what I'm paying for": Purdue, Case, CMU, RPI, WPI, Texas A&M, VT.

Hail Mary: ND but also places like Santa Clara, Loyola Marymount, Gonzaga, Dayton, U of San Diego, Marquette.

I disagree with the point about athletics because I think athletics are what will save these schools from being perceived as uselessly woke. For better or worse, the athletes are the ones that keep the deep ties to Wall Street, IB, etc going at the elite schools. They also bring a group of students to the schools who are perceived as hard workers who aren’t annoying and who can handle hard competition. Basically, the athletics programs bring kids to the schools who don’t melt down when faced an opinion they don’t like, who have been forced to get along with team members whether they like them or not, who can handle losing, and who have a lot of discipline. That’s appealing to many competitive employers and has been for many years.

Now if (say) Amherst College guts its athletics programs, I suspect you will be right about the decline of the school. Turning Amherst into another Reed will not be great for the perception of the school. But right now, athletics is one of the only things that is preserving the reputation of these schools from being seen as producing uselessly woke and out of touch graduates.

I'm sure I speak for a lot of people when I say: this is not my experience with younger millennial or gen z athletes who have joined our company, possibly because colleges athletics are not really team sports. I mean, sure, the squash team is a "team" but it was every person for themselves to get ranked high enough to be a full pay Williams squash player and now you're going through the motions til you can quit junior year. A football player from Illinois or a woman's soccer player ND? Sure. A nordic ski person from Bowdoin? You think they're not annoying? Are you f'n kidding me?

We were hybrid forever - and basically still are. I hope being in the office for the sake of face time never comes back. But some of these kids do not get it, they are really not reliably there, the work isn't done, they are zooming into important meetings from the car. I thought the entitlement was off the charts for older millennials, but omg please let us never hire another sailing team member.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:HYPSM will be just fine. Chicago, Rice, Northwestern, etc are not going anywhere.

The Biggest Losers: Dartmouth, Bowdoin, Williams, Amherst, etc. They'll be bitten by the hand that fed them - athletics. These schools will receive the same "woke agenda" accusation as HYP (perhaps correctly), but the second punch is the one that will connect: the many articles that will be coming down the pike about the full pay downhill skiers, sailing, and fencers (etc). These colleges are building classes that are either Pell kids paying zero and St Ann's squash who are paying full fare. That makes for a dysfunctional classroom experience that holds zero appeal to the rest of the world.

Other winners:

The Next Michigan: MN, Iowa, Illinois, Oregon .. basically any flagship with a college town and a football team. (Schools like UCs, UT Austin already in the Michigan category)

Revenge of the Nerds aka "I know what I'm paying for": Purdue, Case, CMU, RPI, WPI, Texas A&M, VT.

Hail Mary: ND but also places like Santa Clara, Loyola Marymount, Gonzaga, Dayton, U of San Diego, Marquette.

I disagree with the point about athletics because I think athletics are what will save these schools from being perceived as uselessly woke. For better or worse, the athletes are the ones that keep the deep ties to Wall Street, IB, etc going at the elite schools. They also bring a group of students to the schools who are perceived as hard workers who aren’t annoying and who can handle hard competition. Basically, the athletics programs bring kids to the schools who don’t melt down when faced an opinion they don’t like, who have been forced to get along with team members whether they like them or not, who can handle losing, and who have a lot of discipline. That’s appealing to many competitive employers and has been for many years.

Now if (say) Amherst College guts its athletics programs, I suspect you will be right about the decline of the school. Turning Amherst into another Reed will not be great for the perception of the school. But right now, athletics is one of the only things that is preserving the reputation of these schools from being seen as producing uselessly woke and out of touch graduates.

I'm sure I speak for a lot of people when I say: this is not my experience with younger millennial or gen z athletes who have joined our company, possibly because colleges athletics are not really team sports. I mean, sure, the squash team is a "team" but it was every person for themselves to get ranked high enough to be a full pay Williams squash player and now you're going through the motions til you can quit junior year. A football player from Illinois or a woman's soccer player ND? Sure. A nordic ski person from Bowdoin? You think they're not annoying? Are you f'n kidding me?

We were hybrid forever - and basically still are. I hope being in the office for the sake of face time never comes back. But some of these kids do not get it, they are really not reliably there, the work isn't done, they are zooming into important meetings from the car. I thought the entitlement was off the charts for older millennials, but omg please let us never hire another sailing team member.

