Educational Prestige in the US: Public, Expert, and Commercial Rankings

• In Event: New Frontiers in Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Research

Abstract

How is educational prestige hierarchically ordered in the United States? As higher education has expanded and college credentials have become increasingly visible in social, professional, and digital life, educational institutions have emerged not only as gateways to economic opportunity but also as salient status symbols. Yet while stratification research has extensively examined education as a mechanism of mobility and inequality, far less attention has been paid to education as a symbolic status position in its own right---publicly interpreted as a marker of honor, esteem, and social superiority. However, researchers currently lack a validated, perception-based prestige scale that captures how institutions are ranked in collective social evaluation. In this project, I reconceptualize educational prestige as a relational status hierarchy and develop a multi-source measurement strategy to evaluate how it is currently represented and how it ought to be measured. I construct and compare three representations of institutional prestige: (1) a newly fielded survey instrument designed to measure public perceptions of institutional prestige, modeled on the occupational prestige tradition, (2) an expert hierarchy inferred from a directed network of peer nominations among university leaders using IPEDS comparison-institution data from 2010–2024; and (3) five widely circulated commercial ranking systems. Findings from the expert peer-recognition network reveals a highly stratified and temporally stable hierarchy. On the other hand, commercial rankings diverge substantially from one another and align unevenly with the expert hierarchy. These divergences demonstrate that existing prestige measures are not interchangeable, reflect different evaluative logics, and may produce drastically difference findings in stratification research that rely on commercially constructed rankings or categorical proxies to study qualitative differences in education. By developing a sociologically grounded, perception-based educational prestige scale and situating it alongside expert and commercial hierarchies, I provide a validated framework for studying education as a symbolic status order.

Author

• Alex Wei Jie Chow, Stanford University