How do the average American distinguish college prestige?

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notthegoatseguy@reddit

Outside of a handful of fields or like...right after college, nobody really cares as long as your degree is from an accredited institution.

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walterbernardjr@reddit

Eh I think people recognize schools in the top 50 as “good” and that probably always earns you a small edge. But yeah more or less nobody really cares.

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Purple_Peanut6683@reddit

Pretty came here to say that. If your degree isn’t from Harvard or Yale or something like that, nobody cares where you went to college.

That being said, the handful of guys I worked with who graduated from Harvard made sure that everyone knew they went to Harvard. They were total douches and weren’t any better at their job than the rest of us who didn’t get a fancy Harvard degree.

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lonelygayPhD@reddit

"I went to a school in Boston."

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Nimbus20000620@reddit

“No not tufts”

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Guernica616@reddit

30 rock in the wild.

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fat-lip-lover@reddit

I love it every time I see it.

"Wesleyan is the Harvard of Central Connecticut!"

"YALE is the Harvard of Central Connecticut, Criss."

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chiefreef1221@reddit

Shoutout BU!

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rufflesinc@reddit

One of the annoying things if you went to a flag ship state university is making it clear to went there and not one of the lesser campuses.

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Charlesinrichmond@reddit

just outside Boston

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PavicaMalic@reddit

New Haven, otoh, is obvious. Though if someone is Catholic, it could possibly be Albertus Magnus.

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Charlesinrichmond@reddit

no one goes to school in new haven. Its "a small college in CT". NH is if the questions continue

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On_my_last_spoon@reddit

I’ve never heard anyone who went to Yale ever be coy about it. They usually take any opportunity to sprinkle it into conversation.

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Charlesinrichmond@reddit

depends very much on context. Lets say I have an N of thousands. In appropriate context it's straight up. Inappropriate and it gets weird reactions

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AndrasKrigare@reddit

I think there's making a 30 Rock reference https://youtu.be/REzs9J_nMTs?si=ZnwGNEATDRAuT1v6

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PavicaMalic@reddit

That joke predates 30Rock. It was in National Lampoon (which is a spinoff of the Harvard Lampoon).

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lonelygayPhD@reddit

Oh no, I'm from MA and have had the game of Harvard grads playing coy until they finally get to say they went to Harvard.

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CorrectingQueen@reddit

"Cambridge"

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thejt10000@reddit

"Just outside Boston"

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ElectromagneticRam@reddit

Oh, are you British?

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BottleStrength@reddit

No, the trade school down the river.

Let’s see who known that one.

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Charlesinrichmond@reddit

in the old Wellesley saying, where the odds are good but the goods are odd

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BottleStrength@reddit

FACT CHECK: True!

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Charlesinrichmond@reddit

cosine secant tangent sine 3.14159

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is5416@reddit

Mike’s Institute of Trucking? Great place.

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Startled_Pancakes@reddit

Krusty's Clown College

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HerefortheTuna@reddit

Fraud!

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Swampy1741@reddit

“Well, just outside of Boston”

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RoosterzRevenge@reddit

A&M guys will let you know, even if it's just tapping their ring. The A&M network is for real.

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grayjey@reddit

You go to an Ivy League for the networking, not the curriculum or learning

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Satisest@reddit

So uninformed lol

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TeaNo4541@reddit

Somebody had to graduate bottom of the class at Harvard.

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WowsrsBowsrsTrousrs@reddit

Half of all graduates are below average.

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TeaNo4541@reddit

Actually, they’re below median.

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Satisest@reddit

Minor detail: half are at or below the median

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Satisest@reddit

Half are below the median. Not necessarily below the average.

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dragonflamehotness@reddit

Most people going to ivies are pretty normal. There's geniuses and dumbasses everywhere. I'm sure most people would be surprised at the amount of unflushed toilets at Ivy league dorms.

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Stratiform@reddit

I've always respected the schools with high acceptance rates and moderate graduation rates the most. These are typical your land grand and "State" schools. They're every bit as good as the sports-popular public schools and unsubsidized private universities, but they accept like 90% of applicants, which includes a lot of B students who never took the ACT.

They graduate a ton of those people until the middle and upper-middle class.

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cappotto-marrone@reddit

An old friend used to say there were two overrated things that both began with H. Home cooking and Harvard degree.

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Groftsan@reddit

I have a friend who went to Harvard. Whenever anyone asks him where he went he'll say "a liberal arts college back east."

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2Asparagus1Chicken@reddit

Harvard is a research university, not a liberal arts college

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EastTXJosh@reddit

I’m an attorney. I went to an evening program in brand new state school that wasn’t even ranked. I worked with a lot of attorneys that went to the top tier programs. Harvard attorneys are actually not that bad. The worst are the ones from Stanford and Virginia. It seems like every time you talk to those knuckleheads they remind you where they went to law school.

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ATLien_3000@reddit

Harvard degrees have lost value because of that dynamic (and others)

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Prestigious-Row-1629@reddit

Talk about manufacturing a narrative.

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Jabjab345@reddit

The stereotypes are true, I met a guy and within the first few sentences of talking he mentioned in an off hand way that he went to Harvard. I called him out on it in a kinda jokey way, but I don’t think he even noticed he was doing it.

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KingEgbert@reddit

I work with a unicorn - a woman who went to Harvard who has never mentioned it over like 6 years. I only know cause I saw her resume when she was hired.

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Swampy1741@reddit

I always pretend I’ve never heard of it

Once with a friend who went to Penn, he would be super impressed and gas them up and then I’d pretend I’d never heard of it which was a funny dynamic

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vinyl1earthlink@reddit

"You can always tell a Harvard man

But you can't tell him much!"

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RepliesOnlyToIdiots@reddit

Had the same thought, and I’m from a state school.

But I married an Ivy grad, and my eyes have been opened. The opportunities available vary widely and significantly just due to school, even decades later. Not just work opportunities, even vacation opportunities. There are vacation tours I’m now aware of that my wife and kid can go on that I cannot. When time for college, yes, I’ll be aiming to get our kid into a top school, and I’m willing to pay what I must for it.

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mickeyanonymousse@reddit

unless they are going somewhere that the rest of us are unable to gain access to I don’t see how this matters in life at all

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NoSingularities0@reddit

It doesn't. The only one that matters is MIT. The rest are meaningless. Ivy league schools are a joke and their graduates are nothing different than any other university graduates and people in hiring positions are starting to wake up to this fact.

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dr_stre@reddit

lol, why is MIT special, exactly? The STEM-ier your degree is, the less important it is for you to attend a prestige university. Statistics bear that out.

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Satisest@reddit

Graduates of top colleges like Ivies, MIT, Stanford are the top earners over any period of time you care to look at

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dr_stre@reddit

You might be surprised to find that research has shown this has nothing to do with having a degree from that school. It’s an issue with self selection of the populations that attend those schools in the first place. They tend to have inherent advantages even without the prestige degree. So while there is a correlation, there is no causation. When you compare students with similar backgrounds that go to prestige vs non-prestige schools in the same STEM fields you find there is essentially zero benefit to attending the prestige school. This is not the case for liberal arts degrees, where there is a legitimate improvement in earnings outcomes for prestige schools.

A quote from the Wall Street Journal by a couple economists that did research on this topic (link is to another site that includes the quote so you can see if without needing a WSJ subscription):

We find no statistically significant differences in average earnings for science majors between selective schools and either midtier or less-selective schools. Likewise, there’s no significant earnings difference between engineering graduates from selective and less-selective colleges, and only a marginally significant difference between selective and midtier colleges.

…That said, the earnings picture is very different for other fields. Outside of STEM, it matters tremendously where a student receives a degree.

The starkest earnings differences are for business majors, where graduates from the selective institutions earn 12% more on average than midtier graduates and 18% more than graduates from less-selective colleges. Likewise, social-science majors from selective colleges earn 11% more than their midtier counterparts and 14% more than those from less-selective schools.

For education majors, the differences are 6% and 9%, respectively. In humanities, graduates of selective schools earn 11% more than those from less-selective ones, although they don’t earn more than those from midtier schools.

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Satisest@reddit

I’m a bit surprised that you’d be citing here a 10-years old study of alumni who graduated from college over 30 years ago. The tech landscape today is vastly different than it was in the 1990’s. And you need to know what these authors are talking about when they cite “selective institutions”. They are talking about 2,500 colleges that occupy the upper tertile of colleges in the U.S., and comparing those 2,500 colleges to 3,400 colleges that occupy the middle tertile and 1,400 in the bottom tertile. This makes the study quite hopeless to address the effect on earnings of truly selective colleges like (as I mentioned) Ivies and Ivy plus colleges.

Since you cited the synopsis of this older study in the WSJ, I’m also a bit surprised that you missed a far more recent study reported by the WSJ that actually that comes to the opposite conclusion regarding careers in the technology sector. This study ranked individual colleges rather than comparing segments comprising thousands of colleges.

Tech

The top private schools for high-paying tech jobs are Harvard, Princeton, Stanford University, the California Institute of Technology and Yale University.

The average annual salary over the first decade after college (the same metric used by the older study you cited) is higher for these 5 colleges than any state flagship, or indeed any other college in the country.

https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/careers/top-colleges-high-paying-careers-finance-tech-consulting-d1c22601

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dr_stre@reddit

I’m not paying for a subscription just to read this article, but what you’ve clipped out of it doesn’t make it look like they’ve accounted for the self selection issue I referenced above. I never said people coming out of those schools didn’t make more, what I challenged was that it was solely because they attended those schools. The study I referenced looked for how much extra the attendance at those schools accounted for in earnings for an individual and essentially found that the people who attended those schools would make the same as a cohort if they attended less prestigious schools thanks to the advantages they have already. Blindly comparing the salaries of Harvard graduates to state school graduates is ignoring a whole heap of systemic and institutional advantages that the kind of people who attended those schools Harvard typically have even before stepping foot on campus.

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Satisest@reddit

The study you cited did not isolate the “extra value” of attending a selective school, or control for other factors that might somehow predict that an 18 year old would achieve a high salary in tech as opposed to finance as opposed to business. I will assert that such a statistical analysis would be impossible. And as I mentioned, any study grouping all U.S. colleges into tertiles comprising thousands of colleges hopelessly diluted any effect sizes due attendance at truly selective colleges, e.g. top 20 as opposed to top 2,500.

But even the authors of the study you cited state the following regarding earnings differences across colleges of differing selectivity:

Possible explanations include how peer and alumni networks differ by selectivity of college, and differences in learning environment and instruction.

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dr_stre@reddit

The study didn’t cover every college in the country, lol. It used a couple data sets, such that the most selective third made a fair approximation of the prestige universities we’re discussing here. The most selective third in the larger of the data sets would still only have been 11 universities, leaning heavily towards the ivies.

And you still haven’t addressed the self selection issues inherent in just citing raw salaries for graduates like you’re trying to do.

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baycommuter@reddit

I guess in some non-STEM fields, social polish and connections matter more than knowledge.

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dr_stre@reddit

Absolutely. The networking that happens at a place like Harvard is a massive help when you’re a business major or whatever. Lots of doors open up that otherwise wouldn’t. On the other hand, technical careers have a way of exposing people who don’t know their shit, so competence matters, and there’s not a whole lot separating the actual STEM education you can get at a place like MIT from what you can get at a someplace like a solid flagship state school.

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Negative-Ad9832@reddit

Ha so Caltech doesn’t matter either?

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Charlesinrichmond@reddit

Caltech is its own special group called "caltech"

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PAXICHEN@reddit

I asked the same before I saw your comment.

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Charlesinrichmond@reddit

nope. Only people who are non Ivy say that

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PAXICHEN@reddit

CalTech?

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opbmedia@reddit

I am both state school and Ivy grad. I got opportunities I wouldn't have gotten with only a state school degree. It's not even close. In professional services, client do care about where you went to school, because they equate that with quality, misguided or not.

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UngusChungus94@reddit

Dawg you're acting exactly like a Harvard grad. Muh MIT lol, nobody cares.

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Aprils-Fool@reddit

That sounds cultish and not something I’d be interested in.

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okamzikprosim@reddit

There are vacation tours I’m now aware of that my wife and kid can go on that I cannot.

They don't allow spouses? Oof.

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debbieae@reddit

rich people clubs are not the only ones.

