I've heard a lot lately about which universities are "prestigious" so I thought I'd spell it out for anyone. This is strictly for undergraduate universities. Tier 1: Prestigious (people will feel "impressed" when they find out where you go to school, and this feeling may be temporary, or in some cases it can actually create a lasting impression in your relationship): - HYPSM - Oxbridge (University of Oxford, University of Cambridge) - Ivies (University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, Brown University, Dartmouth College, Cornell University) - Ivy+ (Duke University, UC Berkeley, California Institute of Technology, U. Chicago) - Elite LAC (Williams College, Amherst College) Tier 2: Not prestigious (people feel some acknowledgement of this university and know what it is, but it doesn't necessarily evoke any particular feeling of admiration): - UCLA - Carnegie Mellon University - Johns Hopkins University - Vanderbilt University - Washington University in St Louis - New York University - Imperial College London - University College London - École Polytechnique Tier 3: No one cares (people just don't really make any mental note of it, or they forget right afterwards): - State schools (UIUC, University of Michigan, Georgia Tech, and similar) - Other random universities Notice that no mention was made about "CS rankings"—whatever that nebulous and capricious phrase means. No one cares about CS rankings. No one's looking up on their phone the CS ranking of some state school you've never heard of. Most top students today are not choosing UIUC over Harvard because a “CS ranking” says so. A school is either "prestigious" in one’s mind, or not prestigious. First impressions are everything in the real world. If you have to ask whether you have prestige, you probably don’t have it.
Do I have prestige
Gotta bump Caltech down. It frustratingly has very little "street cred" somehow, except among academic types. For example, when I went there, people really often never heard of it, including residents living in the area. They'd confuse it with Cal Poly, etc. And my parents thought it was some random technical school.
Written by a new grad lol
Where’s University of Washington. Go huskies
Yup, where does UW rank?
Well I went to two of the first schools OP listed, both in Cambridge. My life hasn’t turned out anything special.
Laughable ranking
University of Washington missing. One of the most prestigious university in the US for CS
I’ve never heard of UW. When you say engineering and CS, I think of MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, and CMU. And schools like Caltech, Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech, RPI etc. I wouldn’t associate UW with “top tier”. Not saying they are or aren’t — just as a non CS person I’d never know that.
I know. It’s underrated and doesn’t get the attention it deserves. It’s #6 in this list - https://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/rankings?int=a27a09
Ok Arjesh
I assumed the M in the very first line is MIT.
Definitely no longer NYU/Columbia