lol. I can assure you I know a lot about colleges, sending many many kids to college including an Ivy and another top 10 and three others, but don’t know squat about any of those three and never heard of them until on here. RIT is a dye, I know that. I think people like to believe their little world is famous when in truth, it doesn’t matter or apply to the mass population. Especially all those little colleges that are the size of high schools - so insignificant to most people. What’s important to one isn’t important or even known to so many others. Who cares?
@MuggleMom , now my curiosity is piqued and I’m trying to figure out which school your D chose. 
Olin? Rose-Hulman? Union? Of course, none of them are in the middle of nowhere…
I present the Wellesley Book Award at the local HS, and on two occasions the person introducing me has said Wesleyan instead of Wellesley. They do know the difference. It’s just a weird thing.
BTW, there are several Wesleyan Colleges, but around here when people say it they are thinking of Wesleyan University in CT. (You know, as my mother told me decades ago, the place people go who can’t get into Yale. >:) )
@bookworm: “Frankly, anyone who doesn’t know of Wellesley or Oberlin or RIT tells me instantly how little they know of colleges.”
Yeah, because RIT is so famous or so many people have heard of LACs.
I mean, I could act that way about Rose-Hulman, Truman St., or William Jewell, but that would be silly.
I like it that people don’t know about Olin. Most people around here think Virginia Tech is good enough. I’ve always been the contrarian.
I love Virginia Tech.
Virginia Tech probably is good enough. That is the point of the thread. I used to work in a company that had a sea of engineers in cubical land all making essentially the same salary and they would argue endlessly about who went to the “better” engineering undergrad. Me, a humanities, undergrad from an LAC used to laugh endlessly at the irony. So what if people have no clue about your college…better not to be too smug or too offended because over the long haul it only matters to you.
While we’re at it, I’d just like to point out that there is no need to sneer at LACs and other small schools. Many of them have had an influence that belies their size.
You might be more familiar with Wellesley if you thought about some of its better-known alums, such as Hillary Rodham Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Diane Sawyer, Nora Ephron, a host of NPR figures and other journalists, a host of other authors and scientists, et al. (You won’t have heard of some of them either, so I won’t list them to be sneered at.)
@thumper1 I’m an East Coaster but have heard of Santa Clara Univ - dh is from the Silicon Valley; his father graduated from Santa Clara. As a product of a Jesuit education, I hoped D17 would go to one as well but instead she chose USD. Not be confused with UCSD or SDSU. And here where I live on the East Coast, SDSU has that “party school” reputation so of course, I then feel the need to clarify that it is USD, a private Catholic school, not SDSU. There are a couple of kids from her h.s., including a classmate, who are going to SDSU, so from parents familiar with those two girls, we also hear, “Oh, that’s where so and so and her sister are going.” Um, no, different school! I even went round and round with a friend who said, “Oh, USD, the Catholic school, right, not the public university?” “Yes,” I replied, “I’m surprised you’ve heard of it”. She then said one of her best friend’s daughters was going to be a freshman there as well, that she had been recruited for lacrosse. “Really,” I said. " I didn’t think they had lacrosse at USD, in fact I’m pretty sure they don’t. Are you sure it’s not SDSU?" “No, I’m pretty sure it’s USD, the Catholic school,” she said. She then pulls out her phone and shows me a picture of the girl - wearing a SDSU shirt! We had a good laugh. Then I told her that dd’s classmate had also been recruited to SDSU for lacrosse so I’m sure her classmate and this other girl probably knew each other.
I must admit, that until last year when her college search process started, I had not heard of USD either. However, I didn’t even know that BIL got his MBA from there, as well as another friend of ours.
The question that usually follows the answer of where she is going to college, is “Wow, that’s SO far away. I hope she likes it” or some other semi-judgmental remark.
I don’t think I’ll have this same problem with D19 - he wants to go to a big football school.
People’s knowledge about schools is somewhat limited. My DD attends MIT. When asked where she goes to school by her doctor during yearly checkup, the response was “This is the one in Pasadena?
“No, it’s the one where Bullwinkle went!”
I like the reply when ask why a student attended U of Alabama. That’s where Forrest Gump went.
@Consolation: The sneering isn’t at the schools but those folks who judge people based on whether they have heard of some small school or not, which carries more than a whiff of snobbishness/elitism.
Truman St., after all, produced John Pershing, Don Faurot, and Ken Norton. Should I judge you to be some uneducated lout if you knew nothing of the school?
USD does have women’s lacrosse, but it at the club level. They are very good. My niece played for 3 years and although they don’t recruit like an NCAA team does, they do sort of wine and dine the kids they want on the team through applications and orientation, and she got a credit for playing. Niece went to a Catholic high school which is sort of a feeder school for USD so the upper classmen know who is coming down the pipes.
Interlocutor: “So where does your daughter go to college?”
Me: “Haverford”
Interlocutor (looking impressed, but feeling a need to correct my pronunciation: “Oh, HARvard.”
Me: “No, Haverford. It’s a small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, just outside Philadelphia.”
Interlocutor (no longer impressed, face going blank): “Oh . . . . never heard of it. Well, how did she end up way out there? Do you have family in Pennsylvania or something?” i*.
Me: “No. She wanted a small school with strong academics, and Haverford is a good fit for her. It was her top choice.”
Interlocutor (clearly unimpressed): “Oh . . . .” i*.
I can’t tell you how many times I had that conversation. It didn’t bother me; I had no need to impress, and I wasn’t the one who brought it up. In fact, that sort of conversation rather amused me. In my experience, most people don’t know very much about colleges, and even those who know something usually know less than they think they know. But so what? That’s probably true about many things.
@4kids4us lol. There’s certainly a learning curve to get USD, UCSD and SDSU square! Whenever discussing with people or my kids we always attach a description at the beginning of the conversation… “You know, USD is the beautiful one on the hill with all the white buildings, UCSD is the one with that weird upside down (think Stranger Things upside down world) building, and SDSU - the one that looks like a Spanish Mission buzzing with lots of people.” Then we know we are talking about the same school. 
Probably many people outside those colleges’ regions do not know of those colleges.
Call me an uneducated lout. I had to google Don Faurot. :)>-
^^^ Assuming it’s pronounced “Don Fa-Roh,” it sounds like a very fine wine to me.
“Yes, I’ll have a glass of the Don Faurot.”
@Sue22: My point exactly.
Yet if you do a poll of Americans, I would bet that more people would know who Don Faurot is than who Nora Ephron is.