I am a Texas A&M graduate and it has been the deciding factor in job offers before because the hiring manager was also an A&M grad. Strong traditions get you in the club, not necessarily money.

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big_sugi@reddit

That’s a networking factor rather than a prestige factor, though. The Aggie Network was even stronger back in Old Army days, when the school wasn’t particularly prestigious academically.

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debbieae@reddit

as I said...having an alumni with strong traditions is the reason these effects happen. If we go back to Harvard we see that academics are not the reason a degree there gets jobs. It is the network effects of a university with strong traditions and an active alumni. Money doesn't create the boost...traditions that keep alumni involved do.

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big_sugi@reddit

“Harvard” or “Yale” or “Princeton” is valuable with people who didn’t attend Harvard, etc. “Texas A&M” is much less valuable with people who didn’t attend A&M. It’s not just a networking effect for the former.

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UngusChungus94@reddit

What a coincidence! My SEC school (Mizzou) is super represented in my field. I can't say whether it got me a job, but it didn't hurt.

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brzantium@reddit

I need to know more about these exclusive vacations you can't go on. Does an alum reach out to your wife and say something like, "we're all going to Gstaad - you should come, bring the little one, but leave that public school husband of yours at home..."?

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spintool1995@reddit

My alumni association does organized trips. But they are expensive and it's mostly old people with plenty of time on their hands. I really have no interest.

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PAXICHEN@reddit

I’ve seen ones that are geared toward 40somethings that are tied to some Archeological site.

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PAXICHEN@reddit

Think Jeffrey Epstein… (I kid, I kid.)

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thisMatrix_isReal@reddit

with vacation you mean a private club right

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PAXICHEN@reddit

UVA and W&M also have strong networks like that. W&M more regional and within certain 3 letter agencies.

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CPA_Lady@reddit

You would not be able to accompany your wife on vacation if she signed up for a certain vacation tour? Who would do that.

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honorspren000@reddit

Isn’t it just a rich person club? You graduate from an Ivy League college and make connections with a bunch of rich people. You get perks like getting invited to their vacation home in Fiji or something.

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ATLien_3000@reddit

Eh.

I get a feeling he's talking about those cheese cruise mailers you get in the alumni magazine.

Not someone saying, "come stay at my vacation home with me!"

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Nimbus20000620@reddit

Those hyper rich people often times still otherize you if you're not old money like them, even if you're studying at the same instiution as them. one of them at one of this.

To me the biggest boon was the companies that were giving us attention for no other reason than the school on our resume. Job postings specifically for students from the school. Recruiters would host events on campus, and if you make a positive impression, said recruiters can help you enter, or even circumvent some steps of, the interview process. Career fairs were completely stacked with companies at the top of tech, finance, consulting etc.

You get more cracks to work at one of the best. You're not set for life just by attending, but your odds of joining the upper middle class noticeably increase if you play your cards right. Not commenting on the fairness or effectiveness of these hiring practices, but they are still real.

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Ok-Class8200@reddit

The obvious caveat to this is that your first job (or graduate/professional degree) out of undergrad often is often what sets you on your career path.

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LoisLaneEl@reddit

You would think that, but both of my brothers went to those top schools and the alumni from those universities pull their fucking weight getting you jobs wherever you want. Even years out of college

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RadiantHC@reddit

+ students at more well known schools have a larger amount of opportunities

I'm currently working at an ivy. The amount of resources here, even as a staff member is insane.

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wbruce098@reddit

This. Ivy League schools are prestigious, but only the rich and those who got scholarships can attend them. But for the vast, vast majority of middle class Americans, the existence of a degree is all that matters, not the school.

And that’s because every regionally accredited US college meets specific minimum standards of educational quality.

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Chemical_Can_2019@reddit

This is not remotely true. Many are completely free unless you are rich.

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Satisest@reddit

You wouldn’t know this, but Ivy League colleges don’t award scholarships. They give only need-based financial aid.

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wbruce098@reddit

I wouldn’t. But that makes sense.

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Tossaway198832@reddit

I’ve always wondered if they check schools. 10-15 years ago I put I went to community college of Denver on my resume and my degree even though I dropped out of all my classes and never went because I got a killer job.

I’m a senior controls engineer in niche industry and barely graduated high school. I don’t even have to apply for anymore, I get offers pretty regularly.

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Negative-Ad9832@reddit

I don’t think your experience is universal. There are lots of companies that care about where someone got their degree.

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WowsrsBowsrsTrousrs@reddit

I got hired for a financial job once not because I went to an Ivy, but because I got my MBA from the same small university that the guy interviewing me went to, and we spent more of the interview chatting about the school than anything else.

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Idustriousraccoon@reddit

I think it matters most for your terminal degree, which, as I type this, am realizing that would be tied up with the prestige of the undergraduate institutions….yeah, it’s a circle jerk for families at the top, for the most part. And I don’t mean necessarily the top top (most upper class people don’t even have degrees and are some of the most boring people on the planet)…but there’s this whole world of the upper middle class that lives for all of this. Then there’s the intelligentsia…it’s something like five times as likely for the child of a PhD to get a PhD than one without (although, that stat extends to all fields for many reasons)…but certainly there’s some insularity to top tier institutions…but it really is just among the people who give a shit about it…for me, I love the academy in all its ivory towerness…but I went to a prep school and then one of the seven sisters before dropping out and getting on with my life. It wasn’t until much later, when I actually learned the value of an education, and the fun and privilege of it all, that I went back and chose Cal. At the time I was married to a Blackfeet woman who was about to be the first person in her family to go to college. She had zero awareness of any difference whatsoever between this college or that one…and so I talked her into applying with me. We both graduated from there…it was really, unfairly difficult on her, she hated most of it, was in tears for at least a quarter of it, but she did it. And it’s opened a lot of doors for her. And she’s really, really happy she did. There absolutely is a difference between the education you get at a basic institution and a top tier one. I’ve been to community colleges and public and private schools here. There’s a VAST difference in the quality of the education. It is only the top institutions that actively teach all of their students to not only think for themselves, but to think like leaders and captains of industry…. It’s hard to define, really, but it’s overwhelming. One wants to turn out employees, the other wants to turn out entrepreneurs and leaders and owners. In no way am I agreeing with this, I think it’s horrific…but it’s apparent. There’s a LOT of weird collegiate nepotism in industry too…so the system reinforces itself…

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WasabiParty4285@reddit

Don't forget alumni networking, too. I've worked at several large companies that both preferred new hires for particular schools and mostly hired seasoned professionals that networked their way in. Networking happened through a lot of alumni functions or being friends back at school. So particular schools would be 25-30% of the workforce. The local schools were represented in wherever a district office was, but every office would have people from the preferred school, and the higher you went up the food chain, the higher the percentage was.

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PAXICHEN@reddit

I interviewed a guy for a position just because he went to W&M. His resume looked like he was a job hopper and others passed on him - he worked for a company that did government work, so of course he was going to a bajillion different gigs.

While he was a finalist for my position, his skills were better aligned with a different open position that also paid 10% more.

Networking won’t necessarily get you the job, but it can make you stand out enough and get you into the running.

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wbruce098@reddit

Sure, especially law firms. But my experience in a non-lawyer industry is - while not universal - certainly typical.

We care that someone has a degree because it provides a minimum level of education that’s valuable. Aside from that, we just don’t care where it’s from. I’ve never looked at a resume and gone “oh shit this guy went to Harvard!” Because I care that they can do the job, not where they studied.

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PAXICHEN@reddit

I’m looking for someone that can demonstrate critical thinking and has a capacity to learn. Coming out of college I can teach them anything they need to work in Cyber. My current team is me (chemistry major), a guy with a masters in History (from Harvard, but that’s just incidental), a woman with an IT management degree from Poland, a guy with no degree, and a guy with some sort of undergraduate business degree. I hired them all based on personality and capacity to learn - and soft skills. We have a very effective team.

College isn’t vo-tech. We need to stop treating it as such.

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notnatasharostova@reddit

This is misleading. Maybe this wasn't the case back in the day, but all of the Ivies offer need-based financial aid (at least for American citizens) and are tuition-free for students with family income under $100k. If you get in, they're usually far more affordable than state schools or community colleges. I attended one as a first-generation kid on full aid, and while there are a lot of students who come from serious money, I had classmates from all income levels and social backgrounds.

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On_my_last_spoon@reddit

IF you get in. The standards are so high that’s really rare.

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PAXICHEN@reddit

Case in point here.

Late 1980s/early 1990s

Brother at Williams College: $3,000 per year

Brother at Cornell University: $2,000 per year

Me at W&M: $9,000 per year.

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Nimbus20000620@reddit

If you're actually middle class, the financial aid packages are quite generous. Ivy league schools won't lose out on top talent just because their parents aren't well off. Ime its the upper middle class that struggle with the price tag. Say a family being raised on a primary care physican's income. Their kids are hard working and groomed well enough to get in, but they don't have fuck you money (or support from the university) to easily justify 250k+ for a bachelors.

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tu-vens-tu-vens@reddit

The Ivys are definitely more generous with financial aid than the next rung down of private schools. But in practice, their student body is still overwhelmingly wealthy, in large part due to how subjective the admissions process is.

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On_my_last_spoon@reddit

And the ability to reach their standards without being a legacy admission is really difficult. Sure, Yale School of Drama’s grad program is free, but you need to come with expertise already.

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Secret-Ad-7909@reddit

This is where the legacy thing comes in. My family’s GP graduated from our top state school, so did all 5 of his kids. I don’t think anything shady happened there, they all would have met at least the basic requirements for enrollment. But I’m sure those alumni donations helped too.

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Twirlmom9504_@reddit

Don’t even get me started on legacy admissions…

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WiseQuarter3250@reddit

or they only care to talk collegiate sports with you.

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MustAshKing@reddit

There are absolutely schools that have a massively loyal group of alumni that helps future generations. Penn State is a great example. I work in a field with a lot of people from Penn State and it's never surprising when another graduate gets hired. That's incredibly useful.

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HegemonNYC@reddit

Nah, if you have Harvard or Stanford in your resume you’ll always get attention. Maybe no one cares about the 30th vs 60th ranked university, but those prestige names always carry cache

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Tommy_Wisseau_burner@reddit

That’s because, with upper managing positions, you’re more likely to have someone from an Ivy. So you being a grad is about your connection. This is why networking is important. Ivies and state schools have massive networking bases

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Curmudgy@reddit

those prestige names always carry cache

They also come with knowing the difference between cache and cachet. Or maybe it’s just better proofreading skills.

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HegemonNYC@reddit

See, if I went to Harvard I wouldn’t make that mistake.

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PAXICHEN@reddit

You already made the mistake. So, if you had gone to Harvard, you would not have made that mistake.

(Just poking fun. Not actually being serious about correcting/enhancing your grammar. )

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PAXICHEN@reddit

No. That got dropped for “I am a victim” 101.

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Picklesadog@reddit

On a resume, sure. But once you're actually working, no one really cares.

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merp_mcderp9459@reddit

This is true in most cases, but with a lot of exceptions. Brand-name schools still carry some weight, and some smaller schools have super dedicated alumni networks who will work like crazy to get you a job.

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RedditModsSuckTaints@reddit

Yep, I went to a tiny D3 school and I’m the boss of people who went to some of the most recognizable, revered universities in the world. Where you go doesn’t really matter in the real world. You just need a piece of paper saying you went.

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reapersritehand@reddit

I'm sure the people from the big names we all know feel different, but guess if I had to buy a new library to attend I would too

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TheGrauWolf@reddit

Yep, pretty much this, It basically comes down to this. It's going to vary based on field and degrees. Some colleges/universities are more prestigious in various fields than others. For example I'm not going to Texas A&M if I'm looking for a degree in Astrophysics or Rocket Science. That's not their thing. But it is where I'd go if I'm interested in an Agricultural degree. Conversely I'm not going to go to Berkeley for an Agricultural degree, but I would go for a Physics one.

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PenteonianKnights@reddit

Most people might not care...but enough people care, enough, to where it can make a difference

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B4K5c7N@reddit

I think it is heavily dependent upon social class and location, though. In VHCOL areas (particularly among the upper middle/upper classes), school name absolutely matters, and you likely will be judged upon where you went to school.

