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Because in America, Ivy versus non-Ivy isn't the distinction.

What matters is your major and whether it is a well respected program.

A CS@Texas student will have the ability to open the exact same doors professionally and prestige wise as a CS@Brown student.

You have Ivies, Ivy Tier Privates (Stanford, Chicago, Duke, USC, Caltech, MIT, NYU, Northwestern, Georgetown, CMU), and Public Ivies (Cal, UCLA, UCSD, Mich, UIUC, UW, UT, GT, Purdue, UNC Chapel Hill, UVA) that all recruit the same kind of applicant and place in the same careers and employers.

2 comments

Some of that prestige is more regional. Perspectives change based on location and experience. The ivies tend to be more national.

They ain't. A non-trivial amount of people have not heard of Brown or Dartmouth, and confuse UPenn with Penn State. Hell, I didn't hear about Brown until high school and I ended up attending an Ivy lol.

And employers and us alums of these programs know the difference is marginal.

I don't think anyone on the west coast of the US cares if you're an Ivy grad. Now, Stanford grads on the other hand, every employer seems to cream their jeans over them, for whatever reason. I knew a tech company that sorted their resumes into "Stanford" and "Everyone else". Having not gone there, I don't understand what the fuss is all about.

Every employer in the northeast knows who Brown and Dartmouth are.

The Northeast isn't the rest of America, the same way someone in Maine isn't necessarily going to think about CMC or Harvey Mudd similarly Brown or Dartmouth doesn't come up much or at all.

My impression was NYU had a high(er?) acceptance rate. Not saying they are a bad school, since the people I know there are super sharp, but still.

The acceptance rate is sort of a weird criteria for NYU when you compare it to the other schools it is listed with. It is a very popular school so it gets more applicants than 3-4 of the other colleges it is listed with combined, it has a slightly higher rate than most of those schools. It also accepts more students than probably all of those schools. I went there it is a good school. I don't think most people would put it in the same category as MIT. I certainly do not think it is as prestigious.

If you are using acceptance rates as a proxy for difficulty of schools in a given year, you need to adjust by desirability of location and perceived seriousness of degree programs.

And across time you have to adjust acceptance rates for the fact they are all way lower now because kids send out 2-3x as many apps.

A lot of kids even 20 years ago were applying to schools in NYC/Boston/DC on east coast because they wanted to be in NYC/Boston/DC. Many of my friends went to said schools for psychology/film/etc type programs at schools that as an engineering major were decidedly for me "safety schools". Many of these were 50% admit then and 10% admit now. I don't think they suddenly became as difficult as MIT.

Meanwhile many engineering schools (the types with Institute in the name) that were in cold rural boring areas had higher acceptance rates than my "safety schools" in Boston.

This trend has seemingly only accelerated. For example picking 3 schools in Boston to isolate just the difficulty feature:

* In 2005 MIT acceptance was ~16% vs 4% now (1/4).

* BC was ~30% vs 15% now (1/2).

* BU was ~68% vs 11% now (1/6).

So theres an argument that the harder the school the less dramatically its acceptance rate has compressed, while desirable good but not super hard schools (which have fluffy majors available) have had a larger effect.

7% acceptance rate. They're selective.

The "NYU/USC is a party school" trope is from back in the 1990s (aka 2 generations ago).