<p>Well, Gallup surveyed college graduates as well. Dartmouth and Penn don’t seem to fare particularly well in that group, either. Here are the most highly regarded schools among college graduates, as measured by the percentage who ranked the school 1st or 2nd:</p>
<p>There are good educational reasons to choose a Dartmouth or a Penn. Brand recognition and a favorable reputation among college graduates aren’t among the most important.</p>
<p>Well, the other thing is, the question being asked (IIRC) was “what do you think is the best university in the US,” not “what’s the university that you would personally want to attend / send your children to / hire or work with graduates of.” Bottom line, most people in the US don’t spend any time thinking about elite colleges, and if you ask them about Harvard et al, yeah, if asked they’ll say it’s good, but that doesn’t mean that they are spending any time drooling over it Most people (outside the northeast) are favorably impressed with their own state university and consider going there a perfectly fine choice. The northeast is just an aberration in that regard. And, most people draw their conclusion as to what’s a good college either by historical reputation such as Harvard, or via sports standings (UCLA, Georgetown, ND).</p>
<p>There’s an absolutely amazing provincialism – it’s so ironic that the northeast, the region that touts itself as the most sophisticated and with-it, is full of the very same blinders as other parts of the country. And don’t forget how far UT-Austin or SMU or Texas A&M will take you in Texas. Brown Schmown.</p>
I disagree. I find that “prestige” and “fame” are different things.</p>
<p>Ivy Leagues such as Dartmouth or Brown don’t clock in the public perception ranking because they are obscure, not because anyone who knew what Dartmouth was would say that it was less prestigious than a big public.</p>
<p>Public universities tend to be well-known due to the high number of people who attend but they are not perceived nearly as positively as any of the schools ranked above them on USNWR. The ranking we have now is more “correct” in terms of exclusively “prestige” than the one we had before.</p>
<p>Well, you can make that claim, but it flies in the face of what the Gallup survey found when they actually ASKED a random sample of people—and then a random sample of college grads—“All in all, what would you say is the BEST college or university in the United States?” Respondents were asked to name 2. </p>
<p>As many people in the general sample named UC Berkeley as named Princeton. As many named Michigan and UCLA as named Duke. As many named Texas, Texas A&M, Ohio State, and Penn State as named Penn. And more named all of those public institutions than named Brown, Dartmouth, Cornell, and Columbia.</p>
<p>The top publics did even better among college graduates, with Michigan and Berkeley tying Princeton for the #5 spot after Harvard, Stanford, Yale, and MIT, ahead of the rest of the Ivy League, Duke, Caltech, Northwestern, Chicago, you name it.</p>
<p>So when you say public universities “are not perceived nearly as positively as any of the schools ranked above them on USNWR,” you’ve got to heavily qualify that. Perceived by whom? More people generally, when surveyed, rank the top publics as the “best” or “second-best” schools in the country than all but a handful of privates, HYPSM to be precise; that’s the public’s perception, that they’re among the very best. Most schools ranked above them by USNWR are not perceived that way, at least by the public generally. Nor do the “perceptions” of the college graduates surveyed square with your claim; they ranked Michigan and Berkeley even higher than the general public did.</p>
<p>No doubt among current students at the elite privates, and among their alums, and among a bunch of USNWR-reading Ivy-League-wannabe HS students, the great public universities “are not perceived as positively.” But that’s a pretty rarefied and self-selecting group.</p>
<p>Also notice that the perceptions of the top publics are not a function of their size. The largest public universities would include Arizona State, the University of Central Florida, the University of Minnesota, the University of Florida, the University of South Florida, and Michigan State, none of which shows particularly strongly in this survey. Neither tUC Berkeley nor the University of Michigan, the public institutions that were most favorably perceived in this survey, rank among the 10 largest publics. And a number of private universities—Liberty University, NYU, USC, Brigham Young, Boston University–are as big or bigger than some of the top publics, but they don’t appear on the list, either. This isn’t a test of size, and to dismiss the strong showing of the top publics as just being a function of their size is naive and unfounded.</p>
<p>What exactly is “lay prestige”? What is a lay person? A person who is not an academic? A person who hasn’t gone to college? A person who doesn’t care about elite college admissions? </p>
This brings up the relationship between name recognition and prestige. You can think of prestige and name recognition as a coordinate system with four quadrants.