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ATaxiNumber1729@reddit

Yeah, I swear I’m not trying to sound like an elitist but for undergraduate degrees, most well known schools are good and are all you need. If you are planning to go into academic research, where you get your doctorate is a big deal. In general, you will get a lesser prestige job than where you earned your doctorate (at least starting out).

As an example, someone getting a doctorate at the University of Illinois will have trouble getting a job at a place like U of Chicago or even Purdue, unless you have done some impressive research for your dissertation

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Nofanta@reddit

They don’t. This is a scam nobody cares about.

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CH11DW@reddit

How to distinguish prestige. Simply put their reputation.

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CH11DW@reddit

There’s is also private vs public. Private usually considered better, but lots of public universities are on the same tier as a lot of private schools.

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CH11DW@reddit

Ivy League schools are considered the best in the country. What is Ivy League? It is an athletic conference, the first athletic conference I believe in college American sports. So it is made of some very old, established private universities. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia to name a few. Ironically none of the Ivy League schools are known for their sports. Or at least not the popular ones like football or basketball.

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DerAlex3@reddit

Not a single person I know cares. It doesn't matter except in elite social circles, and who cares about being part of that?

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G00dSh0tJans0n@reddit

Only matters to those who get into top schools, and top schools vary depending on the field. For example, in business there's the M7 schools which are Harvard, Penn, Stanford, Columbia, MIT, Northwestern, and Chicago.

But for everyone else, just having a degree from an accredited university is what is most important.

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iliketurtlesthey69@reddit

A’s mean you can work for a “good” company. C’s mean you can run a “good” company

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RP1199@reddit

I’m sure some people care but I couldn’t care less if you have an Ivy League education

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Ok_Gas5386@reddit

There are some schools that predate independence where a bunch of presidents and captains of industry have studied. Harvard, Yale, Princeton.

There are some schools that are known for extreme academic rigor in the hard sciences. Stanford, MIT.

There are flagship state universities with massive research budgets. UC Berkeley, Michigan, Virginia.

There are smaller liberal arts schools known for producing excellent students. Bowdoin, Pomona, Williams.

Each of these has a different type of prestige associated with it, and will carry more or less weight in different circles.

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clingbat@reddit

There are some schools that predate independence where a bunch of presidents

There are also non-ivies in this bunch. William and Mary (1693), University of Delaware (1743) and Washington and Lee (1749) come to mind and are older than a handful of the ivies.

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No_Owl_7380@reddit

Rutgers University in New Jersey as well having been chartered in 1766. I did my two masters degrees there and both programs are consistently ranked top 10.

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Mr_Kittlesworth@reddit

And of those, W&M and W&L are also both really well-regarded liberal arts colleges.

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clingbat@reddit

And Delaware has top 10 chemical engineering and DPT programs (I believe #1 in the latter).

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baycommuter@reddit

If you don’t use an Oxford comma, nobody from another country will ever figure out how many colleges Delaware, William and Mary and Washington and Lee are.

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PAXICHEN@reddit

It’s the W&M comma in VA.

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clingbat@reddit

Because the three separate dates don't give it away... Could you be more pendantic?

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baycommuter@reddit

Just a joke about colleges with compound names.

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clingbat@reddit

Sorry I'm tired, it's super late, and both the Phillies and Eagles proved they are frauds tonight lol...

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baycommuter@reddit

No probkrm, that Phillies loss was brutal.

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PAXICHEN@reddit

As a W&M grad, we hate the Blue Hens because we have to go through them every year on our quest to FINALLY make it into March Madness.

W&M, The Citadel, Army, and Seaton Hill (not hall) have never made a single March Madness. Northwestern was in this club until the past decade.

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thejt10000@reddit

> There are smaller liberal arts schools known for producing excellent students. Bowdoin, Pomona, Williams.

I don't think these are known outside their regions.

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EquivalentRooster735@reddit

I will note that the reputation of liberal arts colleges (LACs) is highly regional and class based. Someone who went to prep school in New England? they've heard of and highly respect dozens of LACs. Middle class people from Texas? Probably haven't heard of any specific ones and think of them as schools for unserious rich kids who couldn't get into a state flagship.

I went to a LAC myself and it's wild how differently different people respond to hearing where I went to school. I get everything from a audibly condescending "I haven't heard of that" from people who take deep pride in their state flagship degree, to a super excited "that's a good school, my really cool/smart friend went there." And, honestly it lines up a lot with class. The more upper class the person I'm talking to, the more they know my alma mater, even though my college was no more bougie than UVA.

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curelullaby@reddit

Was this Carleton or Mac?

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EquivalentRooster735@reddit

St. Olaf, though I know some people in VA who went to Carleton and it's even more bimodal for them. Either a "where's that?" or "is that in Canada?" or "you must be a genius."

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curelullaby@reddit

I went to Carleton for a bit and had to drop out for some weird external circumstances, nice to run into someone around, also saw you in r/pinkscare so that's pretty cool!!

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EquivalentRooster735@reddit

Honestly my years in Northfield feel like a fever dream in retrospect. Just a very different environment with very different people and values than anywhere else I've been. I've been missing my college friends lately.

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annang@reddit

Don't forget about prestige HBCUs: Howard, Spelman, Morehouse, etc. Those carry a ton of weight in certain circles.

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PAXICHEN@reddit

Listen buddy, a bunch of presidents went to my school and one of them founded UVA. Another Alum founded MIT. And it’s where Phi Beta Kappa was organized.

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airbear13@reddit

Pretty good explanation except one thing I’d disagree with, good schools don’t produce excellent students, excellent students just attend them.

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unlimited_insanity@reddit

Yes and no. There is certainly a lot of self fulfilling prophecy when a school gets a reputation for being good, and they have their pick of applicants, and that increases the school’s reputation, which increases the applicant quality…and so on. But when you get excellent students in a class, you are more likely to get excellent discussions, and that’s part of an excellent education. And many of those top schools have large endowments and facilities that give their students access to opportunities not available in other places. It’s a different level. How much that pays off for the average student is debatable.

On the other hand, there are also colleges that make a difference. There’s a list of Colleges That Change Lives - not the most traditionally prestigious list, but good schools doing good work. And even USNAWR recently changed its methodology to include social mobility as part of its criteria.

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Pelvis-Wrestly@reddit

Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Cornell, Stanford, UCLA, Cal and the service academies: Annapolis, West Pt., and USAFA.

Everything else is second tier or lower. Fight me.

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NYCRealist@reddit

UChicago is more academically prestigious than UCLA, Dartmouth, (and probably Cornell) or any of the service academies.

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Confetticandi@reddit

Does this play out in real life and culturally? How do regular Americans associate with college prestige

In high school, people are impressed to hear you were admitted to a top university. Harvard’s acceptance rate is 3.5%, for example. So, just being able to say you got in is impressive.

However, after your first few years of professional work experience after college, no one looks at where you went to school anymore. They’re looking only at your work experience.

What the prestigious college gets you is the higher-prestige network which can land you better opportunities out of the gate, giving you a head start over other graduates.

Prestigious universities often have stronger alumni networks. Additionally, top firms and companies may only send direct recruiters to a few top schools. The university may even have an established relationship with those firms and companies to provide summer internship opportunities to their students.

Also, a lot of the kids that get into those universities already come from well off, well-connected families. So, befriending the children of wealthy, powerful, well-connected people often leads to more opportunities “by chance,” if you know what I mean.

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langstonfleury@reddit

Your alumni network definitely helps. If you have half a million spread out it can at least get your foot in the door for an interview instead of just mailing

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AAHedstrom@reddit

what do you mean "prestige"?

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Return-of-Trademark@reddit

I’ll break it down for you:

Tier 1: Ivy League + a few other schools everyone knows and respects for their academic excellence

Tier 2: respected largely due to big name, often tied to size of school or successful football/basketball teams

Tier 3: schools that people know about by name but not necessarily respected.

Tier 4: known by their local communities. Neither respected or disrespected. Just oh ok, that’s the school near here. Cool

Tier 5: local schools known for people who “couldn’t get into real schools”

Tier 6: scam universities, diploma mills

SECRET TIER: schools known by their programs in a given field.

How these play out in real life is also tiered:

Tier 1: OMG you went there???

Tier 2: oh cool. I’m familiar with that large place

Tier 3: (sports related conversation)

Tier 4: oh, cool

Tier 5: oh…..ok……

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GreenBeanTM@reddit

People who went to an Ivy League college care the most that they went to an Ivy League College and then care if you went to one.

People who didn’t go to an Ivy League College (the vast majority) don’t care where anyone went to college, and really want Ivy League people to shut up about it.

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SufficientBowler2722@reddit

My experience is the opposite of what others are saying here. I went to an elite college for my undergrad, and an even more elite college for grad school.

Everyone who learns my educational background treats me differently (in good ways and bad ways). But it has a lasting effect on the relationship. To people I want to impress I’ll tell them, but to others (immediate coworkers) I won’t be too loud about it so it doesn’t color our relationship.

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codenameajax67@reddit

Why would anyone care? If your coworkers know what college you went to other than because you talked about sports, then you are insufferable.

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shoesafe@reddit

Unless you're in a specific context like academia, most people don't care too much about rankings.

This tier system is a loose approximation of how many average Americans rank colleges & universities:

Harvard
local favorite school or home-state flagship school (or, if Catholic: Georgetown or Notre Dame)
other elite or Ivy school (Princeton, Yale, Stanford, MIT, Caltech, etc.)
other school with a prominent name, especially in college football or college basketball
other school name they recognize
don't recognize the name, but sounds like a fine school
trade school or vocational school for a good profession
for-profit trade school that didn't lead to a relevant job

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fnrv@reddit

I’d say most don’t care. With the exception of some professions, a degree is no longer a requirement to be successful.

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beach_bum_638484@reddit

I went to one of these schools. In grad school I definitely had people assume I was more knowledgeable than I actually was. I switched careers at 27 and taught myself to code. An alum hired me - I was only partially qualified, but I got the benefit of the doubt that I could figure it out (which I did, but I know I’m not the only one who could).

Now, many years later, no one cares. If I needed to get a new tech job, maybe it would matter, but with the current state of things, I doubt it would make much difference. I have many friends who have no idea where I went to college and I don’t mind keeping it that way, telling people sounds like a weird flex, like announcing your SAT scores or something.

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alittlepizza@reddit

I'm not really interested in where anyone went to college.

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cowboy_catolico@reddit

Most of us don’t, honestly. Some Ivy League universities and a few private ones are considered more prestigious (Harvard, Yale, Rutgers, Princeton), but for the most part, a university degree is a university degree as long as it’s an accredited university and not some BS, for-profit “career college”.

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EquivalentRooster735@reddit

This is highly regional and subculture dependent. For many Americans, prestige means having a sports team they've heard of, but for others it's US News-ish rankings, and for certain cultural subgroups, the top 50 or so Liberal Arts Colleges have just as much weight as the top 100 or so National Universities. People are also very regional in which schools they've heard of and respect.

The top 20 National Universities being the end all is a very Asian American thing.

I'd say the typical middle class American respects the school they went to, their state flagship, a couple programs at their local commuter school, and the state flagships of a few neighboring states (though with a rivalry), and doesn't think about other schools outside of sports. There's some sense of Berkeley and Harvard from media but they don't interact with people affiliated with those very much and mostly think of them as rich kid schools.

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Glass-Painter@reddit

Top 20 universities being “the end all” has been a thing since the days the only Asians in the US were in internment camps. Just depends on your circles.

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LewisFootLicker@reddit

Yep, I got into a top 100 school but the Asian-American kids who got into North Carolina, Duke, etc... made sure to put me in my place. Our yearbook people were all the super pretentious types so they would ask everyone where they are going after high school. I very clearly remember a group of Chinese kids saying "Where's that?" In a very condescending tone when I said my university.

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PAXICHEN@reddit

They didn’t go to HarvardPrincetonYale?

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EquivalentRooster735@reddit

I went to a good but not top tier liberal arts college, that probably corresponds to somewhere between 50 and 100 in the main US News rankings. It's halfway across the country from where I'm living now. Asian-Americans will regularly call me out for going to a place they haven't heard of, but upper class white Americans have usually heard of it and will verbally say that it's a good school.

