<p>The average person definately doesn't know what the Ivy League really is or what schools are in it. In fact, you need a fairly sophisticated person to answer that question.</p>
<p>I tell you in my school and the rest of my area, it goes:</p>
<p>ND #1
Harvard #2
Everyone Else #3</p>
<p>Now, don't misunderstand, I am insanely excited that I just got accepted to Tufts, but it drives me nuts that no one knows about it...then again, the only people that do are intellectuals, so I suppose that's all that really matters, lol.</p>
<p>Duffman i am an international who knows about Tuffts! There is hope for you. </p>
<p>Although the first place i heard it was on the tv show "two guys a girl and a pizza place" (or something along those lines). So maybe that may not be the best way to hear about a college, not exactly intellectual heh. However being the dork I am, I looked it up online. </p>
<p>I also have wanted to go to Brown since i was 11. However very few people in Australia have ever heard of Brown let alone know its an ivy. As most people are saying, most people only know HPY (and yale may only be a recent addition). You may be able to add some large state schools and NYU to that list.</p>
<p>My dad did his PhD in Canada so i think that has opened my eyes a little more than most Australians about colleges in the US/Canada.</p>
<p>To all of you who are putting down Wake Forest University- for your information, I am in N.J. (the most heavily populated state in the union!!) Wake Forest is VERY well known, academically it is well respected. Just because you are in Cal-i-forn-i-a does not mean you know it all. But I guess with ARNOLD in charge of you all, who knows..........</p>
<p>^ But he is the GOVERNATOR....then again, last time I checked, he had a 38% approval rating, so, it's not him they're listening to...must be Deepak Chopra, or their scientology mentors...I crack on Cali, but it's where I was born. :</p>
<p>i think a good mark of "perceived prestige" is that peer evaluation thing on the USNWR rankings.</p>
<p>Scale from 1-5</p>
<p>i think like harvard, princeton, yale are all like 4.9</p>
<p>i'm sure there are other 4.9's I just dont have it in front of me.</p>
<p>on a side note:</p>
<p>A survey was given to 1000 employers a couple years ago to rate the quality of the undergraduate business program at Princeton University. Over 900 of them rated it as "very prestigious"..........Princeton doesn't have an undergraduate business program.</p>
<p>njmom, i contend that most AVERAGE people have never heard of wake forest. the very fact that you're on this website most likely makes you ABOVE average, and thus, your knowledge of wake doesn't count.</p>
<p>I haven't heard of Wake Forest and I'm a senior applying to prestigious schools. I'm going to go look it up right now. My guess is that it's in the NE.</p>
<p>EDIT: I guess it's in NC. Heh.</p>
<p>I agree. I would even contend that the majority of average people have never heard of school out of their state other than Sports powerhouses, HYPSM + Berkeley, and nearby schools. So 5/8 of the Ivy league, and schools like Caltech, Northwestern, UChicago, GTown are probably unknown. The exception is the northeast, where states are small so that people know what goes on outside of their state borders.</p>
<p>But that's ok, because its not the average person that will matter to your career.</p>
<p>I think Flavian pretty much nailed it. Obviously things are slightly skewed depending on which part of the country you're in and how old you are. </p>
<p>These are the results from the Gallup poll and they seem pretty acurate to me. I'm not saying these people know any thing about the quality of schools, but this seems to be the national perception.</p>
<p>1)Harvard
2)Stanford
3)Yale
4)MIT
5)Berkeley
6)Notre Dame
7)Princeton</p>
<p>if prestige is ranked above all else in your college decisions, youre going on to higher education for the wrong reasons....</p>
<p>Well, prestige itself cannot be used like that. There are different types of prestige. For the common man, Penn state is more prestigeous than Northwestern, but not to an experienced recruiter. Berkeley sounds prestigeous than Dartmouth to the common man, but an Ivy leaguer will readily claim the opposite. Likewise, people don't go to Wharton to impress a fast food manager.</p>
<p>whoever posted that reply talking about if you are from california, you think UC's are great, you haven't heard of Penn, Stanford is an Ivy and all the other things in it...was right on. Hahah. It is annoying though sometimes because everyone here does think that UC's are the highest level colleges besides like Harvard.</p>
<p>Why does everyone think Berkely has wider name recognition, and not UCLA. Everyone has heard of UCLA, whereas most people have not heard of Berkely. In fact, I would totally amend that list. </p>
<p>Here are my "best name recognized" colleges list
Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, UCLA, MIT, NYU, Texas A&M, Notre Dame, Georgetown, Columbia, Duke</p>
<p>I think name recognition and prestige can be linked but essentially are two different things. People can recognize the name of many colleges for one reason or another (sports success, bad press, etc.) but that does not make that school prestigious. Kind of like the classic "all dogs are not German Shepherds" bit. Every prestigious school has to have name recognition, but not every school with name recognition is prestigious.</p>
<p>international people only know berkeley, harvard, stanford, princeton, yale, cornell, and maybe michigan and UVa. bring up the rest and they're like .....????</p>
<p>how about schools like NYU or USC? I am sure those schools have name recognition and prestige to a cetain extent.</p>
<p>If you live in the Northeast but not a total snob elitist community, the average person is like WOW NYU!!!!! Very good school!</p>
<p>Just saying.</p>
<p>PS. I'd never heard of Notre Dame until I came to CC, but I mean..I've heard of like...Swarthmore. And Wesleyan. And even....Macalester?!
So if you really don't follow sports, Notre Dame doesn't seem to have much pull. Nobody I know has heard of it either.</p>
<p>I think there is a difference between national recognition and local recognition too. The "average person" from say St. Louis is going to know about WUSTL, and the "average person" from Texas is going to know about Rice. However, most people even in a college prep school like mine do not know much about either because they are not local to the Cincinnati area. Hell, we seem to think that Miami OH is the next up-and-coming Michigan!</p>
<p>So the OP's mixing of local prestige and nationally prestigious schools is what is ****ing everyone off here. It all depends on where you grow up.</p>