What's the most prestigious school?

It's the question everyone asks, just in different words. What's the best school? The most prestigious? Which one sends students to the best colleges, or sets a student up for life? Underneath all of them is the same instinct: ranking.

There's a whole industry built on that instinct, sites that exist to put schools in order, one through ten. We are not one of them. We're also not going to pretend the question isn't real, because we asked it ourselves when we went through this. You want what's best for your student. That's what all of us want.

The trouble is that what's best for your student isn't what's best for the student down the street. That's why there's no honest single answer to "which school is best." Rather than hand you a non-answer, though, we'd rather talk about what prestige actually is.

Prestige is mostly a measure of history. Not entirely, but mostly. It tells you a fair amount about a school's past, a little about how good that school is today, and almost nothing about how good it will be for your particular student.

Think about how a school earns it. You need two or three generations of students and families to pass through. You need those students to go out into the world and do notable things, the kind that eventually earn Wikipedia pages. Then come the crests and the alumni networks and the rest of it. Prestige is a lagging indicator. It takes decades to accumulate. So the schools we call prestigious in San Francisco are usually the ones that have simply been here a long time, with deep alumni networks and families who sent their children and then their grandchildren. That's what the word is pointing at.

None of which makes prestige worthless. It's real shorthand for "this school is good," and the networks can matter. What prestige can't tell you is anything about the other schools that might be a better fit for your student. It answers a status question, and fit is a different one.

So a prestigious school might be a wonderful place for your student. It might also be a poor one. The prestigious schools in San Francisco are a great fit for certain students and the wrong fit for others, and that's completely okay. We're lucky here to have that many real options. All we want is for you to understand what prestige actually measures before you let it do too much of your deciding. Finding the right fit is the harder question, and it's the one worth your time.