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B4K5c7N@reddit

I think it is very much a regional thing. In VHCOL areas (particularly within upper middle/upper class zip codes), school prestige is definitely important to many.

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Trinx_@reddit

Exactly - I went to nursing school at Rush University, top nursing school in the country. If you're not in Healthcare, you've never heard of it.

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CheezitCheeve@reddit

What’s funny is prestige doesn’t equal better education. It often equals rich parents. The rich parents want their average child to get into Ivy, so they pay an obscene amount is more likely than the middle class or poor student whose brains get them a full ride. It does happen, but it’s rarer.

The reason why Ivy Leagues like Harvard are valued has nothing to do with the education itself but the people you meet there. Your teachers are world class leaders in their fields and groundbreaking researchers. Unfortunately, that often means they don’t care about their 8am English 101 class you’re in. Their job is not tied to their teaching ability but their name and their research. Whereas, someone at a small school teaching that same course is more incentivized to do well because they’re often a freshly graduated doctor who is trying to prove that they’re a good professor. That’s their hope to move up the ranks.

Similarly, the students next to you are often what makes Ivy League worth it. The guy in your chess club is the president’s son, the girl tutoring you is the daughter of a rich foreign business and will inherit it, and the person spotting you at the gym is a brilliant student who earned free admission for his work in high school. This is why Ivy is valuable. These people are the business leaders, world leaders, researchers, and more of the future. And you got to know them as a friend and a connection before they were that.

Therefore, college prestige honestly depends on what you’re looking for. My dad hires for his construction company. The best construction school in our state is actually a no-name D2 drinking school in the south and not the D1 nationally acclaimed universities. Therefore, prestige means nothing in this case. Often times, employers don’t care that your degree is from Harvard or Backup University. They care that your references, experience, and attitude is good. They’ll train you with what they want. But for the music student who gets to eat lunch every day with the president’s son, the conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, or with a famous composer, prestige makes a big deal.

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TeaNo4541@reddit

I didn’t go to an Ivy League school, but somewhere ranked in the top 30 USNews.

The specific undergraduate program I graduated from was #2, behind the Ivy League #1.

This means absolutely nothing to my friends or most of my coworkers, but early in my career it absolutely got me in the door. It doesn’t matter anymore because now my experience and reputation is what gets me in the door.

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Jabjab345@reddit

Some fields care about it to the extent that really does define your career aspirations, namely in medicine, law, and academia. You simply cannot work in big law without graduating from a handful of top colleges. But outside of those fields prestige matters less.

Even in competitive engineering fields you’ll see state college grads working with MIT grads. Prestige will get you a leg up initially, but deep into a career it stops mattering as much. Most other industries work this way.

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shakeyshake1@reddit

In law, people only care (if ever) when you’re brand new. And most lawyers, especially newer ones, have a decent idea of the school rankings for law schools.

I went to a top 50 school that isn’t in the state I practice in. After I started practicing, a group of younger lawyers asked where I went to school and I said “I went to X, it’s in Y state”. And they thought it was hilarious that I pointed out what state it was in because they knew about the school because of rankings.

Other than that, I have very few memories of people asking me where I went to school.

Once you’re practicing, your work speaks for itself and no one cares.

I think law is an unusual example because the work can be very public. Anyone can read the briefs you submit to the court, and you often do oral argument with a courtroom full of other lawyers who have hearings at the same time as you. When people can see your work, it really doesn’t matter where you came from, they can just easily judge you on your work.

These impressions don’t include big law. I never pursued that.

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QuarterMaestro@reddit

It's somewhat regional. I understand there is more education snobbery in the Northeast and New England. Here in the Southeast, it's extremely rare to meet anyone who attended an Ivy League college, so it's mostly irrelevant.

Though it may depend on field. I work with some engineers; it's likely easier to get a job fresh out of college if you come from a top engineering school like Georgia Tech.

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Tossaway198832@reddit

Nobody really cares aside from the people who graduated at said colleges, and everyone else just thinks they’re annoying if they talk about it too much.

Kinda like runners, vegans, etc. They will definitely let you know, even if nobody asks or cares.

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PdxGuyinLX@reddit

Having lived in the Northeast, Midwest and West Coast I would say people care about it a lot more in the Northeast than in other regions.

When I lived in Oregon, new people at work would be asked “Duck or Beaver?” It was more about sports fandom than prestige. That there were other possibilities didn’t seem to enter most people’s consciousness.

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Quirky-Bar4236@reddit

My personal opinion is college is not necessary unless your field requires it. Generations have went to college because they were supposed to and now many people are in quite a bit of debt making a middle class income or lower.

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Zealousideal-Rent-77@reddit

Nobody cares where you get your undergraduate degree, but they might care where your graduate degree came from in certain fields.

Oh, except that some people will automatically reject applications that list a historically black university, which sucks. I worked (briefly) for a small law firm that was reviewing applications for law clerks and the guy checking them over just autoshredded any recent grads from the (excellent) HBCU across town. Left that job as soon as possible.

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tretaaysel@reddit

I went to a community college and my co-worker has a master's.

We both are paid $19 an hour to do our job. It really doesn't matter.

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Sudden_Outcome_9503@reddit

When I was applying to college's 30+ years ago, I was certain that the cost of attending a prestigious university far outweighed the benefits. My opinion has not changed since then.

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petits_riens@reddit

If you want to truly talk “regular American,” ~60% of adults don’t have degrees.

There are a handful of careers where school prestige truly matters—finance, consulting, academia, to a lesser extent law—but most jobs that require a degree just want you to have a piece of paper.

In other fields, school prestige can open doors but it’s not a make-or-break. I went to an Ivy-adjacent university and I ended up going into marketing. It’s definitely gotten me interviews, but it hasn’t been a cheat code for instant success either. I’m currently at a Fortune 500 and there’s a decent number of people with fancy degrees around, but plenty more that went to more “ordinary” schools. It doesn’t come up after the interview, and I’m at the point in my career where it often doesn’t come up even then. The biggest difference it makes in your career after your first job or two is the network.

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cgjeep@reddit

Acceptance rate is usually a decent indicator of “prestige”

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DrBlankslate@reddit

Most Americans don't care, really.

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buoyantjeer@reddit

I don’t know. In Houston, for example, there’s a pecking order of Rice>UT>A&M>UH/LSU/Tech>Sam Houston/ Stephen F Austin > Houston Community College, etc. I think people are subtly “sized up” based on where they went to school. Other factors can complicate this where like a STEM/engineering major at UH may be more respected than communications major at UT-Austin, but I don’t think “most Americans don’t care” is fully accurate.

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sgigot@reddit

Most of the time, only people who went to Ivy League schools care if you did or did not go yourself. I've seen the same thing from greek orgs...I wasn't inclined during my time in school and still wouldn't be, but I know some people who were in frats that favor other members even sight unseen

Networking is the big deal and when you go to a school with a lot of successful connected graduates, it does help...and when University X grads hire other grads from University X to jobs that have a chance to offer promotions, it tends to self-perpetuate.

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Tedanty@reddit

Um yeah but the question was “average” American. A person that graduated from an Ivy League school where a lot of successful, powerful people graduate from isn’t exactly representative of the average person lmfao. The average person probably cares fuck all where you went to school, ivy or not.

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Afromolukker_98@reddit

I think Black Americans who went to HBCUs care. If we know you went to another HBCU, there is a type of fellowship there.

We all know Howard is the top 😂😂, but we know of eachothers colleges and there is some type of network link.

I feel at least for me HBCU graduates make it known that they are HBCU graduates

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didntmeantolaugh@reddit

It’s similar with women’s colleges, especially the Seven Sisters

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baycommuter@reddit

What are some of the other top ones? I’ve heard of Grambling and Jackson State for football, Florida A&M for their band, and Tuskegee because of Booker T. Washington.

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Afromolukker_98@reddit

Howard University, Spelman College, Morehouse College, Hampton University, Florida A&M University, North Carolina A&T State University, Tuskegee University, Clark Atlanta University, Xavier

Those are the ones ontop of my head, but of course love for all of em.

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DataQueen336@reddit

I will forever be jealous of the HBCU network. And the sorority connections. I’ve been 10/15 years out of college and seen coworkers do amazing things with those connections.

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Mean-Math7184@reddit

No one cares. Yale or Harvard are recognized, but we'll just assume you're a legacy. We don't talk about college after we graduate. College pedigree is only important in pure academia.

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Young_Bu11@reddit

Generally basically irrelevant

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MUHerdAlum703@reddit

Power 4, Group of 5, the Pac-2, FCS then the rest haha

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PromiseThomas@reddit

The only reasons to go to a fancy college are to learn from top professors or “network” with the rich and/or soon-to-be-rich students at the college. Once you graduate, I think telling people what college you went to to try to impress them is on par with telling people you were the quarterback on your high school football team: people will want to roll their eyes at you.

There might be hiring managers whose eyes will bug out when they see you went to an Ivy League school, or will raise an approving eyebrow if they see you went to a Big Ten school, so it might open doors that way. But in my opinion, if going to a “top” school is going to put you in a ton of debt, it’s reeaallly not worth it.

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OhThrowed@reddit

For the vast majority of us it's less 'prestige' and more 'this University has the program I want at a price I can afford.'

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Rhubarb_and_bouys@reddit

If you can get into the really prestigious ones it's basically free for most Americans.

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Pearl-Annie@reddit

This is only true below a certain income threshold. The top schools do not do merit-based aid, only need-based, and if your parents make even very low six figures, you can expect no aid, even if your parents did not save much toward the often $250,000 total bill.

I personally know middle-class kids who were admitted to Ivies but turned it down because they didn’t want $200k in debt.

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annang@reddit

Most Ivies are free for kids whose parents make under $150k, and they have no income cutoff for need-based aid. If your friends didn't qualify for enough aid to bring their debt load under $200k, they likely were not middle class. Their parents may have been misleading them about the family financial situation, or they were misleading you.

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Rhubarb_and_bouys@reddit

Right. Need based. If your folks make over 250K and haven't thought about saving for college for their kids? That's pretty messed up.

Overall average debt (2024): A Statista report for 2024 found the average student debt for Harvard to be $17,940, notably lower than many other top universities.

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Pearl-Annie@reddit

1) by “low six figures” I meant like household income $120k, not $250k lol. $250k is not middle class

2) “did not save much” =/= saved nothing. The people in question had college funds, just not college funds with the ability to pay for $80k/year tuition. I don’t have all the financial details, but my impression was the funds could pay for a year or that.

Those kids are all fine, they went to schools that would give them merit aid.

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Rhubarb_and_bouys@reddit

Yeah, I am just saying Harvard is free for those families with 200K or less, princeton 250K means no tuition, MIT under 200K completely free. Even people who make 300K will get need based in some circumstances. John Hopkins med school? Make under 300K and its completely free.

Every birthday check of 20-50 bucks has gone straight into the bank for my kids.

That plus their job, plus small loans means each year is covered for 3 kids.

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notnatasharostova@reddit

And the kicker is, you're still eligible for financial aid if you make more than that - it's just on a sliding scale! At my alma mater you had to make in the ballpark of $350k before you were no longer eligible for any aid (significantly more if you had siblings in college). As someone who grew up low-income in a HCOL area, it boggled the mind how many of these UMC families completely balked at the thought of living a little below their means to set some money aside for the significant investment that college is, or felt that I was privileged for being poor enough to be on full aid.

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Yggdrasil-@reddit

The financial aid at elite private colleges is insane, or at least it was a decade ago. We were a single-income household, but solidly middle-class (~90k). It was cheaper for me to go to a top 10 school out-of-state than it was for me to go to the state school 20 minutes from home. I also had guaranteed year-round work-study and living expenses covered for summer internships.

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Rhubarb_and_bouys@reddit

Yeah, now it's up to 150K and 250K and it's free.

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PAXICHEN@reddit

Tuition or tuition room and board?

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ostensibly_sapient@reddit

Yale need-based financial aid covers tuition, room and board.

source: Yale '24

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Rhubarb_and_bouys@reddit

Depends. Under a certain salary many schools pay everything like books PLUS give you money for personal expensive like traveling back home.

Some you just cover room and board.

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PAXICHEN@reddit

Thanks. It’s been 30 years since I needed financial aid - seems like a lot has changed.

