Overrated colleges and universities in America

UT-Austin

The Electoral College

Stanford

USC

The ivys aren’t overrated. America’s smartest kids go there.

The private no-name colleges that charge what the ivys are overrated

Stanford.

Duke

Trump U

DeVry

University of Phoenix

Stanford is definitely not overrated. Now Duke, Vandy. That's overrated.

Tufts (I was going to go there... until I visited)

NYU of course.

Stanford is known more for the people who dropped out than those who graduated. It's also the home of the super-conservative Hoover Institute. It has a beautiful campus, that's all.

NYU

Tufts and Tulane always struck me as where rich kids who didn’t have the best grades went.

Royal Tampa Academy of Dramatic Tricks

Cornell and UPenn are the two ivys everyone gets into

NYU is massive and has a high tuition—haven for stupid rich kids

Over-rated how? There are so many aspects to a university.

What R11 said. NYU owns this thread

R4, just because the country’s smartest kids go there doesn’t mean they’re not overrated. In fact it could well mean the opposite.

Unless you’ve attended the university you are purporting to evaluate, you don’t know what you are talking about.

Yes, no, r21.

Then you might be able to speak to the quality of the faculty in your field, r22, but not much else.

All woke universities

HARVARD

Lol R15

UNC and its racist Confederate-inspired mascot

Film schools own this thread.

if the school has tv commercials DO NOT GO THERE

[quote] The ivys aren’t overrated. America’s smartest kids go there.

Your darn tootin'!

Surely you jest r29!

Yale aka children of famous politicians university.

The elite small Midwestern liberal arts colleges - Oberlin, Earlham, Wooster, Grinell, Kenyon, etc. - are all terribly overrated and over priced.

[quote]NYU is massive and has a high tuition—haven for stupid rich kids

Both of Kelly Ripa's kids go there!

International Correspondence School

All schools that are doing exclusively remote learning while simultaneously increasing tuition.

Over priced would be more interesting. Overrated is a little vague. Like the midwestern liberal arts colleges - I think they provide a great education so not sure how they are “overrated”. Maybe in the sense of getting a job - impractical may. E a better word. But they are “rated” based on their quality education- which I think they deliver on. If we are “rating” based on usefulness in capitalism, that’s a different standard.

R33, Oberlin is universally acknowledged as an intellectual shithole. And even then, it's overrated. The other shithole colleges hate to be lumped in with Oberlin.

[quote] Tufts and Tulane always struck me as where rich kids who didn’t have the best grades went.

Very true 25 years ago. Today, Tulane is highly selective. It admits only @15% of applicants annually and it costs $50k a year. A colleague has a smart kid with good grades who wanted to go there but did not get in. I was gobsmacked.

[quote][R33], Oberlin is universally acknowledged as an intellectual shithole. And even then, it's overrated. The other shithole colleges hate to be lumped in with Oberlin.

A shithole by the standards of shitholes. It must be bad.

Vanderbilt University.

It’s a top choice for rich private school kids from all over the Deep South. The embodiment of cushy, bland, unchallenging, relentless mediocrity.

Clemson

NYU, another vote. An example of the corporatization of higher education: we can increase tuition continuously (profit) to pay for the bigger real estate footprint, the grander buildings, the higher-profile faculty, the media profile (overhead). It never ends, it never stops, as long as there are gullible children with money who think they're buying something first-rate and special.

If Theo Huxtable could get through NYU, anyone can.

[quote] International Correspondence School

NOOOOOOOOO!!!

But I got my important degree in Learning the Personal Computer there!!!

University of Wisconsin--Madison. Not that great of a school--not on par with U of Michigan--but people (in the midwest) rave about it.

Schools that people go to when they want to go to a prestigious school, but didn't get in:

Trinity (nothing tops Trinity as the school that not one single grad wanted to go to)

Duke

NYU

Tufts

Grinnell

Claremont

Tulane

Pepperdine--It's ASU for wealthier kids who may be a little less drunk.

That's just not true at all, r47. I have known lots of very smart kids who are the children of college professors who have wanted to go to Grinnell and the Claremont schools; I have known lots of kids who are high achievers for whom NYU or Duke was their dream school.

Reed

College of Hard Knocks

Isn't Tulane a notorious party school?

Oxford

What you're paying for at the Ivys is a good education, but more than that, the connections, the "certification" that you can run with the elite, it's your gate pass into the network. There are powerful tables you may never be invited to sit at, groups you may never know exist, without that education. Play your cards right and it pays off over and over again. If you have any sense at all, you can skip over a whole lower level of jobs and survival.

I wonder what criteria the OP thinks anyone in this thread possesses to make this assessments? Nice try troll.