+1 maybe I'm not the target audience but OMG, if many (most?) of the "student athletes" I know aren't the most annoying, self-important d*cks ever...

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:HYPSM will be just fine. Chicago, Rice, Northwestern, etc are not going anywhere.

The Biggest Losers: Dartmouth, Bowdoin, Williams, Amherst, etc. They'll be bitten by the hand that fed them - athletics. These schools will receive the same "woke agenda" accusation as HYP (perhaps correctly), but the second punch is the one that will connect: the many articles that will be coming down the pike about the full pay downhill skiers, sailing, and fencers (etc). These colleges are building classes that are either Pell kids paying zero and St Ann's squash who are paying full fare. That makes for a dysfunctional classroom experience that holds zero appeal to the rest of the world.

Other winners:

The Next Michigan: MN, Iowa, Illinois, Oregon .. basically any flagship with a college town and a football team. (Schools like UCs, UT Austin already in the Michigan category)

Revenge of the Nerds aka "I know what I'm paying for": Purdue, Case, CMU, RPI, WPI, Texas A&M, VT.

Hail Mary: ND but also places like Santa Clara, Loyola Marymount, Gonzaga, Dayton, U of San Diego, Marquette.

I disagree with the point about athletics because I think athletics are what will save these schools from being perceived as uselessly woke. For better or worse, the athletes are the ones that keep the deep ties to Wall Street, IB, etc going at the elite schools. They also bring a group of students to the schools who are perceived as hard workers who aren’t annoying and who can handle hard competition. Basically, the athletics programs bring kids to the schools who don’t melt down when faced an opinion they don’t like, who have been forced to get along with team members whether they like them or not, who can handle losing, and who have a lot of discipline. That’s appealing to many competitive employers and has been for many years.

Now if (say) Amherst College guts its athletics programs, I suspect you will be right about the decline of the school. Turning Amherst into another Reed will not be great for the perception of the school. But right now, athletics is one of the only things that is preserving the reputation of these schools from being seen as producing uselessly woke and out of touch graduates.

if you have a lot of experience losing, you don't get into these schools based on your squash rankings. they picked squash because the competition is low and they've been privately coached at the Brooklyn heights casino so they've never had to handle .. what's this you call .. "losing".

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:HYPSM will be just fine. Chicago, Rice, Northwestern, etc are not going anywhere.

The Biggest Losers: Dartmouth, Bowdoin, Williams, Amherst, etc. They'll be bitten by the hand that fed them - athletics. These schools will receive the same "woke agenda" accusation as HYP (perhaps correctly), but the second punch is the one that will connect: the many articles that will be coming down the pike about the full pay downhill skiers, sailing, and fencers (etc). These colleges are building classes that are either Pell kids paying zero and St Ann's squash who are paying full fare. That makes for a dysfunctional classroom experience that holds zero appeal to the rest of the world.

Other winners:

The Next Michigan: MN, Iowa, Illinois, Oregon .. basically any flagship with a college town and a football team. (Schools like UCs, UT Austin already in the Michigan category)

Revenge of the Nerds aka "I know what I'm paying for": Purdue, Case, CMU, RPI, WPI, Texas A&M, VT.

Hail Mary: ND but also places like Santa Clara, Loyola Marymount, Gonzaga, Dayton, U of San Diego, Marquette.

I disagree with the point about athletics because I think athletics are what will save these schools from being perceived as uselessly woke. For better or worse, the athletes are the ones that keep the deep ties to Wall Street, IB, etc going at the elite schools. They also bring a group of students to the schools who are perceived as hard workers who aren’t annoying and who can handle hard competition. Basically, the athletics programs bring kids to the schools who don’t melt down when faced an opinion they don’t like, who have been forced to get along with team members whether they like them or not, who can handle losing, and who have a lot of discipline. That’s appealing to many competitive employers and has been for many years.

Now if (say) Amherst College guts its athletics programs, I suspect you will be right about the decline of the school. Turning Amherst into another Reed will not be great for the perception of the school. But right now, athletics is one of the only things that is preserving the reputation of these schools from being seen as producing uselessly woke and out of touch graduates.

I find it a huge bonus when schools cut athletics to favor academics. Any school where the highest paid employee is the football coach is kind of a joke.

Okay, but you aren’t a Wall St or IB hiring manager. And in no world does a college like Amherst have the highest paid employee be the football coach anyhow. The athletes at Amherst, Williams, etc are smart kids who have the added bonus of generally not being annoying and who have proof of being good team players. Regardless of what DCUM thinks, the fact remains that’s an attractive combination for highly competitive employers, especially in a world where employers are worried about uselessly woke new hires.

