<p>Stanford: Fantastic private school on par with east coast privates
Cal tech: Fantastic school on par with MIT
Cal: good state school with good science programs
UCLA: decent state school if you can’t get into any of the above
USC: average private school with good film school, known more for football than academics
Pomona: good liberal arts school with no name recognition</p>
<p>Other schools like UCSD or UCSB aren’t really well known or thought of in the northeast. But they are good schools.</p>
<p>I’ve read and looked up. Lot of west coast schools which could create some bias. I live in GA btw.</p>
<p>UCLA: nice school, good public, best UC, rival of USC
Cal: excellent public school, smart people
Stanford: on par with Harvard
USC: Cool school near the beach, pretty awesome
Pomona: Probably the best school an east coaster has never heard of, I know that school and know its one of the best schools in the country.
Cal tech: MIT of west coast (a kid from school went there last year)
Harvey Mudd: I remember reading about them and know they’re good, but idk too much. The average response would be “huh.”</p>
<p>I’m going to guess WG, with an extended definition of “town” in this case. I’m basing this off the fact that he was the same class year as ML’s son.</p>
<p>UCLA: great school
Cal: huh?
Stanford: amazing, basically Harvard
USC: keeps mailing me about scholarships but I don’t really care
Pomona: huh?
Cal tech: MIT of the west
Harvey Mudd: great engineering liberal artsy school</p>
<p>I grew up in upstate NY and attended a basic, public HS there. Most students there were far less knowledgeable about colleges than most on this site, particularly for colleges on the west coast. I attended Stanford. Some had heard of it and were aware that it was a quality school. However, some also thought I was talking about a college in Stamford, Connecticut. It was far less well known than selective privates in the northeast, such as Harvard or Cornell. Smaller private colleges and LACs in western states were almost universally unknown. When I mentioned being interested in Harvey Mudd, nobody had a clue what college I was talking about, including both students in honors classes and my parents. A few may have heard of Caltech, but they’d be unlikely to know more about it than being like MIT on the west coast and appearing in movies/TV. Most knew that the large colleges on the west coast with Div I sports teams existed. This includes UCLA, Berkeley, Arizona, and USC, among others. Few knew much of anything about their academic offerings or which is more selective, and nobody I knew mentioned applying to one. My mother was convinced that graduates from Berkeley had trouble finding jobs because of a protesting history. In contrast, most knew a good amount about colleges that were within a 1-2 hour drive, sometimes inflating their academic quality. For example, many thought RPI was on a similar level as MIT or Caltech (among the minority that had heard of it).</p>
<p>I’m on the East coast, and my sister grew up and went to school on the east coast, but has been working in computers in CA for the last twenty years; when I mentioned Harvey Mudd as a possible school for her math-gifted kid who still wanted an LAC, she had never heard of it. It does have a rather implausible-sounding name.</p>
<p>I’ve lived on both coasts and in between. The first issue out of a lot of Westerners’ mouths is the weather. A lot of them can’t complain enough about the cold and snow in the Midwest and Northeast. So they can get branded as sort of intellectual lightweights because they are so afraid of the snow and cold where most of the best colleges are. And therefore the colleges out west sometimes get perceived similarly–places where people are more concerned about their tans, the surf, rock climbing, and all manner activities that depend on warm and/or sunny weather than academics.</p>
Heck, I worked for two STEM professors at a Southern California UC, both of whom earned their phDs at Cal Tech and neither had heard of Harvey Mudd until a colleague’s kid went there.</p>
<p>Claremont McKenna and Pomona tend to be nationally known, as is Keck (graduate) among colleges in the consortium. Mudd, Scripps and Pitzer aren’t on the radar for very many people even in Northern California.</p>
<p>Using the upstate NY HS I attended’s Naviance data, the average number of applicants per year for various west coast schools is below. There were a little under 500 students per class, so 5 apps ~= 1% of student body. Stanford was the only west coast colleges that averaged more than 2 apps per year. Surprisingly Arizona State was the most applied to west coast public college. There did not appear to be a notable difference in app rates between the different Claremont Mckenna colleges. </p>
<p>Some numbers for colleges in the northeast are below, as a comparison.<br> Northeast Colleges
Nearest CC – 153 (32% of class)
SUNYA – 84 (18% of class)
SUNYB – 78
SUNYO – 72
Sienna – 67
Northeastern – 40
Cornell – 29
RPI – 24
Rhode Island – 22
UMass, Amherst – 20
Brown – 12
Colgate – 9</p>
<p>Matriculations:
Public: In State – 116 (24% of class)
Local CC – 113
Private: In Region – 80
Public: Northeast, Out of State – 13
Highly Selective, in Northeast – 12
Highly Selective, Outside of Northeast – 2
Public: West Coast – 1
Highly Selective, West Coast – 0.4</p>
<p>To be honest, I’m from suburban Indiana, and I’ve never heard of about 80% of the colleges people consider “elite”. Harvey Mudd, CalTech, what are those? I think the general public only knows about schools who have good football teams or are portrayed as elite by the media: Harvard, Yale, Stanford.</p>
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