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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]People who insist upon situating LACs in opposition to universities reveal their ignorance and/or lack of intelligence. No one--neither classmates, nor parents nor faculty--at my Ivy feeder alma mater would have blinked an eye at anyone choosing, say, Williams over Yale (and some of my classmates ended up at an Ivy precisely because they didn't get accepted to, say, Amherst or Swarthmore), in no small part because they were wise enough to understand that the value of these schools is in the quality of education and opportunities they offer and that on those grounds, any differences between them were negligible because anyone "worth" impressing would recognize the value of all of these schools. Plenty of students at my LAC chose it over an Ivy or Stanford. Those in my social circles--people who by and large have attended "top" schools--would think very poorly of anyone who insisted that WUSTL was better than Bowdoin just because the former is a university ranked in the top 20. More than a few of my friends who graduated from Ivies have observed that, as with any school, fit matters for those who have the luxury of choosing where to matriculate based upon metrics other than finances. [/quote]
I agree with most everything you say. But at the same time (for mainly all the wrong reasons, with the exception of the crazy athlete proportions at SLACs), there has been [b]a moderate prestige shift in the past decade[/b] or two away from SLACs and towards national universities. The reality, unfortunately, is that a smaller proportion of kids at top SLACs chose it over the top Ivys than in your time. To be sure, nobody blinks an eye these days at someone choosing, say, Swarthmore over Penn, or Williams over Brown. But Amherst over Harvard? Not so sure. [/quote]
According to whom? Do you have a source? I think so much depends, as a PP alluded to above, on your social/class/economic circles. For better or for worse, in "elite" prep school circles there has been little if any change in perception of prestige that I've noticed over the last forty years. The only major shift that I can think that would affect changes in perception of prestige would be due to the masses who rely too heavily on social media for information. [/quote]

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