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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Williams is a much more prestigious school and the clear choice unless you don’t want to be in rural MA. And wanting to be in a vibrant city instead of rural MA is totally valid![/quote]
Ask people overseas, which of these two had they likely heard of....?[/quote]
Oh, oh, I can answer this! (I work in higher ed, often the field of international recruitment at my school and am unaffiliated with either Williams or Georgetown.)

The answer is, the vast majority of internationals have heard of neither. Internationals know of research-focused Ivies, Ivy+'s, and massive research public schools like Berkeley, UCLA, Michigan, Washington, and Illinois. Outside of international schools, they know very little about LACs, but they also know little about pre-professional schools like Georgetown, which isn't even ranked in the top 300 in the QS rankings (https://www.topuniversities.com/universities/georgetown-university) or top 500 in the Shanghai rankings (https://www.shanghairanking.com/rankings/arwu/2024).[/quote]

Good. So they are on the same level of prestige in this sense, or the same level of lacking of it, not one is more prestigious than the other...[/quote]
PP here. I personally think that the top 25-ish universities and top 10-ish LACs are all great schools and that decisions should be made on fit and program, not ranking or prestige. I went to a T20 research giant but one of my kids goes to a WASP school. They are both great in different ways.

For international students who plan to return to their country after graduation, the traditional thinking is that international prestige matters. So a school like Washington may have more cachet in India than, say, Dartmouth or Williams. But I think this may be changing a little. I visited some very prestigious international schools in Shanghai earlier this year, where the median SAT is around 1500 (keeping in mind that 98% of the students speak English as a second language). They often have photos and descriptions of the colleges where the prior graduating class matriculated, and I was surprised at many LACs were listed (rough guess: ~15-20%). And one of Korea's most prestigious international scholarships (Kwanjeong) is offered for Korean students studying in 15 elite U.S. colleges, which includes HYPSM but also WASP. It doesn't include Dartmouth, Cornell, or Duke. [/quote]

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