<p>Cal Tech is only known here due to TBBT. For that reason it’s perceived as good. If someone doesn’t watch the show, they won’t know the school.</p>
<p>Stanford is impressive. Berkeley is too, but slightly less.</p>
<p>None of the rest would count. Penn St would beat almost anywhere (there are some exceptions in the east), esp for engineering.</p>
<p>Note, this is only for my area, not my personal opinion.</p>
<p>Small town PA…</p>
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<p>In terms of admissions selectivity, which can be seen as a proxy of popularity among applicants, the approximate selectivity and popularity ranking of UCs:</p>
<p>Berkeley, Los Angeles, San Diego, [Davis, Santa Barbara, Irvine], Santa Cruz, Riverside, Merced</p>
<p>[Freshman</a> admission profiles | UC Admissions](<a href=“http://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/freshman/profiles/index.html]Freshman”>http://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/freshman/profiles/index.html)</p>
<p>For the CSUs, the most popular ones are the ones impacted for all majors. These would be (not necessarily in order of selectivity and popularity):</p>
<p>Fullerton, Long Beach, San Diego, San Jose, San Luis Obispo</p>
<p>Others with a significant number of impacted majors:</p>
<p>Pomona, San Francisco</p>
<p>The least popular campuses, which are not impacted at the campus level and have few (if any) impacted majors:</p>
<p>Bakersfield, Channel Islands, Dominguez Hills, East Bay, Maritime, Monterey Bay, Stanislaus</p>
<p>[Impaction</a> | Student Academic Support | CSU](<a href=“http://www.calstate.edu/sas/impactioninfo.shtml]Impaction”>http://www.calstate.edu/sas/impactioninfo.shtml)</p>
<p>I don’t really know the CSUs really well… but I always thought of them as the western equivalents of the SUNYs. I might be completely wrong though.</p>
<p>Toronto isn’t really the East Coat (it isn’t even the USA) but just from my perspective in grade 12 high school (years ago), when all the grade 12 students were talking about different universities, several west coast schools were commonly in the conversation. Stanford was seen as one of the top schools in the world and would be lumped in with HYP (several of us actually thought it WAS on the east coast with the ivies). Berkley was also very well viewed and was really only one of 2 US public schools that generated interest in my class (the other being Michigan which is pretty well known in Toronto). UCLA wasn’t talked about all that much, but those who did know about it respected it and it had a reputation as an artsy, hipster-y school (not sure if this is deserved or not). No one really knew any other California schools outside of this, maybe UCSD.</p>
<p>Again this is just the view of a bunch of high schoolers… across the continent and in another country, not anyone actually in the working world or academia.
Anyway I guess the point of this is that the reputation of California’s top schools is pretty ubiquitous.</p>
<p>I life in a town where students are not afraid to travel to another part of the country for the best college experience.</p>
<p>-Stanford - equivalent to the Ivy League schools academically. Some prefer Stanford because of the good weather and big time sports.
-UCBerkeley - equivalent to the very top public schools (ex UVa, UMichigan).
-UCLA - a half notch below UCBerkeley but still a very good public school.
-CalTech - equivalent to MIT
Pomona - Slightly below Amherst and Williams but equivalent to many of the very good LACs out east (ex. Middlebury).
-Harvey Mudd - LAC with very good STEM programs.