[ul][<em>]Colleges with name recognition but not prestige - U Phoenix and DeVry
[</em>]Colleges with prestige but not name recognition - Olin and Deep Springs
[<em>]Colleges with both prestige and name recognition - Harvard and Yale
[</em>]Colleges with neither prestige nor name recognition - Virginia Union and Kentucky State[/ul]
bclintonk indirectly brought up the issue when noting that “as many named Texas, Texas A&M, Ohio State, and Penn State as named Penn.” The first four are all large schools with well-known athletic traditions. When people are asked to name good schools, they’re going to think of
[ul][<em>]The few elite ones they know (Harvard, Yale, maybe Princeton, a couple other regional powers)
[</em>]Schools they know from sports, tv/movies, etc.[/ul]
If you asked a random guy on the street to choose between U Conn and Swarthmore, for example, he’d probably pick U Conn. Why? Well, he’s probably heard of U Conn and maybe knows it’s a decent school. Swarthmore? What/who/where is that?</p>
<p>Colleges with the most lay prestige are those in the third category, those that have both prestige and name recognition. This typically includes colleges that are extraordinarily strong and selective (e.g. Harvard) and colleges that combine strong academics and top-notch sports (e.g. Texas).</p>
<p>
Another possible source of information is the College Dreams survey by Princeton Review. It has the advantage of a much larger survey pool - 8219 applicants and 3966 parents compared to Gallup’s total pool of 1003 people.</p>
<p>Applicants’ Dream Colleges
Stanford
Harvard
NYU
Princeton
MIT
Yale
UCLA
Penn
USC
Berkeley</p>
<p>Parents’ Dream Colleges
Harvard
Stanford
Princeton
MIT
Yale
Duke
Brown
NYU
Notre Dame
Northwestern</p>
<p>The problem with using these lists, of course, is that they are not quite accurate as measurements of perceived academic quality. It is highly doubtful most high school students actually think NYU is a stronger or more selective university than Yale, but a good many students would much rather spend college in NYC than New Haven.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, it is interesting that 5 of the 6 schools that make both lists are HYPSM, and virtually all of the others fall in the USNWR top 25-30.</p>
<p>bclintonk, thanks for the info - that’s really interesting. I’d expect there to be more Harvard applicants from the Rocky Mountain areas, but I guess Stanford still takes the West. Do you have a link to where you got that info? I’m curious as to how Stanford shows in the East and Harvard in the West. I once read that the yield for applicants from NYC to Stanford was like 85%, which surprised me, so perhaps Stanford makes a stronger showing in the East than I’d expect.</p>
<p>warblersrule, </p>
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<p>I’ve seen discussions of prestige vs. recognition many times, but never seen it summed up so concisely and clearly. That makes a lot of sense.</p>
<p>You also bring up a good point about the dream college lists - I’d never thought of them as a proxy for prestige, but the connection is clear. IMO parents’ perceptions seem to be more in line with general layman prestige than students’, probably because the latter has had to research colleges more, and that likely makes it not “layman prestige” anymore.</p>
<p>It’s also important to note that when you go to the man on the street and ask him to name “the best” college – he may not necessarily be defining “best” along the lines of “offers the most academically rigorous education” or “has the very best professors” or “is extremely selective” or “increases the chances of getting a super-high-paying job on Wall Street.” “Best” could also be interpreted as “gives a great college experience,” “is a good value for the money,” “all the smart people I know who went there really liked it,” “has a wide range of majors / programs.” The guy on the street in Iowa who answers U of Iowa might indeed be thinking U of Iowa’s best in that everyone he knows who went there seems to like it, and some very smart people went there and were very pleased with it. Or best because it’s better than U of Northern Iowa. That type of thing. I think this board WAY overthinks how much the average person knows or cares about colleges outside his immediate geographic area, AND how much the average person values a college environment that is the super-best of the super-best in terms of academics.</p>
<p>The next-to-last page in each state report, titled “College Plans,” shows the 50 or so most popular colleges to which SAT score reports were sent by college-bound HS seniors from that state. But because it lists only about 50 colleges per state, it’s only so useful. For example, Stanford isn’t listed for New York, so all we can really say about it is that fewer than 3,358 New Yorkers sent SAT score reports to Stanford; and that’s less than some other top-50 schools like Cornell (8,742), NYU (8,446), BU (6,097), Columbia (5,026), Penn State (4,916), BC (3,901), Brown (3,682), and Penn (3,358). Somewhat surprisingly, Harvard doesn’t appear on New York’s list, either.</p>
<p>Stanford doesn’t make the top 50 in Massachusetts, either (<1,454). There, BU (6,221) and BC (4,721) lead the top 50, while Tufts (2,992) and Brown (2,832) edge out Harvard (2,383), Cornell (1,940), NYU (1,906), and Dartmouth (1,534). Perhaps somewhat surprising, no Yale, no Princeton, and no MIT.</p>
<p>One more Northeastern state, just to show how local/regional these preferences are: New Jersey residents prefer Penn State (7,346), NYU (4,373)., BU (3,691), Cornell (3,519), Penn (3,337), Princeton (3,245), BC (2,742), Columbia (2,633), Johns Hopkins (2m,122) and Brown (2,070) to Stanford, Yale, and mighty Harvard (all < 1,983).</p>
