For decades, higher education seemed immune to market forces, as families stretched to pay almost any price for a top-ranked college. Prestige was seen as synonymous with enduring value: Harvard would always be Harvard, Yale would always be Yale, followed by the Northwesterns and the Cornells, with aspirants such as the University of Southern California and Northeastern further down the ladder. But with sticker prices surging and graduates facing a tough job market, many parents have begun to question whether prestige alone is worth the price. As reputation loses some of its grip on the marketplace, colleges are moving up and down the list more than ever.
How we think about brands in higher education was largely decided centuries ago when America’s top colleges were established. These perceptions were cemented in the late 1980s, when U.S. News & World Report turned its college rankings into an annual exercise. A school’s “reputation score,” as determined by a survey of college leaders, was the most heavily weighted factor in assigning it a ranking on the list. Reputation is still the biggest factor in the U.S. News methodology, and plenty of people still care enough about an exclusive brand to pay a premium for it. In recent years, however, many families have begun to put more emphasis on practical matters such as tuition costs, hands-on learning, and career outcomes.
This evolution in priorities stems partly from personal experience. Today’s parents—who are more likely than their parents to be college graduates—have seen the college hierarchy change in their lifetime. When U.S. News released its 1989 rankings, it not only issued overall rankings, but also listed the top 25 colleges by reputation alone. A few of the names among the latter list seem like typos today: the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Purdue University, Indiana University Bloomington. Meanwhile, schools that were considered regional brands three decades ago, such as the University of Southern California and New York University, have risen in the rankings and now have acceptance rates that rival those of the Ivy League. Last cycle, NYU broke its own record, with more than 120,000 applications for a class of some 5,700 students.
In the past couple of decades, Americans have reevaluated not only what constitutes an elite school but what a college degree is actually worth. In the mid-2010s, about 85 percent of parents and students viewed college as an investment in the future, according to a long-running survey by Sallie Mae and Ipsos; by 2024, just 56 percent felt that way. In that same time frame, the share of people who said they were willing to “stretch themselves financially to obtain the best opportunity for the future” fell by almost 20 percentage points.
Nowadays, more than 80 percent of families with a six-figure income cross a college off their list at some point because of its cost. Only 61 percent did so in the mid-2010s, when six figures went further. This shift is reflected in the number of families paying full freight for college. Sixty-four percent of higher-income families paid the sticker price at a private college in the 1990s. That figure dropped to 28 percent in 2020, according to calculations by the economist Phillip Levine.
In my own survey of some 3,000 parents, more than a third at the highest income level ($250,000-plus) said they’d compromise “a lot” on prestige if a school cost them half as much as their child’s top choice because of merit aid. That’s largely because families rank prestige lower than other markers of a “good” college: the availability of internships and research projects, the job placement of graduates, the strength of specific majors. More and more families are measuring a school’s worth by what it delivers rather than what it represents.
Driving this trend is a so-called panicking class of parents—mostly in Gen X but also older Millennials—who fear their kids won’t be able to replicate their lifestyle in affluent American cities and suburbs. The sticker price of college has doubled in the past 20 years, and student debt covers much of the increase. Parents know the road to adulthood is longer than in previous generations, and as a result, they’ll need to support their kids well into their 20s. And with AI threatening to displace many entry-level jobs, some families are wondering whether a prestigious degree is still a solid insurance policy.
Parents are also drawing on their experiences in the workplace, with colleagues and new hires coming from all kinds of colleges. “I interview new grads. Where they went to school matters far less than what they did while there,” one parent, who works at one of the major tech companies, told me. “The kids who maximized opportunities at lesser-known schools often outperform the ones who just coasted at top schools.” Another said: “I attended an Ivy League college and can now confidently say that it has had little to no impact on my career compared to current friends who attended a less ‘prestigious’ college.”
Some families told me that they opted for less statusy schools because they feared that an elite college would mean yet another rat race for kids who’d only just made it through the admissions gauntlet. One student turned down a spot at Cornell (which would have required taking out loans) for a full scholarship at Southern Methodist University. She wanted a less competitive environment after graduating from what her mother described as an “intense public-school system with very cool opportunities that only 10 students got to do.” Another parent wrote that their daughter was thriving at the University of Alabama, on a full scholarship, while “many of her friends at ‘prestigious’ schools are stressed about money and competing with classmates.”
Of course, prestige does have some staying power. No one expects Princeton, MIT, and Harvard to suddenly tumble out of the elite ranks. But change can happen faster than we expect. Consider Columbia, which in two years has gone from a symbol of ascendant wealth and ambition to a campus convulsed by protests, lockdowns, and administrator resignations. Columbia fell two places in the U.S. News list this year, making it the lowest-ranked of the Ivies. Many of our long-held certainties about which colleges matter and which don’t turn out to be embarrassingly shortsighted.
We see that shift in where teenagers are applying to college. Until about a decade ago, high-school seniors mostly confined their search to a specific set of either private or public colleges. They might focus on the Ivy League, or a cluster of small liberal-arts colleges in the Northeast, or the Big Ten and Southeastern Conference flagships. Today, teenagers are far more likely to apply to a mix of both public and private schools, in state and out of state. In other words, students seem less concerned about sticking to a sliver of universally known brands and are instead casting a wider net.
Some of this shift is practical: Though many brand-name flagship public universities have expanded to keep up with demand, the top-ranked institutions largely haven’t, forcing students to look beyond the vaunted schools of the Northeast to the South and West. Some of the change is related to other considerations. Nice weather is a not-insignificant factor behind the rising popularity of southern publics. The number of students heading to the flagship public universities in the South has swelled especially since 2020, in part because some of these schools had fewer restrictions during the pandemic than campuses elsewhere. Homebound teenagers were served up clips of football games and sorority parties at southern schools that made these campuses seem fun.
Some college leaders, looking for ways to compete with the elite tier, have cultivated values that go beyond prestige. About 30 years ago, Northeastern’s president at the time, Richard Freeland, understood that trying to beat the Ivies on history was futile. So Freeland leaned into something distinctive about Northeastern: its co-op program. He bet that by investing more in the program, which embedded work experience in the curriculum, he could win over families more concerned with job placement than pedigree—and he was right. In a few decades, Northeastern’s U.S. News ranking has gone from 162 to 46, and its acceptance rate has dropped from 70 percent to less than 6 percent. Suddenly, Northeastern is looking pretty prestigious.
Prestige in higher education has long favored the incumbents at the top of the rankings. But the more that families steer their decisions elsewhere, the less secure those incumbents will become. One student described his acceptance to Columbia in 2023 as akin to winning the lottery. But once he arrived on campus, he told me, the high wore off quickly. A class he wanted to take had a waitlist so long that he wouldn’t get in until he was a junior or senior, if at all. A professor he’d hoped to do research with didn’t allow undergraduates to work in his lab. The core curriculum was a grind, and the competition to get into clubs was intense.
He told me that he was so enamored with the brand name that he hadn’t taken the time to consider what he really wanted out of his undergraduate experience: finding great friends and working closely with faculty, without constantly clawing for the next thing. After a year at Columbia, he transferred to the University of Minnesota, some 40 spots lower in the rankings. He told me he finds his courses just as challenging as at Columbia, he gets to work in a research lab, and his classmates are more welcoming—and his tuition has been cut in half.
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