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ostensibly_sapient@reddit

It's still insane. I went to Yale for free despite coming from a zero income family. The dynamic on campus was weird because there was those of us from moderate to little means, and those peers who come from families who consider Yale tuition a small investment into their child.

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tesseractjane@reddit

My daughter found out she was admitted to an ivy graduate program when the bursar's office reached out for more information to put together her financial aid package. That was a wild day for our family.

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Illustrious-Shirt569@reddit

Yep. They’re some of the very few remaining institutions that admit people “need-blind” because they have the funds to potentially cover an entire entering class if everyone they admit ends up being eligible for free admission. Of course, that doesn’t happen in practice, but their policies allow for the possibility.

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Maurice_Foot@reddit

I grew up poor.

Local community college / trades school was aspirational for me.

You could say any school I'd heard of through sports on tv (both state colleges/universities and Ivy League schools) and I would have just assumed it's all rich people doing whatever rich people did (which wasn't working at fast food restaurants and scrounging for money to hit the pub on Friday night).

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dgmilo8085@reddit

Unless you go to Harvard or Yale, it doesn't matter whatsoever where you go to school.

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gravely_serious@reddit

There are a few of them with good reputations, a few with bad reputations, and everything else is lumped together. I don't think there are any "bad" state schools, but there are some that are quite good.

I'm in engineering. Aside from the top universities (MIT, Caltech, Georgia Tech, Michigan, a few others) anything that's ABET accredited is good. I've met good engineers from small city universities and terrible engineers from some of the top programs. It really depends more on the individuals.

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PercivleOnReddit@reddit

Most don't care. Even among those who went to college it's not a big deal.

The biggest difference in college prestige is attention from companies while you are attending; which gives more exposure opportunities.

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StrippinChicken@reddit

Generally the heirarchy is:

Ivy league

Private college

Public college

Community college/trade school

In reality, no one really cares. A degree is a degree. In personal relationships, you can kind of make some assumptions if youre given this info: Private means you have a lot of debt or come from a well off family; Ivy means youre either incredibly smart (scholarship) or are wealthy; Public/community/trade school means you dont have much debt relative to private schools, and are more likely to come from a middle class and below family.

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Beginning-Olive-3745@reddit

Outside of the top reputation graduate programsa lot of it is alumni based by region. Example, graduating from Texas A&M or SMU is more valuable to you on Dallas than a Harvard or Stanford undergraduate degree.

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TheBimpo@reddit

What do you mean “does this play out”? Most of us don’t go to elite schools, that’s what makes them elite.

Most of us go to state universities. You can attain a degree and have a terrific career by attending Central Washington or Oregon State or SUNY-Oswego. Who cares?

“Prestige” isn’t very important to most people.

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Niro5@reddit

Are you telling me SUNY Oswego isn't good!

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holymacaroley@reddit

I live in the southeast and haven't even heard of it. It's probably prestigious in the state/ region.

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unlimited_insanity@reddit

So the interesting thing about NY is that there is nothing like Chapel Hill or even NC State in terms of prestige. What it has are a lot of smaller universities dotted around the state, many of which are good in general but then like really good in one area. For example, there’s SUNY Purchase that is amazing for performing arts. And there’s a whole college dedicated to Environmental Science and Forestry. But the acceptance rates are often high because the applicant pool gets partially divvied up by interest rather than everyone competing for one or two top schools. NY does have Binghamton which typically makes the “public ivy” list, but it’s still nowhere near as well known as Chapel Hill, where the prestige is really concentrated. Connecticut is also more focused on access than prestige. I’m married to a Tar Heel, and had to explain to him that UConn is one university with satellite campuses. So if you apply, and you don’t get into the main Storrs campus, you might get offered Avery Point or Stamford instead, while retaining the ability to take courses in Storrs. But you’d never apply to Chapel Hill and be offered admission to Wilmington because they’re separate schools. He was kinda horrified because he saw a system like that would devalue his UNC degree, but it makes sense for UConn’s business school to be in Stamford where people can hop on commuter rail and get into NYC for internships.

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holymacaroley@reddit

Grew up in NC and moved back here a couple decades ago. It's interesting to have state universities separated by interests/ majors. NC is definitely a different system.

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beenoc@reddit

I mean, there's a bit of that in NC (if you want to study engineering, you go to State or maybe UNCC, journalism and medical is Chapel Hill, ~~ECU for drinking~~) but yeah, the idea of "I've been accepted to The University of North Carolina and I want to study biology, which means I've been assigned to the Greensboro campus. If I change majors to poetry I'll move to the Asheville campus" is alien to me.

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Cruitire@reddit

I went to SUNY New Paltz. We were in awe of SUNY Oswego.

Don’t even mention SUNY Albany.

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PAXICHEN@reddit

What did you think of the SUNY Cortland folks?

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Cruitire@reddit

My cousin went there. He’s a bit unhinged, so there you have it.

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Niro5@reddit

I played right against a lot of smaller SUNY schools. Cortland was all gym teachers. Good athletes, but didn't know much about rugby. I was too cold to form an opinion on SUNY Plattsburgh. SUNY Oneonta were a bunch of degenerates. I had the distinct honor of being a DD at an away game there. 25 years later and some of those images are still burned in my brain.

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AvaSpelledBackwards2@reddit

The gym teacher thing is so real lol. I’m a college student from NY (though I don’t go to school there) and know a ton of Cortland students. They’re almost all majoring in exercise science or physical education.

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PAXICHEN@reddit

It’s like East Strousburg state in PA. 1/2 my gym teachers growing up went there.

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PAXICHEN@reddit

I heard SUNY Plattsburgh is also a wild ass place - specifically the Rugby guys who aren’t always starting the game with a full deck.

A buddy of mine was a pro-frat guy who would go campus to campus visiting and engaging with the fraternity’s different chapters and he said the Cortland and Plattsburgh guys were a different level.

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PAXICHEN@reddit

Better than Cortland. Those people are monsters.

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TheBimpo@reddit

I’m telling you that most people/employers don’t give a shit about prestige. Most scientists, surgeons, astronauts, etc…went to state schools.

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TsundereLoliDragon@reddit

This is like the 20th post I've seen where someone apparently thinks it's like either Ivy League or trash. When in reality less than 1/2 of a percent of students are going to Ivy League schools and there's literally hundreds and hundreds of other schools outside of those considered good or great.

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dvharpo@reddit

We wouldn’t even have rankings if it was just Ivy League or trash; like none of this would matter. So why tf do people go to Michigan, UVA, Vandy, Berkeley, WashU, Chicago, Emory, and so on??

It’s crazy the amount of people saying it doesn’t matter. That’s just not true. At the end of the day, there are a multitude of great schools that will open the door for your career, and do it better than other, ‘less prestigious’ schools. That is literally the bottom line point of this whole ranking thing…taken as a whole, a degree from a highly ranked institution should put you in a more advantageous starting position to succeed.

Should is the key word; not will or always. Rankings don’t have anything to do necessarily with quality of education (a perception) nor do they account for the guy who went to Oswego (or wherever) and has worked really hard/made great post grad connections to eventually get into a great financially rewarding leadership job, and they especially don’t count for the communications major at a low-rated state school that fell ass backwards into a job at Google (these people exist! That’s life)

Yes no one cares where you went after ~5 years of professional work experience. That’s not the point; the point is you had to start somewhere, and if you went to a higher ranked school, ideally that somewhere was better than if you’d gone to State U. That’s why we rank these schools; people want to maximize their investment, and some places do it better than others.

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TsundereLoliDragon@reddit

We wouldn’t even have rankings if it was just Ivy League or trash; like none of this would matter. So why tf do people go to Michigan, UVA, Vandy, Berkeley, WashU, Chicago, Emory, and so on??

I'm not saying this is true. I mean this is the perspective of every foreigner I've seen post on here about American colleges. They think every single person is trying to get into Harvard and if you didn't you must be a failure, when in reality around 50% of students go to public universities. I literally said there are hundreds of great colleges in the US. But on the other hand, in most professions nobody cares.

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PAXICHEN@reddit

UVA sucks. Sorry, 30 years later and I have to say that. Go Tribe!

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Hoosier_Jedi@reddit

It’s not like the SKY schools in Korea and I can’t believe anyone needs this explained to them.

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PAXICHEN@reddit

IIT in India.

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1maco@reddit

It’s not that it’s Ivy League or Trash but your average guy in Hartford has no fucking clue if WashU St Louis, University of Kentucky, Tulane or Georgia state is the best school.

But they do know Yale is good. And Princeton is too

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Final-Elderberry9162@reddit

This is the thing. I can say as a former recruiter that the one thing degrees from Ivys and other top tier schools do is travel. You can receive an excellent education at a state school in Missouri or at Brooklyn College in NY - but the people doing the hiring in San Diego aren’t going to know how to parse what doing well at these schools means or entails, but they absolutely know what Princeton or Columbia are.

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no-due-respect@reddit

Most of us don’t go to college at all.

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glowing-fishSCL@reddit

Oregon State is very prestigious in oceanography!

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Caloso89@reddit

And forestry! (Go Beavs!)

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PAXICHEN@reddit

West Virginia is also excellent at forestry. My nephew is there for that.

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TRLK9802@reddit

Some state schools are elite schools, though...

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Trinx_@reddit

Some state universities have highly ranked programs. An engineering degree from Purdue is as prestigious as many top universities. Ball State is a great school to attend for the arts because of networking opportunities. I went to Notre Dame, which still has prestige, but it's been dropping in recent years. But having the alumni network is still helpful. An online school no one has heard of will make starting out difficult in many careers.

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dazzleox@reddit

"Most of is" is a bit of an overstatement itself. 65% of those over 25 dont have a degree at all.

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airbear13@reddit

This sounds kind of cope-y tbh

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Nimbus20000620@reddit

I went to some prestigious schools. One of which was an ivy. No one irl cares. I agree with his take. Most laymen have no idea what schools are even prestigious outside of HYP and MIT.

To say it doesn't open up doors to you is cope however. There are some very lucrative professions that exclusively recruit at these schools.

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PipingTheTobak@reddit

How do you know someone went to Yale/Harvard/Stanford/MIT etc?

Oh don't worry, they'll tell you

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MakalakaPeaka@reddit

We mostly don’t.

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tinfoilhattie@reddit

I've spent more than 25 years as a researcher. In my experience in fields where your competence and skill can be easily experienced by anyone working with you, it doesn't seem to make any difference. The organizations and projects that I have worked for have not made college prestige an important factor for any actual research positions. However, I have seen it make more of a difference in business or corporate settings where having a degree from somewhere particularly prestigious is often more highly socially regarded, which is valuable in positions that rely on other people's opinion of personal gravitas without experience of your personal competence.

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sluttypidge@reddit

It's not. My best friend and I met, because she literally looked up a list of cheapest out of state tuition, universities and the university we both went to was at the top of the list.

For me, it was in state and I went there because my mom was an alumini and I got a further reduced tuition on top of it being in state tuition.

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RoxoRoxo@reddit

that stuff only matters to those people

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Visible_Noise1850@reddit

The average American doesn’t care where anyone went to college.

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DragonKing0203@reddit

If your degree isn’t from an insanely prestigious university (Harvard, MIT, Yale, ect) nobody fucking cares where you went to school after a few years work experience

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no-due-respect@reddit

Regular Americans don’t give a shit

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MadScientist1023@reddit

In the few instances where anyone cares?

There are a handful of colleges who are household names for their quality. Harvard, Yale, MIT, Juliard, etc. Average people know how impressive those schools are.

Beyond that, it's mostly a matter of whether or not someone has heard of the school. Which in America mostly means whether or not they have a decent division 1 college football team.

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RX3000@reddit

Unless you go to like Harvard or Yale it doesnt matter. For 99% of jobs, they only care that you have a degree, or practical experience, doesnt matter where its from.

Normal people really dgaf where you went to college. Most of the time it will never come up unless you just feel like bragging about it in a conversation or something.

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Ok-Trouble7956@reddit

Think it's more noisy if you went not where

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snowbeersi@reddit

Surprised I didn't see this, but it may primarily be relevant to engineering fields, and the majority of people posting are not in those fields.