-USC - Decent private school in bad area most often used as a safety school for Ivy hopefuls. Does have a bit of the “university of spoiled children” reputation.</p>
<p>It really depends on what circles you are talking about. I live in New York and my friends here are 1) mostly graduate-educated and 2) come from all over, so our opinions collectively of West Coast schools is pretty similar to this board’s opinions of them: The UCs are great schools, the Cal States are good mid-range state universities, Claremont colleges are like small New England colleges; Pepperdine and USC probably evoke images of American and NYU (respectively, and as a group). There are thousands of Californians in New York.</p>
<p>It’s the schools in Oregon and Washington that we may be less familiar with. I think generally University of Oregon and University of Washington are well regarded; Reed and to a certain extent Whitman are well-known and well-regarded; and some of us may know that Evergreen State is a quirky hippie place. But otherwise I think it’s mostly going to be “Where is that now?”</p>
<p>Living in Ohio, it was known that Cal/Berkeley was prestigious, but UCLA seemed like just another state school (same for USC). Not quite as prestigious as the Big Ten and THE Ohio State University (sorry, I had to throw it in there), which was pretty much where any engineering student would go anyway.</p>
<p>What do I, living on the east coast, think of west coast schools? I don’t think of west coast schools (except for I just kinda knew Stanford was in California). I’ve been to Berkeley’s German website once, and I’ve been to the page about math requirements for Caltech and Harvey Mudd, but only because I was directly linked there.</p>
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<p>Some SUNYs are PhD-granting research universities, while the CSUs are mainly undergraduate and master’s degree universities. This does not mean that they are bad (for undergraduates), but it tends to mean less research-based prestige.</p>
<p>From my visits to Ohio, where I grew up, I can say</p>
<p>UCLA - basketball school
USC - football school
Berkeley - hippie school
Stanford - good school, but not worshiped like the Ivys.
Caltech - not well known among the general public.
Mudd - not known at all.</p>
<p>Ohio State = #1 school</p>
<p>From an east coast state in the South (North Carolina):</p>
<p>Among well-educated people: Cal Tech, Stanford, Berkeley, and UCLA are all well-respected. Among geeks (and with the Research Triangle and other areas with high tech industries, there are many in NC), Cal Tech would be the most impressive degree, revered even. USC is well known for its film school. Only a very few people would have heard of Harvey Mudd and Claremont McKenna. (I hadn’t heard of them myself until I came on CC.)</p>
<p>Among less well-educated people: UCLA is known for basketball and USC for football. Berkeley is known as the Chapel Hill of the west coast for its liberal reputation. Some people would know that Stanford is where Chelsea Clinton went to college. Few people would have heard of Cal Tech and no one would have heard of any other California college.</p>
<p>Then again, the United States is so large that I wouldn’t expect most people from one part of the country to be all that familiar with, or even aware of, universities from another part.</p>
<p>I no longer live in the East, but I did for many years, so I feel qualified to answer.</p>
<p>Stanford is very well known and highly regarded in the East. Gallup did a public opinion survey about 10 years ago on “best universities.” Nationally, Stanford tied for second with Yale, with 11% of those surveyed naming the school best or second-best in the country; Harvard was first with 24% giving it first- or second-place votes. </p>
<p>When the results were broken down by region, Stanford tied with MIT, Penn State (?!) and Penn for 4th place among Easterners, after #1 Harvard, #2 Yale, and #3 Princeton. In fact, Harvard, Yale, and Stanford were the only schools to make the top 5 in every region; Harvard was #1 in every region. Stanford was the only Western school to make the top 5 in any region other than its own, and it did so in all regions. There’s no reason to think Stanford’s reputation has diminished since then.</p>
<p>After Stanford, I’d say UC Berkeley is the next best known Western school among Easterners, though it has a somewhat mixed reputation carrying over from the student protests of the 60s and an ongoing leftish reputation, attractive to some, anathema to others. USC and UCLA are also very familiar names but are known more for sports (football and basketball, respectively) than for academics. Caltech has a much smaller and more specialized following among STEM-oriented professionals, parents, and students, but among those groups it has a extremely strong reputation, possibly exceeding that of Stanford.</p>
<p>Beyond that, Easterners don’t give much of a thought to Western schools. The Claremont Colleges are on very few Easterners’ radar screens, and I’d venture to guess that most Easterners couldn’t name a single UC other than UC Berkeley and UCLA (unless they made a lucky guess and said San Diego). Fans of college sports (especially football and basketball) could probably name a fair number of Pac 12 schools, but again they’d know them only for sports and not for academics. Many college basketball fans could probably identify Gonzaga.</p>
<p>Many, possibly most Northeasterners think private colleges are categorically better than public, and in their own region that is often the case. They also think the best private schools are in their own region, and many are. Consequently, they tend to be focused on private schools in their own region, and when they go outside their own region it is more often for private schools than for public. Most of the better schools in the West are public, and aren’t on the radar of many Northeasterners.</p>
<p>-Stanford - equivalent to the Ivy League schools academically. Some prefer Stanford because of the good weather and big time sports.
