<p>A college should be chosen strictly on match and fit certainly, but out of curiosity which one has the better and more far reaching name recognition - Barnard or Vassar?</p>
<p>If there’s any difference whatsoever in reputation it’s barely discernable, debatable, and would be of such trivial distinction as to play no useful role in college selection. IMO.</p>
<p>If you want to split hairs, maybe “name recognition” is correlated with alums who are famous.And people who are famous tend to be actors, TV personalities, politicians, or sports figures.
In these categories, Vassar has Meryl Streep,Jane Fonda who dropped out, and Jackie Kennedy who transferred. Barnard gets Joan Rivers. +2 for Vassar.</p>
<p>But does this matter?</p>
<p>You can look at the US News “Peer Assesment” scores, to try to assess reputation among academics. But these exclude scores for Columbia where Barnard students take on average 30% of their classes, are probably bogus(what do they really mean/measure, for LACs?), and really have little or nothing to do with “far reaching name recognition” among the masses anyway.</p>
<p>You can also look at # total threads on college confidential.</p>
<p>I suppose other things you could do to gauge “far reaching name recognition” is look up each school’s Student Profile page, and see what proportion of their students come from " the far reaches": eg., West coast & International. And look up where each school’s alumni clubs are located, to see how many are located in “the far reaches”.</p>
<p>IIRC Vassar is slightly harder to get into currently, but I only happen to have come across this because I had kids applying recently. “The masses” wouldn’t know.</p>
<p>The thing is, the biggest component to each’s name recognition is as one of the historical “seven sisters”. And this is a heritage they share.</p>