Selectivity doesn't translate into quality. There's always a number of schools that are "selective" but easy to graduate. Brown seems to be a continuing example. Wesleyan was like that in the 80s. There was a WashU troll on another thread who seemed to confuse this, neglecting to know that parts of WashU never recovered from its bad old days in the 70s and 80s and they basically rebuilt their social work school by hiring people from St Louis U, the less "selective" school in town.

Stanford and Yale actually care about teaching as well as scholarship by their faculty. There are lots of places with uneven faculty that will never really rise---my impression of Brown is that if anything the quality of the faculty has declined even in the med school. Emory is very uneven, doesn't care about teaching, and doesn't really support the development of people who started there. They'll buy people from elsewhere who do nothing help build departments--they just want to be big fish in a medium sized pond.

Unless you major in something practical like engineering or natural sciences, a college degree is pretty useless. Arrogant liberal professors basically just teach students to hate America.

R47, I get that you are a DL snob but you should know that all the schools you listed are "prestigious." There are prestigious schools that are not one of the 7or 8 Ivy League schools. Duke, Grinnell, NYU, Tulane and Claremont have extensive, loyal and influential (and very rich) alumni networks -- that equals prestige.

[quote] Isn't Tulane a notorious party school?

Once...40 years ago when the legal drinking age in La was 18. Not now at $50,000 a year. Today, even ASU isn't a "party" school. Higher education is serious business and now that students can be criminally prosecuted for allowing their peers to get blackout/Brett Kavanaugh blasted the party is over.

Except for the 15 or so names that make people go "wow - you went there?", all private colleges and universities are overrated. You can get the same education at state school prices.

R57 went to plumbing school in the 70's. Universities want students to learn critical thinking, something sorely lacking in the US. Unfortunately a meme does not replace learning.

Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo thinks it's on par with Berkeley, but really it's on par with its fellow CSU colleges, Fullerton, Fresno, etc.

Wossamotta U

The choice was Stanford or Cambridge; chose Cambridge. Stanford seemed too try-hard. Anywhere that uses 'selling techniques' to pressurize you into acceptance is deeply suspect.

R57 = Donny Trump Jr.

r60 in my experience, one advantage of going to a top school/program is the academic and intellectual caliber of your peers.

Source: I went to a middle-of-the-road state university for undergrad and a relatively high-ranked private university for grad school, where I also taught.

I agree with the assertion that for many schools, it is more about the program/department than the school itself. My graduate program at NYU was absolutely phenomenal and not overrated. My undergraduate college (not yet mentioned on this thread but very highly rated) was great for certain subjects and awful for others. I had a negative experience, which made my graduate experience at NYU even more positive in comparison.

R60 I so wish somebody had sat me down when I was 18 and explained this to me. But I don't blame my parents -- they couldn't have known.

"University of WPson. Not that great of a school--not on par with U of Michigan--but people (in the midwest) rave about it."

people rave about Madison, not the university.

Fuck the Ivy League. I support anyone running for office who will not hire Ivy Leaguers.

r4 is correct. Hate the Ivy League all you want, but the quality of education is much better than private colleges that cost the same.

Departments matter a lot-- for graduate school. It doesn't matter very much for undergrad degrees, unless you go in knowing you want to try to get into a top graduate school.

I am an Ivy League fan, though I received an excellent undergrad experience at a large state school. I loved my departments. Why deny the reality of the networking one has within the Ivies? That’s literally everything.

I think that it goes without saying that going to a lesser known liberal arts school is the education solely for the most elite families in America (generally speaking).

The more interesting question for me are the newer admissions paradigms being used — I’m referring to Princeton. If the Ivies continue to follow their lead, won’t we actually be achieving an actual pathway to move up a social class (or two!)? New opportunity is being created that will benefit working class students which is exciting for our country.

Kamala Harris went to Howard, and then to UC for law school. And she's about to be one heartbeat away from the Presidency. So the Ivys are NOT all that.

Whatever mess of a school in PA in which Miss SylviaFowler is teaching in. Yes, you paid your hard earn dollar for her to browse DL.

Are all the Ivy's cutthroat? I know a woman who went to Harvard and she always says she hopes her kids don't want to go there. She says it was just too competitive and the kids were so arrogant. She had a bad time there.

My best friend did undergrad at Claremont and got his JD at Stanford.

He is SMART.

R72, she got where she is because she sucked and fucked Willie Brown. And she’s just a tool for the establishment Democrats. She’ll just be a puppet, not a true leader. And she won’t be inspirational like Obama. Sarah Palin had more charisma than Kamala and even she couldn’t beat Obama.

And don’t underestimate the growing resentment against these riots and protests. Many people who don’t like Trump would still prefer him over anyone they associate with the crazy far left.