-UCBerkeley - equivalent to the very top public schools (ex UVa, UMichigan).
-UCLA - a half notch below UCBerkeley but still a very good public school.
-CalTech - equivalent to MIT
Pomona - Slightly below Amherst and Williams but equivalent to many of the very good LACs out east (ex. Middlebury).
-Harvey Mudd - LAC with very good STEM programs.
-USC - Decent private school in bad area most often used as a safety school for Ivy hopefuls. Does have a bit of the “university of spoiled children” reputation. </p>
<p>I grew up in New England, attended a New England LAC, and then lived out west a few years after college, now live back in my hometown. This is exactly the breakdown I still have in my head.</p>
<p>There’s one UC that a specialized subset of people will know, and that’s UC Davis. If you know wine, you know UC Davis, or at least you know it’s importance, even if you don’t want to send your kids there.</p>
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<p>This New Yorker-now-in-Ohio would agree with this assessment - before I started hanging out on CC. </p>
<p>UCLA and UCSD I was aware of because I had family attend, their parents moved to LA senior year. I thought of them as vaguely located on a beach and was a little in awe of that.</p>
<p>I’d never heard of any other CA schools, not Cal Tech and certainly not Pomona, Mudd, etc. My private NYC school sent kids to schools all over New England and a handful even to the midwest but I can’t think of one who went to CA.</p>
<p>I’m surprised that so many of my fellow East Coasters feel like people are unfamiliar with Pomona, Mudd, etc. I have been hearing a lot about the Claremont Colleges since I was a Connecticut teen in the 80s. My high school was full of kids wanting to go to East Coast LACs and many were urged to also go west, so as to stand out more (and not be one of the 100 kids from our high school who apply to BC every year!)…and the only real recs we got were Colorado College and the Claremonts. Funny, we never got the PACNW LACs suggested to us – Lewis and Clark, Willamette, Whitman…and there were plenty of students who would have done well there, all back here competing for New England schools.</p>
<p>The hippie concentration is probably higher at UC Santa Cruz and Humboldt State (and Evergreen State in Washington) than at Berkeley.</p>
<p>The UC on the beach is UC Santa Barbara: [A</a> Campus Like No Other](<a href=“http://www.ucsb.edu/campus/campus-intro.shtml]A”>http://www.ucsb.edu/campus/campus-intro.shtml)</p>
<p>However, UC Santa Cruz and UC San Diego are rather close to beaches.</p>
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<p>DW and I were on a 4-day mini-vacation last year, sans kids, and passed through Santa Barbara. Gorgeous campus, beach, wharf, scenery, etc. Nice downtown with lots of high-end shops, restaurants, etc. Weather was perfect. When we got home we announced to the kids that one of them MUST attend UCSB, just so we’d have an excuse to visit. Unfortunately, DD#1 has no interest and won’t be going. But I still have three more shots at it.</p>
<p>Amongst those I know, I would say that Stanford is regarded as being at the same level as the Ivies, Berkeley is regarded as one of the very top state Us, UCLA is well regarded, but less so, USC still has a big University of Spoiled Children vibe, Cal Tech is the premiere STEM school along with MIT, Harvey Mudd is a top STEM school but not quite at that level (say in the same area as Carnegie Mellon), Pomona is the west coast Amherst or Williams. The other Claremont colleges are a bit of a mystery.</p>
<p>MaineLonghorn, was your father referring to someone whose initials are BT? :)</p>
<p>ETA: looking back at some preceding posts, I would say that my opinions track almost identically with BossyMommy’s.</p>
<p>I hear you, DGDzDad. Lovely town.</p>