There is a reason the Ivy League started life as an athletic conference. There has long been a pipeline from Ivy athletics to super-competitive jobs.

Yes and Yes to the bolded. I work for and have recruited for one of those employers. Do we now hire more broadly? Yes, we do. But who is still the definition of a top candidate for us? An Amherst or Yale athlete with top GPA and demonstrated extracurricular leadership. Everybody is still fighting for these kids and they get scooped up. So I don’t know what most of you are talking about in terms of the decline of these schools. I don’t see it from where I sit.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:State flagships will be popular. Particularly the Honors programs.

A lot of Ivies will decline in popularity. Particularly Harvard and Yale. They'll be regarded as rich kid and DEI schools, and not taken seriously for undergrad.

Schools going up will be the other major privates - Duke, Vanderbilt, Rice, Northwestern. And some publics like Michigan, Berkeley, and UCLA. MIT will continue to be regarded as the best school in America. Stanford will do fine.

Among SLACS, no real change. Amherst, Williams, and Bowdoin

There will be more interest in the academies. West Point and Annapolis will be roughly equal. Then Air Force.

Not a lot of change. Except in the Ivy League. Harvard, Yale, Penn, Brown, and Columbia are declining institutions. Princeton and Cornell will do fine

+ 1 though I disagree about Princeton. They posses the same woke issues as Harvard. It just hasn't been as widely publicized.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:In general I think there will be a push to schools perceived as fun but with good educational rigor. The northeast schools will drop because they are perceived as grim grinds filled with backstabbing, unfriendly people. Political moderation will be appealing. I think this generation of kids, who suffered through covid, has little patience for schools where, fair or not, there is a perception of tolerance of drama queens and waste of education. This will also go with an increasing demand for good ROI.

Excessive drama, misery, and petulance is headed out, solid education, fun, and good ROI is in.

So kids weren't interested in schools that were fun before recently? And plenty of drama and backstabbing in the Southern sorority scene.

They were, but schools in the northeast used to be a lot more fun because there was more personality variety in who they attracted. They used to attract the population that made campuses come alive: the quirky geniuses, the smart frat and sorority kids, the theater kids who had the time in HS to really perfect their craft, etc. But those kids often don’t have the mid-career project management skills that getting perfect GPAs in a test-minimizing environment along with the requisite resume-polishing now requires. So these schools are instead filled with grim armies of Tracy Flicks who don’t understand what “fun” even means.

Have you been on the campus of some of these schools recently? What’s remarkable is how silent they are. It’s like walking through a library, but outside. It’s outright depressing and for some bright kids, that’s not going to be appealing no matter how shiny the name is.

Yikes - what schools are you talking about? My DD is a hs freshman and I want to avoid this type of atmosphere.

[Anonymous]

If you don't see the problem with a sailing director who gets to weigh in on admissions applications, then I think we've gone to the other side.

It used to be true that athetlics was a boost in job hunting, but there are limits to that. I'd rather hire students who have mounted a musical - managing the construction of sets and lights and actors - or been the part of an orchestra or been an RA than a kid from the ski team. Being on the ski team shows me nothing. And I participated in club sports all through college and would encourage my kids to do the same.

I dont think athletics are going away, but pull up Middlebury's sports programs and I think together we could cut a third of it and the campus would be better off.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:State flagships will be popular. Particularly the Honors programs.

A lot of Ivies will decline in popularity. Particularly Harvard and Yale. They'll be regarded as rich kid and DEI schools, and not taken seriously for undergrad.

Schools going up will be the other major privates - Duke, Vanderbilt, Rice, Northwestern. And some publics like Michigan, Berkeley, and UCLA. MIT will continue to be regarded as the best school in America. Stanford will do fine.

Among SLACS, no real change. Amherst, Williams, and Bowdoin

There will be more interest in the academies. West Point and Annapolis will be roughly equal. Then Air Force.

Not a lot of change. Except in the Ivy League. Harvard, Yale, Penn, Brown, and Columbia are declining institutions. Princeton and Cornell will do fine

+ 1 though I disagree about Princeton. They posses the same woke issues as Harvard. It just hasn't been as widely publicized.

+1

This is SO true. My niece is there and she laughs when people talk about Harvard and Yale as woke and exclude Princeton. She says it’s exactly the same.