Thank you for choosing 5 best reputation colleges !

What is your goal in finding out this information?

If you are simply curious about how Americans in general view these colleges, you are asking in the wrong place. CC is a tiny bubble of people who spend a lot of time thinking about and looking into colleges. Even most college-educated Americans haven’t heard of many of these or know nothing about them unless they have been involved in the college search for their kids, or whose occupation would be related in some way (working in academia, hiring, etc.)

Here’s an example. I won’t rank the colleges, but I’ll tell you what my opinion/knowledge of each of these schools was before I had a particular interest in looking at colleges:

Tufts University - never heard of it
Brandeis University - never heard of it
University of Massachusetts–Amherst - knew it was a state U
Middlebury College - never heard of it
University of Wisconsin–Madison - knew it was a state U
Grinnell College - never heard of it
Fordham University - never heard of it
Vassar College - knew it was prestigious
University of Virginia - knew it was prestigious
College of William & Mary - knew it was prestigious
Wake Forest University - heard of it but didn’t know reputation
University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill - knew it was prestigious
Case Western Reserve University - never heard of it
Oberlin College - may have heard of it, but no opinion on prestige
Kenyon College - never heard of it
Emory University - knew it was prestigious

You can probably guess what area of the country I’m from. And even those southern schools I knew of in a general way, I couldn’t really have ranked. Now that I have been on CC I’ve heard of all of these and have a positive impression of all but I couldn’t rank them.