Larger companies in technical fields have targeted universities they recruit from, because it is impossible to recruit at thousands or even hundreds of universities. The targeted universities almost always include schools that historically produce students with training in a relevant area, for example Northwestern University is known (and likely ranked in the US News survey) as a top material science school. Carnegie Mellon for computer science, etc. the companies will focus on a few of those nationally plus larger local and state schools in their region. Some HR people at large companies use those rankings. This is for undergraduate education.

For graduate school in engineering, there is a direct correlation between the research funding available per student and the US News ranking, because the people taking the survey know what school is winning grants and the rating may even use this parameter. As a graduate student in engineering, if you go to a "top ranked school", you are likely to be able to easily receive funding for your research program, including funds to pay your rent and buy food and provide healthcare.

The quality of the undergraduate education is largely independent of the ranking, but your job prospects may be impacted. The quality of a graduate education in engineering is likely highly related to the ranking due to research funding.

I suspect finding employment in a so-called "liberal arts" field is more dependent on serendipity and networking and less related to a school ranking explicitly or implicitly.

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HoyAIAG@reddit

1) IVY League 2) Flagship State Schools 3) Prestigious private(with exceptions like MIT) 4) Everything other 4 yr 5) Community Colleges

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knockatize@reddit

Has the college appeared or been alluded to in a Steely Dan song?

That gets you William & Mary, and Bard.

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baycommuter@reddit

Which one is in Annandale?

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knockatize@reddit

Bard.

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TsundereLoliDragon@reddit

I couldn't tell you what college my coworkers or almost any other people I know even went to. In general nobody cares.

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thorns0014@reddit

I can tell you most of my coworkers’ schools for the sole purpose of water cooler talk about sports.

I’ve met some incredibly dumb people from some incredibly prestigious institutions and some amazingly smart people from some institutions that are thought of poorly when it comes to academics.

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Unreasonably-Clutch@reddit

I worked with someone who never even when to college who was a better employee than someone who passed three states' bar exams. Academic prowess misses a lot of important skills.

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PAXICHEN@reddit

Ok. Would it be states’ bars exam? Or states’ bar exams? Or states’ bars exams?

Reminds of that old Onion article where William Safire goes into Burger King and orders 2 Whoppers Junior.

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TsundereLoliDragon@reddit

My degree isn't even in the field I work in so it's barely even relevant. Also a college most of the country won't have heard of.

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PAXICHEN@reddit

I do have a colleague that went to Harvard and I bring it up all the time. Another has a degree from Princeton. But mostly my company is Bentley, NEU, Babson, BC…can you tell where we’re HQ’d?

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Baby-cabbages@reddit

We have little signs on our classroom doors that tell where we graduated from. I put my bachelor's and not my masters degrees bc I went to a prestigious school for undergrad. No one has heard of the school I got my masters degrees from (Tarleton State University). At this point, the student loans for the prestige school make it not worth it in any way.

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Brilliant_Ad2120@reddit

it's probably based on what they see in media and here about with sports teams

most filmed campuses
Most mentioned in US film subtitles "Harvard came out on top, being mentioned in 3.9% of movies studied. Yale was second, featuring in 2.5% of movies, followed by Stanford (1.4%) and finally Princeton (1%).)
(Top 200 Most Followed Universities on Instagram | Harvard, Oxford, Universitas Gadjah Mada, Cambridge, Stanford, Universitas Indonesia Yale Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, MIT, Universidade Estácio de Sá
Most searched for on the web *Universities with most active Tiktok users Harvard, Penn State, USC, NY, Maryland

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Jackasaurous_Rex@reddit

I decided by looking up “best engineering programs in NJ / tristate area” and you’ll find various rankings that generally agree with each other and align with acceptance rates. Applied to em and toured em and picked a good one with a reasonable price. Also local employers have some awareness of these rankings and may factor that loosely into hiring. Usually projects and internships are more important but colleges have a big impact there. But anyone with a brain knows great talent can come from a less exclusive university and you’ve got to look at the big picture, but it’s certainly factored into vetting early in your career.

There’s something to picking a known school too, even if it’s not the biggest program. Networking across the country, I found that most haven’t heard of my small state school but everyone would be aware of Rutgers if I had attended there, and maybe that would have given me a tiny leg up in some jobs out there but hard to know for sure.

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pee_shudder@reddit

No one gives a shit just do your job.

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Welpe@reddit

No one cares about college prestige except people applying to college basically. And EXTREMELY rarely specific businesses that want to hire from specific universities. But for 99.9% of people, once you graduate college it doesn’t matter at all.

It’s, in fact, considered very low brow and crass to try and use the prestige of your college for your own benefit. American culture by and large doesn’t like people trying to use the prestige of other people/institutions to benefit themselves, whether that is your family or who you know or where you went to college, etc. Don’t get me wrong, it still happens often, but it has a negative connotation and most people will not see you as better but rather see you as insecure and without anything to brag about that you actually accomplished on your own.

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voidcritter@reddit

As long as your university is accredited, no one's really going to look down on what school you went to. A handful of schools (the Ivy Leagues, Stanford, MIT, etc.) will get special attention, but no one really *expects* you to have a degree from there. There's just more prestige if you do.

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Comfortable-Ad-7913@reddit

The average American doesn't care about what college went to after about 5 years of proffesional work experience.

Other than that its Ivies Smart-kid-private schools Smart kid state schools (Michigan, Georgia Tech, a lot of UC schools) Big state schools with football teams Everyone else

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Intelligent-Sun-7973@reddit

Not true. A top tier school will always open doors.

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burndownthe_forest@reddit

Yeah, but which doors?

Employers aren't looking at 40 year olds who graduated from Princeton 20 years ago over someone who has 20 years of industry experience.

Even then, the ivies really only matter for high end legal, medical, and business work.

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PavicaMalic@reddit

Academe, international development, non- profits, consulting firms (Accenture, Deloitte, etc.)

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rickybobbyscrewchief@reddit

Only in academic fields like scientific research or in regards to med/law schools. Going to a top 20 undergraduate university might have a little longer lasting influence opening doors than just a top 200 school. But somewhere around your second or third job after school, it only matters who you know and what you've accomplished professionally. I'll concede, if it comes down to a couple of seasoned, equally successful candidates and one has a degree from Stanford or something and the other has a degree from a nearly unknown small college, Stanford would probably have an advantage. But as someone who has made hiring decisions, I bet one candidate would stand out as a go getter or more polished or more personable or whatever, and then school be damned, I'm taking that one.

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Yggdrasil-@reddit

It definitely gets you a foot in the door, but only in those first couple of years after graduation. After that, work experience, connections, and accomplishments carry far more weight.

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RumRations@reddit

Agreed, although where you went to school can help with the connections part of the equation.

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Yggdrasil-@reddit

True. They primed us from the beginning to network, network, network.

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Drew707@reddit

In my experience, that's more the networking effect than the raw prestige.

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Bobsothethird@reddit

Even in the military, the academies gets about as much respect as the ROTC or prior enlisted officers. Nobody really cares, it's about how you treat your folks and do your job.

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Comfortable-Ad-7913@reddit

The original poster asked about average Americans, not what is most cared about in the U.S. military.

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Bobsothethird@reddit

The average American doesn't think about the academies because they don't work with them. I've never heard anyone ' go'oh you 're from the citadel? That's great!' in my entire life.

Also no need to be a dick lol.

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Comfortable-Ad-7913@reddit

Im not being a dick. I answered the original poster's question. You took it upon yourself to create a different scenario, and then explain how my answer was wrong in the scenario you invented.

They asked how regular Americans associate with college prestige. Not how often regulat Americans think about specific colleges.

I'll be a dick now-

You suck at reading comprehension. You keep ignoring the actual question and then examining how I am wrong in different situations you created.

No one asked how often people think about service academies. No one asked if people from VMI are amazing.

Being a dick now, you are arguing made up scenarios. You seem unable to understand the original discussion.

If you want to discuss how respected the airmforce academy amongst unlisted service members, go ahead. There is no reason to tell me I am wrong, because Im not talking about it.

All that to say, youre the dick. You keep explaining how I am wrong when you literally dont understand what I am saying.

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Bobsothethird@reddit

I didn't say it was wrong, I made the point that even within the services, where the differences are seen the most, Academy folks are not that much more well thought of than any other colleges. My comment was a reply to you not the OP.

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Comfortable-Ad-7913@reddit

You are literally unable to understand what I am saying.

I never said there was a difference between officers.

I never said someone's military rank was more or less impressive based upon their college.

I never said how impressive or unimpressive their service was.

You keep bringing up examples as a "reply" to me, but you are not talking about anything I am talking about.

This is pointless. You cannot understand.

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Bobsothethird@reddit

I do understand, I'm just saying the average American probably doesn't care about West Point or the Citadel all that much. That's my point. If we are talking about colleges being more impressive than others, and I'm saying that your local college and West point will generally be seen as the same by the average American at the end of the day, how is it that I'm misunderstanding the point?

I don't want to argue though.

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Comfortable-Ad-7913@reddit

You started all this with "even in the military."

You are now saying "the average American."

You are literally changing your postion and ending it with you dont want to argue.

The question wasn't how much the average American care about West Point or Citadel, but you are talking about how much the average American cares.

If you think people see a random local college as being on the same level as West Point, you are stupid.

You have to see how dumb all this is.

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Bobsothethird@reddit

Let me clarify for you so you can understand. The average American probably doesn't care about where your degree to commission in the military came from. Even military members, who are most affected by it, don't care much about it. If even the people who are affected don't care, it stands to reason those unaffected probably care even less. If you told the average American you went to West point and were a Lt. Colonel in the army they would probably care just as much as if you told them you went to a local 4-year and were a Lt. Colonel in the army. The difference between the schools wouldn't matter much.

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SEmpls@reddit

Just out of curiosity would Minnesota be classified as a smart kids state school or a big state school with football team

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zuukinifresh@reddit

Its certainly a school

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htownmidtown1@reddit

Yup. Checks out.

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Unicoronary@reddit

It's considered a "public ivy," for most of its programs (just like all the big state/regional draw schools). It's both (like U of Texas here) depending on the program. Stuff like "liberal studies," not so much, but their specialized departments (engineering, medicine/bio sciences, law, etc) are pretty top-notch in the midwest.

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TarzanKitty@reddit

Minnesota? Not exactly. It is absolutely not a public ivy. Hell, they have an acceptance rate of almost 80%. Michigan is a public ivy. Mn is just a random school with a Big 10 football team.

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unlimited_insanity@reddit

Don’t confuse selectivity with quality. UMN is on the list, and has been since 2001.

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TarzanKitty@reddit

Then, it must be a long ass list. I’m not seeing it on any list. How many schools are on your list?

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unlimited_insanity@reddit

Thirty total with six or seven being UCs. Madison is on the 2001 list. There are other schools that have been added over the years by various entities, including GA Tech (UGA is on the 2001 version). Unfortunately, too many people think acceptance rates are a proxy for quality, and the universities caught on, so I’ve got a freaking avalanche of mail in my house, to say nothing of my kid’s inbox. Recruit to deny is a crappy practice, but since it works for some schools, I reckon they’ll keep doing it. Meanwhile, there are schools like UMN out there focusing on both excellence and access. UMN is one of the largest public universities in the country, so it doesn’t surprise me that when you have a lot of seats relative to your state’s population, you get a high admit rate.

https://www.bestcolleges.com/blog/public-ivy-schools-and-little-ivies/

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DeathandHemingway@reddit

The Public Ivies - 2024 Edition - College Transitions

It's on that list, which is the first thing that came up with a Google search, but like 2/3rd of the Big 10 is on that list.

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Nimbus20000620@reddit

William & Marry, Umich, UCLA, UCB, UVA, UNC, and UTA are the public ivies imo. I think the term is a bit silly, but if I were forced to make one, these are the schools that would make the cut. Lots of schools I'd put in here before Minnesota tbh even though it is a very solid school.

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TarzanKitty@reddit

Big state with a football team.

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telestoat2@reddit

Isn't MIT in a whole other category, with other tech schools like Caltech, Virginia Tech, Georgia Tech? People don't go there for prestige, they go to learn technical stuff? Might as well just go to wherever is closest unless you really want to get away from mom and dad.

