<p>Please rank them in the order you perceive their national prestige to be in.</p>
<p>This definitely isn't a BIG factor in determining which college I will apply to/attend. I'm just interested.</p>
<p>Uh ok
Notre Dame
Georgetown
Vanderbilt
Emory
Rice
but vandy is my favorite of these choices. although im happy with where im headed next year vandy seems awesome.</p>
<p>Thanks for replying! So you’re going to Vandy? That’s awesome. </p>
<p>Did you apply to any of the schools I listed? What region/state do you live in, btw?</p>
<p>Bump for more opinions</p>
<p>Vanderbilt
Georgetown
Notre Dame
Rice
Emory</p>
<p>Everybody knows:
Notre Dame, Georgetown</p>
<p>Average Person may know:
Vanderbilt, Rice</p>
<p>Average Person probably doesn’t know:
Emory</p>
<p>Atleast this is how it is where I live. But I’m not putting any of these schools ahead of another, they’re all great!</p>
<p>I’d actually never heard of ND being a “top” school until this year. I’d always thought about ND as a football school.</p>
<p>Bump for more opinions</p>
<p>They are all about the same, in all honesty.</p>
<p>I agree with nolwenn. Georgetown (thanks to its location and IR program) and Notre dame (thanks to Football) are probably the most famous, but among the educated elite, they are all roughly equally prestigious.</p>
<p>If you had to rank them, what would the order be?</p>
<p>Vanderbilt (most prestigious)
Notre Dame
Georgetown
Rice
Emory</p>
<p>Georgetown
Rice
Vanderbilt
Notre Dame
Emory </p>
<p>In all honesty they’re about the same and you can’t go wrong with any of them. They’re great. I’m giving you the regional prestige in SF. Georgetown is a clear outlier to most people here. A lot of kids like Rice. I hadn’t heard of Vanderbilt until last year when a girl at my school got a running scholarship there. I think of Notre Dame for football. That’s it. I really like Emory but its small which is why people don’t know about it probably</p>
<p>So here we have votes for Georgetown, Notre Dame, and Vanderbilt as the most prestigious. I’ll cast mine for Rice. Reason? It has the lowest “median rank index” on 50topcolleges.com, an aggregator of college rankings ([50</a> Top Colleges](<a href=“http://50topcolleges.com/Rice.html]50”>http://50topcolleges.com/Rice.html)).</p>
<p>Is that a good measure of “prestige”. I don’t really know. How else would you measure it? And what is “it”, anyway? </p>
<p>One could conduct a poll to determine how many randomly selected people have heard of each school. The results presumably would be influenced by newsworthy events or the fame of individual alumni at the time of the poll. It wouldn’t necessarily tell you much about school quality, nor would it even tell you how much it would impress a well-informed person to learn you attend a given school.</p>
<p>Or, one could conduct a poll only of academic experts. That’s what the USNWR Peer Assessment does. By that metric, Rice, Georgetown, Vanderbilt and Emory are all tied with a score of 4.0. ND is a little lower with a 3.8. Well, that was as of 2009 (the date of the first clear listing I could dig up); maybe the scores have shifted a little by now.
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/797962-college-comparison-xxii-usnwr-peer-assessment-ratings.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/797962-college-comparison-xxii-usnwr-peer-assessment-ratings.html</a></p>
<p>I’d say:</p>
<p>Georgetown
Notre Dame
Vanderbilt
Rice
Emory</p>
<p>[Harvard</a> Number One University in Eyes of Public](<a href=“Harvard Number One University in Eyes of Public”>Harvard Number One University in Eyes of Public)</p>
<p>I’ll add that schools like Notre Dame probably have some brand confusion. The average joe bases “prestige” on how much they’ve heard the name, and “Notre Dame” is referred to in contexts outside of the university, but it all melds together in a person’s mind. Other universities that suffer from brand confusion are Penn/Penn State, Brown (generic), USC (often thought to be a UC school, therefore public), WashU (how many ‘Washington’ schools are there out there?). I’d say these have negative brand confusion.</p>
<p>Columbia (so many "Columbia"s, not to mention Colombia) has brand confusion similar to ND’s, but in their case, it’s positive brand confusion. </p>
<p>Vanderbilt probably rides on its founder’s recognition. Rice is generic, so it probably doesn’t ring a bell in people’s minds.</p>
<p>Georgetown has always been prestigious in my mind (and I grew up on the West Coast), but it’s so often written off on here. I’d never heard of Emory before applying to colleges.</p>
<p>What does it matter what the average person on the street thinks? The answer to this question depends on whom you’re trying to impress. In academe, Rice is highly respected, maybe more than the others.</p>
<p>You’re right, it doesn’t really matter since there isn’t much that one has over the others. As I said in the OP, I’m just wondering for the lulz.</p>
<p>phatasmagoric,</p>
<p>If Gallup is so accurate, why does the previous version of this poll conducted in 1999 differ so much from the 2003 one? Consistency is usually a pretty reliable indicator of the accuracy of any rating system.</p>
<p>[Harvard</a> Tops Gallup Poll List as Best University](<a href=“Harvard Tops Gallup Poll List as Best University”>Harvard Tops Gallup Poll List as Best University)</p>
<p>Harvard 16%
Stanford 4
MIT 3
Princeton 3
Yale 2
Notre Dame 2
Duke 2
Univ. of CA/Los Angeles 2
Penn State 2
Texas A&M 1
Univ. of CA/Berkeley 1
Univ. of Michigan 1
Cornell 1
Brown 1
Florida State 1
Ohio State 1
Other 33
No opinion 24
100%</p>
<p>Stanford and Yale drop significantly in the general poll and amongst the college educated population, Berkeley and Michigan suddenly disappear Notre Dame makes an appearance with 3% while Yale is gone.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t say Gallup doesn’t know what it’s doing, but rather American can’t really separate academic, cultural and sports brands in their head and often answer these polls based on arbitrary whims and spontaneity rather than through a carefully reasoned thought process.</p>
<p>I never said Gallup was “so accurate” - I just linked to it since it was pertinent to the discussion…</p>
<p>If you actually read the polls, they’re also different. The one you linked to apparently considers only one answer, while the one I linked to took two answers.</p>
<p>If you ignore the %s and look at it as a ranking, the two are extremely similar. I would think you’d like the results, since Duke does pretty well in both.</p>