COLLEGE PRESTIGE TIER LIST - 2024

Just wanted to make an accurate overall undergraduate prestige tier list (not finance specific) to help my fellow monkeys out in case you're in a situation in which you need to quickly assess prestige.

1. Harvard

2. Stanford

3. MIT

4. Princeton

5. Yale

6. Caltech

7. UPenn

8. Columbia

9. Duke

10. Northwestern

11. UChicago

12. Dartmouth

13. Johns Hopkins

14. Brown

15. Rice

16. Vanderbilt

17. Williams

18. Amherst

19. Berkeley

20. Cornell

59 Comments
 
[Comment removed by mod team]
 
Controversial

Prestige means different things to different people.

Your list is ass if you’re talking about employer perception and it’s even more ass if you’re talking about laymen’s perception. It’s roughly accurate if you’re talking about a select group of people that follow college rankings, specifically USNews.

The non-Ivy Ivy+ schools that aren’t Stanford and MIT have been the sweethearts of USNews for decades now but schools like Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, Rice, Vanderbilt just don’t have the same quality of alumni network, employer reception, and general cachet as larger, recognizable schools like the top state schools Berkeley, UCLA, UMich and larger leaning private schools like Cornell, Georgetown, NYU. This is reflected in their global rankings but for national rankings, you can just blast more marketing brochures to decrease you acceptance rate and “game” the system.

Money being equal, you’d never take one of the schools I listed over any Ivy even though their rankings are about the same. You think Northwestern is only two spots below Columbia? You’re on crack.

 
Most Helpful

I would definitely take Northwestern over Cornell and Brown (and Dartmouth if I was interested in anything outside of finance/gov) - saying this as a Penn grad

 

Uchicago games the rankings with multiple ed rounds + ea to inflate themselves. They also get mistaken for a public school by the average person.

 

Second this, don’t know a single person outside of CA or TX who would take UCB or Rice over Cornell

 

More reasonable list, only national universities (each tier has no order):

1. H/MIT/Stanford

2. Y/P

3. Penn

4. Duke/Uchicago/Columbia(I would place above Penn 2 years ago)

4.5 Caltech (higher for STEM, lower for Finance/Pre-Law)

5. Dartmouth/Brown/Cornell

6. JHU/Northwestern

7. WashU/Rice/Vanderbilt

8. UCLA/UCB

 

Penn is not above the tier below it. If anything, Columbia is. Best school for Journalism, incredible for the pre-med kids, pre-law/gov is fantastic too (look at their alums, RBG, both Roosevelts, Obama, Hamilton, etc), and more. When I think Penn I think of a major business/nursing skew more than well-rounded prestige. Don’t let the idiotic protests that are now over hold too much weight, every school on your list had issues.

 

Not terrible, but Caltech isn’t really a well-rounded university and is only prestigious for STEM, I’d take Columbia over UPenn, Brown over Johns Hopkins, and Cornell over Berkeley. Also LACs don’t really belong on this list

 

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