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mythirdredditname@reddit

GT grad here. I’m not that impressed by it but strangers seem to be. Not on level of Ivy League but definitely above large flagship state schools

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Comfortable-Ad-7913@reddit

GT is respected

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baycommuter@reddit

I was at a Stanford sports talk and a coach who had come from GT said it was harder for athletes to stay eligible there than Stanford because they only offered Bachelor of Science degrees. Pretty impressive.

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wolfsmanning08@reddit

I definitely don't have more respect for someone just because they paid ahit ton of money for school. In fact, I might have less respect for them.

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Mononon@reddit

Couldn't even tell you if my coworkers went to college at all, let alone which specific one they attended.

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Deep-Hovercraft6716@reddit

They don't. That's not a thing that 99 plus percent of people would even care about.

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Blankenhoff@reddit

Nobody cares unless its ivy league fight after you graduate.

Exception: if you went to a school with dedicated alumni, then youll randomly get preference in obtaining jobs if that person is hiring you. Every school has alumni, but some schools really have those die hards that are overjoyed to see an applicant with that school on it.

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Tedanty@reddit

I literally couldn’t care less lol. I mean cool they got a degree from some place, so did I. Whoopdedoo

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CatoTheElder2024@reddit

College prestige is a bunch of bull anyways. Outside about 5 universities in the nation… nobody gives a shit.

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CatoTheElder2024@reddit

Those five would probably be Harvard, Yale, MIT, Columbia, Vanderbilt.

Bonus Johns Hopkins for medical.

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CatoTheElder2024@reddit

Maybe cal poly tech, Stanford, ucla, on the west coast but that’s very discipline focused.

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roguesiegetank@reddit

You mean ~~Pasadena City College~~ CalTech? I don't think most people outside of California know about either of the three Cal Polys.

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CatoTheElder2024@reddit

Shit idk. I’m on the east coast so I just always hear of a cal poly tech. Idk which one. Which one is best? Let’s go with that!

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roguesiegetank@reddit

Probably ~~Pasadena Institute of Technology~~ CalTech then, no one outside of California probably knows about the Cal Poly schools (San Luis Obispo, Pomona, and Humboldt), as they're part of the second tier of public universities.

(Sorry, part of getting my degree, I'm legally obligated to make fun of our cross town rivals over in Pasadena)

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CatoTheElder2024@reddit

I love this.

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TheLastCoagulant@reddit

No it’s HYPSM. Stanford and Princeton are way better than Columbia and Vandy.

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CatoTheElder2024@reddit

Sounds good to me. Idk. I’m Exclusively east coast so 🤷🏻

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TheLastCoagulant@reddit

Even then, no way you ranked Vandy over Princeton dawg 💀

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CatoTheElder2024@reddit

Bruh idk. I may be drunk and have hit the lettuce. It’s been a min since I was in the high tier PhD academic level game.

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mister_burns1@reddit

It’s definitely not Vanderbilt.

Not Columbia either, but at least that’s in the zone.

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CatoTheElder2024@reddit

I was trying to give some love for the south. Maybe Vandy in religious history and medicine.

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Mobile-Cicada-458@reddit

I got my first job after college based almost completely on where I went to school. After that it mattered a lot less.

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-Boston-Terrier-@reddit

Playboy's Top Party Schools list has historically been the standard for prestige among most Americans that I associate with.

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NemeanMiniLion@reddit

ASU is probably all you need. 5's on 10's there man.

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gummi-demilo@reddit

Easier to get into Heaven than Arizona State.

(Proud Sun Devil here)

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OfficeChair70@reddit

Forks up

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ThePickleConnoisseur@reddit

Ew

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OfficeChair70@reddit

What are you, some wildcat?

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ThePickleConnoisseur@reddit

A wildcat is better than a scum devil

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MulayamChaddi@reddit

Chico State rules

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Danibear285@reddit

I’m partial to Penthouse’s Most Beautiful Co-Eds on Campus and Where They’re Studying yearly issue, myself.

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Current_Poster@reddit

I remember someone posting to this subreddit who was genuinely upset that nobody was "giving him his due" because he went to the London School of Economics.

On the one hand, I would want people to recognize my efforts too, but on the other, he was throwing an absolutely hilarious tantrum about it...

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ThePickleConnoisseur@reddit

The ones people know are Harvard, Yale, Princeton, UCLA, UC Berkely, Stanford, and MIT. Outside of those it doesn’t matter in terms of prestige. Most things are program specific. My college has world class astronomy, cyber, optical engineering, and MIS programs. But my program is average to above average

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worrymon@reddit

You went to college? Cool.

There's so many schools that unless you went to one of the famous ones, nobody's going to have heard of yours.

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InterestingWork912@reddit

I went to UNC chapel hill. I think it was helpful for getting interviews when I moved to WA early in my career but otherwise it doesn’t really matter, especially as you get older.

Some industries redact colleges, names, etc when you apply to try to take bias out of the equation during the first review of job applications (my former employer did this).

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Bobsothethird@reddit

Regular Americans don't, no. The average person probably doesn't give a shit. They may hear Harvard and be excited or shocked, but most probably wouldn't put much weight on it. Certain fields do, and Academia does as well, but the average American really doesn't care so long as you're good at what you do.

I have seen fraternities stand out, but again this is for a relatively niche upper class group of people, not the average American, and it's also kind of dying out.

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Sanjomo@reddit

It’s getting A LOT HARDER these days.

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airbear13@reddit

The hierarchy of universities is broadly understood by Americans. “Ivy leagues,” the term for very old colleges in the original colonies + a few others known for having big endowments and high achieving alumni are at the top of the hierarchy, then community colleges would be at the bottom. In between are a lot of state/public universities and small liberal arts colleges; I guess there’s some kind of hierarchy there too, but it’s less important unless your part of the alumni network.

Basically, if you say “I went to Harvard/princeton/yale/stanford/northwestern/cornell/georgetown/Columbia” and and a small handful of other schools like that, it’s kind of flex. If you went somewhere else, it’s only a flex if you’re talking to somebody that went to a lower tier school.

Because of the networking effect, going to elite universities is super powerful and basically unlocks a whole new trajectory for career path, earning power, and subsequently social status. Alumni from those same schools tend to end up in high positions and they perpetuate the privilege of these schools by treating other graduates from them favorably. They get other perks too, like for instance, in finance too firms often have a list of “target schools” which are synonymous with these elite institutions pretty much and only recruit out of college from them.

So yes college prestige matters a lot and impacts real life. It’s not exactly fair and I personally don’t believe one grad is better than another because of the difference in college they went to, but it is an efficient filter to use for companies that typically get huge stacks of resumes for high paying positions.

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Comfortable-Ad-7913@reddit

Ivy League isn't some nebulous term, its an actual league--an athletic conference.

Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale University

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water605@reddit

For profit universities are ranked at the bottom of prestige

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redditreader_aitafan@reddit

Very few people give a shit. It only matters when you interview if the person who interviews you knows or likes (or dislikes) your school. Obviously ivy league schools may be different, but even then most employers don't make their decisions solely on where you went to school.

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FongYuLan@reddit

Well things are changing, so that’s a gear in the works. The prestige schools have lost their shine in a huge way.

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fishsupreme@reddit

We all know about the Ivy League, we know that Harvard and Stanford and Yale and such are the best universities in America. But we also know about Oxford and Cambridge in England and such.

But outside of a very few fields (finance, law, consulting) concentrated intensely in the Northeast, nobody actually cares once you're a few years out of college. If I'm hiring someone with 10 years of work experience I don't care if they went to Harvard a decade ago - honestly I don't care if they have a degree at all if they've shown they can do the work for years. And in terms of personal relationships, I do not know or care what college anyone of my friends went to.

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PsychologicalBat1425@reddit

It helps you get your first job. After that employers are more focused on your work history. I currently have a couple co-workers that went to Harvard and Yale. I went to State and we all make the same amount of money. Although I would wager I was the first to pay off my student loans!

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Ok-Wonder-9788@reddit

There’s always going to be the same top tier (I.e. Ivy League), but otherwise what may be considered “prestigious” varies depending on region, socioeconomic background, professional field, personal preferences etc.

Generally though, most people don’t think or care much about it

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Harry_Balsanga@reddit

Nobody gives a shit what college you went to after you work your first job.

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MMcCoughan3961@reddit

There are the Ivy league schools, the little Ivies, the Southern Ivies (or Magnolia) schools. Then it certain fields some schools are more prestigious. Cal and Stanford come to mind as similarly prestigious.

Most of the time though, noone really cares as the accreditation process requires a certain degree of rigorous across the board.

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Cool-Coffee-8949@reddit

Vibes. It’s not scientific. Even the US News rankings are just based on vibes from professional college admins.

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tiasalamanca@reddit

The college matters a lot for the first job. After you’ve secured it and hopefully proven your worth, nobody cares for the next job.

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Grandemestizo@reddit

Most Americans don’t care where you went to school.

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Gullible-Apricot3379@reddit

I've seen a certain amount of favoring one's alma mater. Or sometimes for a less common degree, specific schools have a reputation.

There is a real bias against the online-only schools. Those might tick the box for 'has a degree' but don't count for much anything else.

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firemanmhc@reddit

I majored in engineering had the opportunity to go to Rensselaer, which is considered a very good engineering school, a step below an MIT or a CalTech.

I went to visit with my parents, and it’s in the middle of nowhere in upstate NY. 17 year old me didn’t want to go there and have nothing fun to do. I decided to go to Rutgers, which is a fine school but does not have the reputation of Rensselaer. It was only about a half hour from my house, I had access to all the things a big college offers, and it was less than half the cost.

I got a job upon graduation and the cheaper cost meant I didn’t have to worry about big student loan debt. And it never mattered that my degree wasn’t from Rensselaer. Once you start your career, nobody cares where you got your degree from. What matters is being good at your job, regardless of where you went to school.

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la-anah@reddit

I don't know where any of my colleagues went to college. I assume that means none of them went to Harvard or Yale, because ivy grads will find a way to work it into the conversation.

The most useful thing about a well known school is the network of contacts you make there. Other students, professors, members of the same frat/sorority, they can all open doors for you after graduation. The actual quality of education comes second. You can get a good education just about anywhere if you put the effort in, and you can graduate from a prestigious school having learned nothing if you take the right combination of courses to maximize party time.

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Accomplished_Mix7827@reddit

If it's not an elite college that everyone knows (Harvard, MIT, etc), no one knows or cares which colleges are more prestigious than others

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BWSmith777@reddit

There are a lot of people on Reddit who have the wrong attitude about college prestige. I’m happy for people who are proud to be an alum of a top school, but you can get a quality education anywhere that isn’t for profit.

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Primary_Excuse_7183@reddit

Most don’t care as long as it’s accredited. bonus if it’s a large D1 school that has household name recognition due to sports. lol the average American probably cares more about the sports than academics anyway.

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Bluemonogi@reddit

As an average American who does not employ people, work for a college and did not attend a top 20 college I really don’t care what school you go to. It doesn’t make you a better human being to go to prestigious school vs a community college or other life path. You have to do more than go to a “good school” to be someone I respect.

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ingyotter@reddit

I don’t think I ever blinked twice at someone who mentioned their college unless it was a fancy Ivy League school like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc. otherwise I feel they are all the same to me. I’m sure some are better than others but honestly unless they are an Ivy League I don’t think much of it. And even if it is an Ivy League I just look at them as wow they are smart or got money. Or both. XD

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A_Stony_Shore@reddit

It doesn’t really matter, honestly. In hiring decisions actual experience and ability to communicate are key, not the college.

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heliotropic@reddit

A lot of people in here are saying most people don’t think about it, which is pretty true and you did say “average american” so it’s a valid answer.

But as a note of nuance I’d say it’s kind of like Oxford and Cambridge in the UK. There are circles where people pay attention to whether you went there or not. It’s just that most people aren’t in those circles either socially or professionally. In my experience the same dynamic exists in the US: most people are in circles that are more likely to be interested in the football teams associated with colleges, but people who went to elite colleges are disproportionately likely to be in circles that do pay attention to it.

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Lamballama@reddit

If it's not "University of... " or "... University" it's probably more prestigious

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Ok-Astronaut2976@reddit

The average American?

By how good their football team is.

Ya, the Average American isn’t really big on book learning

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GoCardinal07@reddit

I went to one of those elite colleges. The average American goes, "Oh, nice school," but the average American isn't who the target is for these schools.

