Another thing to consider: “Ordinary folk in ordinary towns in ordinary American “flyover” country” have probably never heard of many A list celebrity/movie-TV stars attending Stanford (although I just googled and found two or three like Reece Witherspoon, Sigourney Weaver, and Ted Danson). But they probably do know that Brooke Shields, Jodie Foster, Emma Watson, Natalie Portman, Matt Damon etc. attended the Ivies.
It’s sad when this devolves to actors and actresses…hmmmmmmm, I winder where the Kardashians (sp) went to school…
Hey, I’m just giving my opinion on how most common folks develop “brand recognition” of prestigious colleges. Which is that it’s through sports, TV, movies, books, and People magazine. It’s not by buying and reading college guides - most people don’t do that for pleasure.
I just did a google search on the education levels of the most populated cities in the US. The amount of college educated people in most large cities is about 30% (and that number has increased by about 20% since 1970). So there’s a huge percentage of the population who probably don’t give a lot of thought about college rankings.
I don’t “winder” about the Kardashian’s at all. Except maybe where Dad Kardashian went to school. I’ll have to look that up now.
I did a quick looksee on NCAA football rankings pre-Ivy league. AP was still what was considered the final say on rankings, and some of the results were interesting. In the first ten years of rankings (9 being pre-Ivy League) there ivy league schools were in the top 10 (at season end) four times (Penn x2, Dartmouth, and Cornell), Stanford once, and Cal once. Alabama was on there 4 times by themselves. Minnesota finished #1 three times which made it the Alabama of that time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1936_NCAA_football_rankings
Ivy League schools indeed have encouraged sports but from what I heard it was always as a part of the whole development of its students. Harvard’s athletic website states:
http://www.gocrimson.com/General/Core_Values/athletics_history
This aligns with the idea that ivy league schools have been somewhat consistent with the importance they place on athletics, and that “success against its […] peer institutions” is their “primary standard”. Stanford has had different goals for a while now. Pac8/10/12 championships are one thing, but 22 years of winning the Director’s cup takes a bit more than business as usual, since prime competition are bigger schools with long athletic traditions: Michigan, Texas, Florida, UCLA, Ohio St, etc. If one walks around the athletic area on campus (it was described as “the house that Arrillaga built” in the papers here), if one recalls the new stadium being built round the clock 24/7 in record time… one realizes Stanford takes its sports seriously.
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Silent-Partner-Billionaire-Arrillaga-has-2948340.php#photo-2260055
Presently, Stanford is in a very enviable position of being able to attract athletes with high academic stats on the basis of great facilities and a culture of strong support for student-athletes, while maintaining their rep as an uber-selective school… so they are primed to ride this brand-recognition train on both fronts.
[edited to add links]
Before I started researching colleges for S1, I really didn’t know much about schools and their reps. I knew MIT, USC,
UCLA, Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Notre Dame, Dartmouth, Princeton…maybe some of the big football and basketball schools. No clue about NESCAC’s, WUSTL, Chicago…vague idea about Caltech, Stanford and JHU.
I mean, you could have told me that Tufts was a girls school in VA, or that Tulane or Rice was in Georgia and I wouldn’t have corrected you.
Since I was brought up in Canada I knew most of the big schools up there. McGill, Concordia( formerly Sir George Williams and Loyola), Toronto, Western, Queens, Dalhousie, UBC, U of A, Simon Fraser, etc…