Anonymous wrote:What one worries about is related to the circumstances and size of one's life. There's always something, right?

It seems so, but there are rational things and irrational things. This is irrational.

What one worries about is related to the circumstances and size of one's life. There's always something, right?

84.3%

The things white peoples worry about.

Because they include peer opinions, one would hope that people in the education business might have a better clue than the general public as to why they respect their peer institutions.
I would say that Harvard is the most generally known but it strikes me as correct that peer assessment recognizes that Princeton with it's smaller class sizes and grading policies deserves the number one spot for quality of undergraduate. I think that generally people also get undergraduate quality really confused with graduate reputations. BTW - Nobody in my family has been to either school.

Prestige is likely most relevant to ease the path for career and graduate school opportunities. It's so subjective and school reputations can work for or against an individual depending on the circumstances. I do believe however that the top 10-20 schools can confer a degree of screening that employers seek dependent on the industry, especially their HR departments. For example, a degree from Cornell's hotel program means HR will answer your call. It's also important in industries that want to present gold stamped resumes to potential clients e.g. ...law, banking, consulting.

Bottom line is that for examples above, the US news rankings is widely followed. One can denigrate it for many reasons, some accurate, but to what purpose? It's like saying one doesn't believe in Consumer Reports but you would be in the minority so why bother. One doesn't have it buy into using it or perceived prestige for personal decisions.

Anonymous wrote:U.S. News and the Common App have ruined college admissions.

Care to elaborate?

U.S. News and the Common App have ruined college admissions.

U.S. News is a failure at the news business. It's opinions are those of a failure.

if you care about this you are doing something wrong

Another day, another thread about arbitrary college prestige. Ugh.

As a tool for deciding on the best school for a student, US News rankings are just as unreliable as the notion of prestige.

Everyone is going to have their own personal opinions and biases that are completely unmoored from reality because they don't really know what they're talking about.

Agree that this is an inane question.

Anonymous wrote:How would you measure 'actual' prestige?

This seems silly.

You obviously can't actually measure it, but I think most would say that Harvard is the #1 most prestigious school in the country, despite US News ranking it below Princeton.

How would you measure 'actual' prestige?

This seems silly.

It seems to me that the US News rankings does not always align itself with what most people would consider the top schools to be, based on general prestige. An example is that Berkeley and Emory are both tied at 21. I would bet that most of the population is a lot more familiar with Berkeley and that it carries a bigger wow factor among the general population than Emory. How much correlation do you think the rankings have with overall name recognition and prestige that the colleges carry with the overall population?