The elite college degree is a credibility shortcut in the corridors of the rich and powerful. My parents were public college-educated immigrants, and the corridors of power and wealth are way more accessible to me than to my parents: - I sit in suites more often than regular seats at concerts and games (and usually for free) - I've had jobs just straight up created for me - Each time there were even rumors that anything bad happened to my employer or my job, I got multiple unsolicited job offers - I've had employers mention my degree when introducing me to other people - In my consulting work, the degree usually gets mentioned by my partners to prospective clients, by existing clients to people we're meeting with, etc. (my experience always goes first, but the degree is the cherry on top they like to mention) - My consulting business was doing a joint project with another company, and we had to veto the other company's idea to slap my college's logo on to the corner of my photo - It even comes up in my nonprofit and volunteer work: when I get introduced, the degree gets mentioned - Like most people, my parents call customer service for a business or some general line for a government agency; I've found that I'm often offering to call some executive or politician to fix their issue faster - My master's degree is from a T30 school: almost nobody remembers it because my bachelor's degree casts such a long shadow

I don't tell people IRL about most of the above. I'm only doing it here because I'm anonymous.

(Before anyone here asks: I do not volunteer the school name when talking to people; I only state it if I'm specifically asked. I don’t wear the school merch unless I'm going to a football, basketball, or baseball game they're playing in.)

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djmcfuzzyduck@reddit

No one I know actually cares; I’m also the first one in my family to get a degree. That puts a certain spin on it.

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kingchik@reddit

It’s often about the US News and World Report rankings, yes. But in my experience, people generally know the ‘top tier’ universities and have heard of them enough to think ‘oh, that’s a good school’. That’s maybe the top 50-100.

The Ivy League schools and equivalent (so Stanford, Princeton, University of Chicago, for example) people would hear and think “wow, great school”.

Other than that, people often have a good idea of the schools near them. So they’d know the state schools and which are ‘good’ and which are less so, and then perhaps the nearest other major state schools.

For example, I grew up in Illinois. So people here would be familiar with the prestige of major Illinois schools (public and private), and then often the major colleges of nearby states. At my high school, the Big 10 schools that were most attended by our grads specifically had a bit of a ranking people all knew:

Northwestern University of Michigan University of Illinois University of Wisconsin Indiana University University of Iowa

So the smartest kids went to Northwestern or Michigan, and the kids who went to Iowa wanted a Big Ten school but couldn’t get in anywhere better.

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MilkChocolate21@reddit

Princeton isn't the equivalent of an Ivy League school. It's an Ivy. First and foremost the Ivy League is an athletic league. It is also made up of 8 school in the same region founded by wealthy people to educate other wealthy people. In the colonial days, Harvard's class rank was based upon family status. Funnily enough, for all the screaming otherwise, these schools became more competitive once someone other than rich white men could attend. Legacies from the right families pretty much do just walk in...

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kingchik@reddit

Right, so Princeton is an example of an Ivy, and Stanford and UChicago are examples of equivalents from other parts of the country…

And they’re all prestigious, so I’m not exactly sure what you’re on about.

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AliMcGraw@reddit

Also I will add that I went to a non-Harvard T5 law school and find it continually deeply annoying that my European colleagues do not immediately understand the wealth of socioeconomic and academic information conveyed by that degree.

In the US, you can be like, "I mean, he went to the University of Wisconsin!" "Yeah, but at OCONOMOWOC," and everyone understands the implicit prestige conversation. People outside the US definitely don't!

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AliMcGraw@reddit

It is quite regional. I went to a T5 law school on the East Coast but I wanted to move home to Chicago so I would have been way better off at U of I, which is a good law school and has a better regional alumni network.

My undergrad is T20 but super well-respected in the Midwest and less known outside it, so our alumni network is stronger here. Whereas a Harvard grad who wants to move to Chicago is going to have to prove to Chicago companies and firms that he or she has a REASON they want to be in Chicago, because so many Harvard and Yale and Stanford grads make a two-year stop in Chicago when they couldn't get hired in NYC, DC, or Silicon Valley, and companies don't want to invest in their training for them to leave immediately. Whereas a Michigan or Indiana or Oberlin or Drake or Carleton or Northwestern or Chicago grad is assumed to WANT to be in the Midwest and likely to be a long-term asset.

When my husband and I were moving to Chicago our Ivy pedigrees were a detriment and our cover letters had to explain we had deep family ties in Chicago and were permanent Chicago residents as soon as we could get back home.

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Firefly_Magic@reddit

Outside of the top, Ivy League colleges that usually the wealthiest attend, the rest of us are looking for more affordable universities.

Ultimately for career advancement we are looking for colleges that are Regionally accredited. A lot of the schools that advertise on apps like Reddit or on TV are considered for-profit, not accredited, and are not viewed highly by employers. Watch out for those because they are appealing for low cost, but the degrees are not worth it.

College accreditations

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username-generica@reddit

It really varies. Some schools are well known and respected in certain fields and professions. Some schools have strong alumni networks that can help you get your foot in the door. My husband is an engineers and owns his own business. He’s had the most success with hiring engineers from his Alma mater because the engineering graduates fit in well with the way he runs his engineering department. They’re more flexible and more interdisciplinary than a lot of engineers he meets who studied at different schools.

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1maco@reddit

Literally if it’s not an Ivy I’d UChicago, Stanford, MIT or maybe Vanderbilt/Duke

People really don’t know the difference

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No_Sir_6649@reddit

They used to be prestigous, but mostly is paid acceptance letters.

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mattinsatx@reddit

Prestige is for pointless dick measuring contests in bars nobody cares about.

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WoodsyAspen@reddit

Outside the Ivy League and Stanford, which are pretty universally prestigious, it’s usually irrelevant. I do think people in specific fields are familiar with schools with particularly good programs - my brother in law is an engineer and if other people in engineering hear he went to Carnegie Mellon they’re impressed. But it usually doesn’t come up unless people are reminiscing about school.

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Able_Enthusiasm2729@reddit

For people going to these fancy schools like Harvard University (other Ivy League/Seven Sisters universities) and places like Babson College, etc., they’re paying more for the socio-cultural capital attached to the names of these prestigious universities than the actual content of the education.

The prestige afforded to most “prestigious” unis like the Ivy League, Ivy Plus, the so-called “Public Ivy”, and some (not all) members of the 568 Presidents Group tuition price fixing cartel, but especially also the Seven Sisters, the Little Ivies, and also cliquey Small Liberal Arts Colleges (LAC) as well as some but not all Flagship universities, Party Schools, and Jock School universities with famous college sports teams known for their athletic prowess and well-funded American football teams like the Southeastern Conference (SEC) & originally t/Ivy League, are not necessarily speaking based (solely) on the content of their education but on the social capital and cultural capital associated with the university - i.e. the cultural impact they exert on a given region, the relationship they have with socialites, or the media attention they receive. For the first half of this list (private) , prestige is due to selectivity, artificial scarcity, exclusivity, and the high number of independently wealthy students/alumni it has, which they later on infused with substancial growths in academic prowess as an afterthought (before, they were practically a finishing school / glorified country clubs for wealthy elite adult children); while for the rest (public/newer), they have many non-academic markers of prestige due to school spirit, campus pride, popularity of their NCAA quasi-professional college sports teams, age of the institution, alumni giving/donations, nepotistic legacy admissions, and campus party culture which leads to better accese to cronyism in hiring while having the same or even lesser educational quality as a mid-teir/upper-mid-teir public university with mostly a purely education-oriented pseudo-commuter school for working professionals-stigma as opposed to small rural college town prestige dominated by preppy rural Agricultural & Main Street, etc.-style elite conservative Southern poshness steeped in fraternity and sorority culture or some urban area-based colleges that serve as playgrounds for the mostly Wall Street & Silicon Valley, etc.-style Northern or Western snobby trust-fund class (made up of champagne socialists and limousine liberals).

[ One major problem today is that even a good education from a decent university/college with sub-par cultural capital isn’t going to help people land entry-level jobs let alone a decent corporate/professional service internship that would lead to an entry-level job. Even if a college is higher ranked academic-wise but doesn’t have good brand recognition or has a non-academic social taboo against it, bias will lead many employers to rather hire someone from the party school of a university they’ve heard of, went to, and/or is socially well established in their communities than the higher ranked university with a sub-par social scene in the same region. ]

——————

Examples:

Tulane University undergrad games the U.S. News rankings by relying heavily on Early Action and Early Decision (making it hard to negotiate financial aid) and people claim that they near-auto-reject Regular Decision applicants to incentivize the enrollment of higher income applicants who don’t care much about financial aid and to artificially lower their acceptance rate.

Babson College attracts a lot of wealthy well off people (who couldn’t get into an Ivy League or Seven Sisters university), who’re there to mostly network and make business deals than actually learning the content of the degree program even though it’s overpriced (for the median person from a working-class background or international student regardless of socioeconomic status, it doesn’t have the same worth as an Ivy League or Ivy Plus degree and going to a less prestigious or non-prestigious but accredited private university or public state university would be a far better option). Unless you already fit into niche (American-centric) upper-class (or at the very least upper-middle class) social circles and understand their unique social norms to fit in so you make connections to advance your career in those same circles or have preexisting personal/professional connections of a similar caliber to pool together with others, Babson is going to be a waste of time, energy, and money.

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Atomic_Fire@reddit

It depends on your field to some extent -- like MIT is clearly the best STEM school and most of the ivy league isn't nearly as strong in STEM, Harvard Business School is undeniably the best. Yale Law school is regarded as the best. As a rule of thumb, there are rough tiers. Ranked from highest to lowest:

Harvard (MIT if STEM)

Yale, Princeton + Stanford

Rest of the Ivy League + UC Berkeley and maybe a handful of others like it (E. G. NYU, Georgia Tech if STEM, Tufts, Boston University).

Solid state schools (UCLA, CU Boulder, UIUC, UT Austin/Dallas)

Other lesser state schools and less relevant private schools

That's the gist of it. Harvard is indeed in a league of its own. Culturally it does play out only if you're at the top. You tell people you went to Harvard or MIT, you get taken seriously in your subject. Otherwise, as long as it's accredited, it doesn't have much effect beyond checking a box. Some schools have local prestige like Georgia Tech or Caltech.

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Alexdagreallygrate@reddit

I consider the Service Academies to be the most prestigious. They are incredibly hard to get into. You need flawless grades, excellent physical abilities, and an appointment from a select group of government officials.

If I meet someone who graduated from USMA (West Point), USNA (Annapolis), USAFA (Colorado Springs), or USCGA (New London) I have immediate respect for them.

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TrillyMike@reddit

Academically there’s Ivy League and a couple other schools that’s up there near that level. After that I don’t care, I guess if it’s a major state school or a school I’ve heard of that helps I guess. But like if you gotta math degree or something like that, like math is math, if it’s an accredited program you good.

Honestly, if we ain’t talkin them ivys n such, I’m more likely to judge ya college on how good their sports programs are.

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mirdecaiandrogby@reddit

Honestly the general opinion is that outside of Ivys and ivy adjacents (like Stanford) it doesn’t really matter

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lonelygayPhD@reddit

I went to UMass Dartmouth, which is a state school, but people think I mean Dartmouth, to the point that during an interview, my interviewer said, "Dartmouth. That's a great school." I didn't know what to say, so I just went with it.

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Appropriate-Food1757@reddit

There’s only a few that matter, and even then, undergrad degree doesn’t really matter much either.

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ATLien_3000@reddit

It's mostly arbitrary.

Pretty much all colleges in, say, the top 200, are going to provide the same caliber of book learning.

It comes down to the reputation your degree has and the network it provides (which both have a whole lot more to do with people that came several years before you).

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Valuable-Election402@reddit

I work in academics and people literally don't care what college you went to as long as you went to a college. they're happy if you went to community college. they believe in the institution of education, it doesn't matter where it was from.

I think there are fields where it does matter where you went and which degrees you got, but for the most part for jobs all it matters is that you have a degree on your resume.

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Plus_Carpenter_5579@reddit

The average American doesn't know anyone who went to an ivy league school.

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SabresBills69@reddit

undergrad does not matter that much in most careers and locations.

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mogul_w@reddit

The most regular of people probably at least general think of schools like this

Ivy league
Good at football
Named after states