I consider my mother to be average. She did not go to college, but she did live in Amherst because my father attended. So she knows Smith, MHC, Amherst. She knows Williams because my uncle went there and he’s married to someone who went to Pomona. And my mother knows Harvey Mudd because of Jeopardy! and a college tournament winner.
She also knows all the football schools like Stanford and ND and Duke. She knows the engineering schools because she worked for a big engineering company and paid the expense accounts for the tuition covered by the company. She was in her 70’s when she was learning about RPI and Case Western.
I think most people know the service academies and Notre Dame.
No ‘every man’ outside the east coast knows Vassar, and if they do, they still think it is a girls’ school.
@Flambeau “I’d probably add UC Berkeley and Columbia too.”
I’m going to channel the average guy…
Q: What do you know about X university?
A: “Columbia? Where is that at?”
A: “Berkeley? That hippy place?”
A: “U California? Their football team is terrible.”
Q: How good of a college is X university?
A: "Columbia? Where is that at?
A: “Berkeley? I think that’s in California. Dunno.”
A: “U California? It’s like Penn State, or Maryland.”
I am always surprised that people forget the Oxbridge schools. I would say that most people who really aren’t aware have probably only heard of Oxford and Harvard, perhaps Cambridge and Yale. As far as famous LACs, my mom thought my daughter should have applied to Radcliffe. Lol! Bottom line, the people who need to know, know. If the point of college is to be employable for better paying jobs once you have a degree, the important thing is the degree, not the name of the college. Higher-end companies will be delighted with a degree from WUSTL or Oxford.
Yes it’s regional. Here in NYC USC means nothing outside sports discussions.
Penn, Columbia and Cornell mean a great deal to New Yorkers, despite the HYP threads on CC.
But there are plenty of people who don’t know difference between Penn St and U Penn, even so.
But WUSTL despite being a great school, means little to NYers, outside parents of bright HS students.
SUNY Binghamton is a big deal here in NY, nobody heard of it elsewhere.
Sports team success does cause kids to apply, makes competition for admission tougher but
does that make the school better ? Makes the students better maybe, but not the professors nor
administration. Villanova is a great example, win national title in basketball, of course applications
will rise, and name recognition, but that does not cause impact on employment opportunities.
Not even thought of in the same league academically, right or wrong.
Prior to becoming a CC denizen I thought Vassar was still a woman’s college and that Scripps College referred to the Scripps Institute for Oceanography at UCSD.
The much maligned USNews ranking has at least made many students and parents aware of colleges outside their geographic region.
Q: Name the best places to get a law degree.
A: Harvard… and Yale
Q: Name the best places to get a business degree.
A: Harvard. Our state college is pretty good for that.
Q: Name the best places to get an engineering degree.
A: Any college that has the word “Institute” in its title… and Purdue. They have a mascot that looks like a boiler. I think his name is “Boily”.
Q: Name the best places to get a medical degree.
A: The Mayo Clinic… University. That’s a place right?
Q: Name the best places to get a liberal arts degree.
A: What’s that?
Q: That’s History, English…
A: Oh, like a teacher. My sister went to State.
Q: Name the best places to get a political science degree.
A: What’s that?
Q: Govt, politics and society.
A: You mean lying. You can get paid for that?
Q: What do you know about Stanford?
A: That’s a really expensive place. What state is that in anyway?
Q: California.
A: Figures. I was up late one night and they were playing Oregon State, and they had this dancing tree on the sidelines.
Until I started paying attention to rankings when my kids got older, simply based on experience, I never thought of Texas, Cal, or Michigan as good engineering schools. I didn’t think they were bad just OK and typical for large state universities. I mentally lumped them in with other like universities Florida, Tennessee, Maryland. And I work in R&D…in Austin… with graduates of these schools… and I interview candidates.
When I saw the reputations reflected in the rankings, I was surprised. My experience with the graduates differs from the rankings. The rankings are greatly influenced by research dollars and not the undergraduate product. The thing is, the rankings haven’t changed my opinion. I still think they (Texas, Cal, Mich) are just OK. I’d say roughly 50% are good candidates… only 10% are excellent.
You can tell the difference between kids that went to an engineering school like RPI and the large state schools. They simply work harder and are more efficient.
Never heard of Vassar before CC. Couldn’t tell you one fact about it today. I’ve lived in every section of country except Northwest and Midwest but bulk of my time has been in South or West and colleges I know outside of CC align with that. Other schools that I know are the sports powerhouses as mentioned.
The take away is where you want to live matters in college choice and that’s rarely discussed here. Just as Ivies and LACs rule, so does the intent to live in CA or the Northeast. Want to work in TX, particularly Dallas? SMU has a great reputation. Rarely mentioned here.
My state flagship has showed up on CC about five times in the three years I’ve been here but in certain majors, grads do great at jobs in that state and nearby states. Ditto on the law school. It’s not a top 50 but also a great deal for the money. A grad won’t get a job in NY but would do fine in top firms in nearby cities.
CC is not the real world and that’s not a bad thing.
Just try asking an average family member, who isn’t an education geek, to name as many top 10 American Universities for academics, according to US News. See how many they can name. In my family I did ask a few people and got between zero and two. Of course that is out here in fly-over country. There is just no reason for people to know or care out here. One person did get Harvard and Yale though.
Surprisingly, even the person who got none was familiar with the term “Ivy League.” I asked what it meant and they said it meant “The best schools.” I also asked if they had heard of Harvard, and they said “Yes. That is a great school. I bet it was in the top ten.” Try something similar with your relatives and see what results you get.
As others have said, they did know many of the in-state universities.
Go to Columbus, Ohio and ask, “Which is the better school, Ohio State or Harvard?”, and you’d probably get a 50-50 split. I’m going to guess it would be like that in a lot of states where you compare the state flagship to Harvard.
Honestly I thought Duke was a great basketball school, so being a sports powerhouse may help in general name recognition but not in the recognition of the academic reputation of the school, in fact it might diminish it.
I thing Michigan might qualify for a nationally recognized school due to its strong academics, a historically strong sports program, and an immediately recognizable logo.
Harvard is the only university with a truly universal reputation. By “universal”, I mean amongst the masses, both educated and uneducated, and all over the nation. Cal, Columbia, MIT, Princeton, Stanford and Yale are next, and their reputation is pretty widespread, but not truly universal. The remaining universities will have reputations that are regional or situational (athletics, religious affiliation etc…). Now amongst the educated, you will have far more universities with “true name recognition”, but again, those will vary wildly from region to region.
Honestly so are the Y, M and definitely the S on the east coast. I think everyone has heard of Harvard, because it’s mentioned so much in movies, tv, politics, etc. over the years.
