University prestige: how much of a factor?

[Choppy]

Oops - Vanadium beat me to it.

For winning grants it seems to matter a good bit. This is from experience in grant writing. Every see a summary sheet? They give you scores on institution/facilities/environment.

In my experience that has more to do with an assessment of the facilities available for the specific project than the name of the school though. Do the applicants have the facilities available that they claim to. Who wants to grant a million dollars to a group that wants to go out a buy a used linear accelerator, but has no (safe) place to put it?

On the other hand, I suppose an argument could be made that the facilities available for research is one dimension of the overall metric used in university rankings.

 

[gravenewworld]

Oops - Vanadium beat me to it.



In my experience that has more to do with an assessment of the facilities available for the specific project than the name of the school though. Do the applicants have the facilities available that they claim to. Who wants to grant a million dollars to a group that wants to go out a buy a used linear accelerator, but has no (safe) place to put it?

On the other hand, I suppose an argument could be made that the facilities available for research is one dimension of the overall metric used in university rankings.

And its probably different for physics than biomedical research. Not every university is ranked in the top 5 in the world for medicine and there's a reason why the place I'm at is the #1 funded instution by the NIH for 20 years running and has been the #1 school for total research spending for over 30 years. Where does this money come from? If institution name never mattered then how has one place had a strangmehold on so much money for so long? The spending on physical science pales in comaprison to biomedical research, biology , and medicine.

 

[jesse73]

And its probably different for physics than biomedical research. Not every university is ranked in the top 5 in the world for medicine and there's a reason why the place I'm at is the #1 funded instution by the NIH for 20 years running and has been the #1 school for total research spending for over 30 years. Where does this money come from? If institution name never mattered then how has one place had a strangmehold on so much money for so long? The spending on physical science pales in comaprison to biomedical research, biology , and medicine.

A lot of donation money goes to elite school because among billionaire's getting your name on a cancer research building at MIT has more bragging power than at a state school.