<p>At the risk of being either too dense or too negative, I for one have to disagree with that simple concept or thesis. I realize I have pointed to that part repeatedly, but I do not think that you can establish the “national status” by merely comparing the percentage of students from its “given” catchment area to the rest of the US. </p>
<p>What does the data for a school such as WUSTL show? That there are fewer students from what you defined as the Midwest? How does a city such as Dallas fit in that puzzle? After all, isn’t Dallas part of the South in the definition of the zones. Or perhaps I missed that as I did not pay close attention beyond the basic proposal. In the meantime, I can assure you that many selective students in Texas consider WUSTL part of their academic “backyard” along the lines of Rice or Vandy. </p>
<p>Again, I do NOT think that WUSTL is a more national school nor that it did a BETTER job at becoming a national school than Harvard (probably the poster child for worldwide recognition) did or does. </p>
<p>I think the thesis and the conclusions are simply unfounded. </p>
<p>Er-- no. I am not aware of any Ivy League school which has as its institutional priority becoming “more” of a national school. Their priorities are to become more global, not more national, and I think the money they spend broadening their reach is spent overseas.</p>
<p>Based on everything I read from Brown (just to pick a “lower Ivy” for the sake of illustration) there is nothing to suggest that they care a whit about who has “heard of Brown” in Arizona or Texas. They target specific populations and kids who happen to live in Arizona and Texas- but the “man in the street” business or what the guy at the car wash has to say about Brown is irrelevant. Don’t care. Not a blip on the radar screen.</p>
<p>Resources against finding first gen/immigrant/top talent kids from “not New England”- for sure. But becoming a KNOWN BRAND for the sake of being national? Not a hoot.</p>
<p>And Rhode Island is a small state. The likelihood of Brown making an institutional decision to stop admitting kids from Cranston and Warwick and Pawtucket is exactly zero (assuming they are admittable candidates). I had a kid on my hall Freshman year whose father was a janitor at Brown (the kid was off the charts brilliant). There is zero value to Brown in becoming “known” in Missouri at the expense of taking care of business at home. And if that means that the rest of the country can kvetch about how parochial those New Englanders are thinking they’re so sophisticated- so be it. The Mayor of Providence (and other local politicians) are important stakeholders to the university. Senators, Congresspeople, Governors and their staffs- important stakeholders. Superintendent of schools in Providence- ditto. The nurses at the local not-profit who monitor maternal and infant health (Brown’s med school provides a ton of manpower for clinics, primary care, health interventions with underserved populations) – a very important constituency.</p>
<p>The guy at the bagel shop in St Louis not so much.</p>
<p>Regarding the comments about what schools DO to get better in this national recognition race, I believe it is important to point out the differences between admissions and enrollments. There is a world of difference between a school with a yield above 70 percent and one that has a much lower yield. For instance, what Tulane actively DOES (in admissions) is dwarfed by what the admitted students actually DO in terms of enrolling. Quite the opposite than what happens at HYPS! </p>
<p>Since there is little to no data available that permits to study the geographical attrition of admitted students, all we can do is speculate. And this along the way of thinking that students mostly will pick their most selective choice or … decide to pick the one that is both more selective and closer to their roots. </p>
<p>Or, it could be that many national universities view regional representation the same way some folks suspect top schools view SAT and ACT scores: past a certain threshold, and it isn’t that important anymore.</p>
<p>Folks can maximize on different parameters. If you focus strictly on SAT/ACT scores, you’re not going to have many folks from lower socioeconomic status groups. I imagine, if you focus on a more strict proportional, regional representation in your student body, you’re going to sacrifice something else. It may be diversity of some other sort - ethnic, or socioeconomic. It may be some other objective measures. </p>
<p>Perhaps WUSTL does work much harder for a mechanistic geographical balance. But they’re giving something up for that that other universities want more of. If they receive many more qualified applications from one region than its numerical “fair share,” then applicants of a given caliber from that region may be disadvantaged relative to applicants from another, “underrepresented” region. </p>
<p>And WUSTL does whatever it can to boost applications, so this effect could easily be exaggerated. WUSTL’s admissions decisions seem to many to be a little “quirky.” I’ve usually attributed to some form of Tufts syndrome or something like that, but maybe it’s more of a thing with regional balancing. Us “northeasterners” from south of the Mason-Dixon line are discriminated against! LOL.</p>
<p>Bottom line, It may be that other national universities just don’t prize slavish proportional representation by region over actual qualifications of individual applicants.</p>
<p>I, for one, would never view this sort of hewing to the numbers as an important part of a national university.</p>
<p>Someone created a new thread with this link. It is ironic that while discussing elitism of Hasty Pudding Club, the chart outlines where the student population comes from and guess what, there is NE, West Coast and whatever.</p>
<p>“Based on everything I read from Brown (just to pick a “lower Ivy” for the sake of illustration) there is nothing to suggest that they care a whit about who has “heard of Brown” in Arizona or Texas. They target specific populations and kids who happen to live in Arizona and Texas- but the “man in the street” business or what the guy at the car wash has to say about Brown is irrelevant. Don’t care. Not a blip on the radar screen.”</p>
<p>I don’t think anyone on this thread has said that what the proverbial guys-at-car-washes are aware of should be an important factor – whether those car washes are in Providence, Houston, Omaha, or Los Angeles. I think we can all agree the average man on the street just doesn’t think about highly selective colleges at all, and gets most of their “information” about colleges simply through familiarity with what they see on TV sports programs. </p>