[quote] And she’s just a tool for the establishment Democrats.

Fuclk off.

*Fuck off

USC = Buy a Degree

Commonly referred to as a diploma mill by instructors. And that was long before the recent bribery scandals. It's been going on for decades. I am not exaggerating when I say every time I have hired a "professional" who graduated from that school they always over sold their ability and under preformed on the job. This includes professionals like Lawyers, medical Doctors and Periodontists.

Not that it's considered to be amongst the best, but my cousin teaches at the University of Kentucky and says knowing what the students pay and what education they get, there's no way she'd send her own kids there.

The University of Virginia. They’re going to have to stop worshiping “Mr Jefferson” now, which is my favorite thing about our woke times. That place is obnoxious, I should know since I went there.

It is not a charm school r81.

It’s kind of a vague question I agree but if I’m going to pick then I would have to agree with Penn and (especially) Cornell, since they’ll always have to prestige of an “Ivy league degree” without nearly the selectivity (again, especially Cornell). Not to mention plenty of non-Ivies (Duke, Amherst, etc) that are more selective and a smarter student body overall.

Someone here will inevitably throw the low acceptance rates at those schools which is meaningless because acceptance rates are “low” now everywhere — USC is at 17% I believe, exactly when Harvard was when I was applying to college. It’s all relative to what everything else is these days (the top Ivies are at about 6% now and get lower every year.)

I thought Oberlin was where you went to be a dance, or gender studies major and that's about it.

Google has some of the dumbest people I’ve ever met in their program manager positions. They all went to Ivy League schools.

R85 it's because they are glorified secretaries.

As the first college to grant undergraduate degrees to women and a historical leader in educating African Americans, Oberlin College in Oberlin, OH, is known for its commitment to social engagement and fine academics. Oberlin consists of two units: the College of Arts and Sciences and the Conservatory of Music.

#12 Music Conservatory in the country.

USC started climbing up because of all those Chinese national students they began accepting for those huge out of state tuitions. They were good to excellent students and pumped the scores and reputations of the obvious fields, i.e. math, science.

Once they began restricting admissions to these students and there became a rash of crimes against Chinese students at and around the school, USC is now reverting back to Olivia Jade University.

But at the end of the day, because the UCs and now even the CSUs are so difficult to get into, USC is still getting some very good students, who, for whatever reasons, did not gain admission to the state schools.

I honestly think of Penn as a good Ivy. Maybe because of Wharton. Definitely more Ivy than Cornell.

[quote]I honestly think of Penn as a good Ivy. Maybe because of Wharton.

Trump is a graduate... one of the stupidest people alive.

As a European who attended an alleged top European university, I can tell you that the US is the wrong target. After I attended an Ivy League university for graduate school and saw what the undergraduates had done, I guarantee you that the students who went to US universities in and outside the Ivy League were better educated and had better preparation.

Lincoln Land Community College in Springfield IL.

Wesleyan (Connecticut) for about the last 20 years.

Christian colleges are breeding grounds of xenophobia and homophobia. What would jesus do?

R94 he wouldn’t come to your house.

R95 my Door Dash delivery guy was hotter anyway 🖕

NYU undergrad. Their grad schools are fine to great but the undergraduate student body is mediocre. It’s kids who care about what’s on the test and getting their degrees, not about learning. Because it’s huge, it’s easy to get by and never befriend anyone outside your major and socioeconomic bubble.

Sweet Briar

[quote] USC started climbing up because of all those Chinese national students they began accepting for those huge out of state tuitions.

USC is private. Tuition is the same whether you’re from California or out of state. I think the appeal of foreign students is that they pay full freight—no financial aid.

R99 And foreign students who do pay the full price are often enormously wealthy in their home countries and have connections and drive. I know Indian students who did not get into college in India so they went to NYU and USC. They are one percenters in India but because the currency is weak, their parents make less than ordinary doctors and lawyers in Kentucky whose children get financial aid.

R9 and other Stanford fans: Trump is bragging about his new corona guru - Scott Atlas - as being from Stanford. "A very famous guy," says Trump. No qualifications other than being FROM STANFORD.

Reminds me of Elizabeth Holmes except he actually graduated.

[quote]They are one percenters in India but because the currency is weak, their parents make less than ordinary doctors and lawyers in Kentucky whose children get financial aid.

R100 Then how did their children attend NYC and USC? I'm not doubting, I'm just curious.

R102 They pay very little in income tax and use their savings to pay for their children’s education. Many who attend school here want to emigrate so it’s a good investment.

R90 Kushner graduated from Harvard. Bush Jr. from Yale. There are always outliers.

Penn, Cornell, Dartmouth and Columbia were significantly easier to get into even in the ‘80’s.