<p>Hunt had said: “Based on the rhetoric I read from the Ivies, I had assumed that they had done this *[tried to attain a more national student body] * more than they apparently have. The reasons for it are harder to tease out, as Pizzagirl noted from the beginning of the thread. It may be all about the applicant pool, for example.”</p>
<p>I wonder - and again this is purely speculation – if you were able to take out the impact of the newer immigrants to this country, if the Ivies were indeed becoming successful in attracting a more national student body – but the immigrants who come here tend to be more concentrated on the coasts, AND more single-minded in terms of “these are the only top universities worth attending,” so they fill the applicant pools back in with NE / CA applicants who are highly qualified, thus pushing the accepted/enrolled pool back towards the NE (and secondarily CA). Just a hypothesis.</p>
<p>" I think we can all agree the average man on the street just doesn’t think about highly selective colleges at all, and gets most of their “information” about colleges simply through familiarity with what they see on TV sports programs."</p>
<p>Yes. And I daresay that Notre Dame would most likely have the greatest name recognition of any school you have listed given their exclusive dominance of the Saturday afternoon national broadcast from about 1950 to 2000. USC is probably in the ballpark of Notre Dame for everyman/everywoman name recognition in the country.</p>
<p>Sample of one: I work for an absolutely brilliant woman who went to USC, and I now know several people who went there, all of whom are highly impressive. I don’t even think I knew til I started looking at colleges what the difference was between USC and UCLA, other than they had some stupid, pointless football rivalry and they were “out there” (waving hand in westward direction). Goes to show we are all provincial, LOL. </p>
<p>But the “premise” of this analysis is that a “national university” is one with a per capita distribution of students from around the country; where what is “prestigious” to someone in Montana or Wyoming is equally prestigious to someone in Massachusetts or Connecticut.</p>
<p>And I’m pointing out that University of Phoenix et al can spend their resources on television ads, billboards in airports, etc. to create a “national brand”, but the East coast elites don’t have to (don’t want to) because their “man on the street” reputation is not of interest.</p>
<p>University of Illinois doesn’t need to try to manipulate its reputation among Computer Scientists. Johns Hopkins doesn’t need to create “buzz” about its Med school among “the people who matter in medicine”.</p>
<p>This premise that unless your undergrad population aligns with census or zip code data you are somehow not pulling your weight as a “national university” I find absurd. And to compare college’s “level of alignment” as if you’re going to learn something that is of value in making a college decision for your kid- beyond absurd.</p>
<p>Most folks in New Hampshire know people who attended and are applying to University of New Hampshire and think it’s a dandy school. That won’t turn it into Berkeley anytime soon, despite the fact that there are probably the same number of folks (adjusted for population of course) in California who think Berkeley is a dandy school. The quality of New Hampshire’s DARPA research or NIH grants doesn’t magically go up or down depending on how its perceived locally, nationally, internationally or frankly- how many “out of region kids” it manages to enroll.</p>
<p>When I was at Cornell, which has a high percentage of New Yorkers because three of its undergraduate schools are quasi public, I took statistics and learned that you can use them to support or attack just about anything you want to. There has to be some logic and analysis behind the statistics. Hypothesis to Thesis. I read as much of this thread as I could and couldn’t find a point other than schools tend to have more people from nearby. What is the Thesis? That we don’t have any truly national schools. How about the military academies? Do you have numbers on where alumni of schools are? That would be another indicator of “national” schools. </p>
<p>Notre Dame is, obviously, a highly recognized name with countless movies from the Gipper to Rudy and a collosal following among Catholics, among other elements. I, for one, got all the stories via a close friend whose dad was the place kicker in the Joe Montana years, and a local hero in … our small world of YMCA athletics. USC, on the other hand, not so much! From California, the names were UCLA and Berkeley! </p>
<p>Football has, however, its limitations. How many people are there who STILL believe that the Paterno’s Penn State is one and the same as the Ivy Leage Penn or UPenn? And this despite all the scandals? </p>
<p>“But the “premise” of this analysis is that a “national university” is one with a per capita distribution of students from around the country; where what is “prestigious” to someone in Montana or Wyoming is equally prestigious to someone in Massachusetts or Connecticut. (snip) This premise that unless your undergrad population aligns with census or zip code data you are somehow not pulling your weight as a “national university” I find absurd.”</p>
<p>I didn’t say it had to align exactly. I found the skews pretty interesting. Before I started cranking the numbers, I did indeed suspect I was going to find that the Ivies had done a pretty decent job of creating a national student body. </p>
<p>“And to compare college’s “level of alignment” as if you’re going to learn something that is of value in making a college decision for your kid- beyond absurd.”</p>
<p>It depends on what you value. *I personally (me, me, me) valued the idea of a reasonably-national student body for my kids. Now, both my kids go to schools that are indeed skewed to their respective home regions and have general patterns like the Ivies (200 index in home region, 100 index in another region, underrepresented in the remaining 2 regions). If I could control the world, which obviously I can’t, I would have liked them to have had even more national student bodies than they do. </p>
<p>“The quality of New Hampshire’s DARPA research or NIH grants doesn’t magically go up or down depending on how its perceived locally, nationally, internationally or frankly- how many “out of region kids” it manages to enroll.”</p>
<p>But this is a complete straw man, blossom! NO ONE HAS SAID or even implied that if a college manages to enroll more out of region kids or a more nationally representative student body that it magically becomes a “better” school! It just becomes a school with a nationally more representative student body. That’s all. </p>