<p>But Stanford does better in the Midwest. In Illinois, UIUC (1,956) and Northwestern (1,973) lead the pack (and that UIUC number is vastly understated because they don’t require SAT IIs and Illinois is an ACT-dominant state). They’re followed by a closely bunched pack including U Chicago (994), Harvard (979), WUSTL (892), Stanford (882), Princeton (879), Cornell (781), Michigan (698)(also understated for the same reason as UIUC), Yale (667), Brown (609), MIT (564), and on down the list.</p>
<p>Here in Minnesota, Northwestern (476) is pretty popular, but Stanford (361) runs neck-and-neck with Harvard (364) and ahead of Carleton (286) (probably understated), Princeton (283), Yale (271), Cornell (264) and MIT (248). </p>
<p>In the West, as you’d expect, Western schools dominate. In California, UCLA (49,069) and UC Berkeley (39,738) are way up there, as are all the other UCs except Merced, but USC (21,659) and Stanford (16,179) draw a ton of in-state applicants. Harvard (5,877) gets about 1/3 the number of applicants that Stanford has but is still in the 50 most popular, as are Brown (5,274) and Cornell (5,141)—but no Yale or Princeton.</p>
<p>And in Washington State, Stanford (1,577) is by far the most popular elite out-of-state choice, followed by USC (1,019), UC Berkeley (942), UCLA (861), NYU (638), Harvard (603), Cornell (553), Brown (530), Yale (518), and Princeton (487).</p>
<p>As you can see, there’s a pretty heavy regional skew to all this. My observation would be that outside the New York-Philadelphia-Washington corridor, Penn has almost no following. Dartmouth’s fan club appears confined largely to New England. Brown and Cornell show up surprisingly strong in parts of the Midwest and West, though of course nowhere near the level of Stanford which dominates the West and runs about even with Harvard in the Midwest but is not nearly as popular as the Ivy League schools in the Northeast.</p>
<p>This is a bit of an oversimplification, IMO. I would say it’s not only Harvard and Yale that have “both prestige and name recognition”; I’d say that characterizes pretty much all the schools at the top of the Gallup survey. It’s certainly true of UC Berkeley which is known far more for academics than for sports. I think it’s also true of Michigan which, while it has a glorious sports tradition, has also long been known for outstanding academics. </p>
<p>College football is the king of college sports, and the most successful programs enjoy a lot of national attention. That certainly operates to the benefit of schools like Michigan (which hasn’t had much success lately but is still the winningest college football program of all time), Notre Dame, Texas, Texas A&M, Penn State, and Ohio State. But where are the other big football powers, like Oklahoma, Alabama, Auburn, LSU, Florida, USC, Nebraska, Florida State, U Miami, in these surveys? They don’t get named “best university” by very many people because they’re not known for their academic chops. Michigan State has a bigger student body than Michigan and has had more success in both football and basketball in recent years, yet nobody thinks of Michigan State as a “best university” while many, many people think of Michigan as one. Why? It’s not size or athletic exposure that distinguishes them, it’s academics.</p>
<p>That said, I’ll grant that football and/or basketball add to the name recognition of schools like Michigan, Notre Dame, Stanford, and Duke, as well as Texas, Texas A&M, and Penn State, and that probably helps them in the popular surveys. But football and basketball alone won’t do it. I don’t care how many Big Ten football championships an Iowa, Nebraska, or Michigan State wins; or an Oklahoma in the Big 12, or an Arizona State in the Pac 12, or an LSU in the biggest football conference of them all, the SEC. Until and unless they establish a reputation for academic excellence, at a minimum among the very best in their region, they’re never going to be named as “best university” by more than a tiny handful of ill-informed people.</p>
<p>That doesn’t mean “stronger showing” - that means self-selected pool … Only those NYC students who really really love Stanford and would definitely if accepted are applying to Stanford. That’s what the high yield means. It could be a high yield off a small base.</p>
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<p>Right. But how does the average layman watching college football and basketball and getting most of his information from there come to the conclusion that Duke or Gtown or ND or Texas or Penn State are “good schools” but not Oklahoma or Auburn or LSU? Do you think it’s because they’ve carefully investigated the opportunities, academics, professor quality, Nobel prizes and student selectivity of these schools, or do you think it’s because the announcer makes some comment that those Duke kids are pretty smart and they internalize it? It’s a meme, I think, not a real opinion built off anything. When Davidson came on the scene with basketball a few years back, it was accompanied (rightly) by remarks that it was a good, smart school. So that’s what basketball watchers now believe - here’s this really smart school with great b-ball chops. It’s still driven by the announcers, IMO, not actual knowledge on the viewer’s part.</p>
<p>You can’t find all of them, but USC is #28 and LSU is #29 in the Gallup Survey linked in post 14, ahead of Columbia (assuming they ranked within “1%” like I think they did). Arizona, Tennessee, Ohio State, and Michigan State also did well.</p>
<p>Oh, I don’t know. Conventional wisdom is usually not built off careful research, but it sometimes may be smarter than you think. My mother never attended college, and she certainly never did detailed research into colleges, but my whole life as I was growing up she told me that the University of Michigan was a very good college, in fact one of the best, and that I was fortunate as a Michigan resident that if I did well enough in HS and on standardized tests and such, I might be able to attend such an outstanding school at an affordable price. In fact, she held that belief so strongly that it became, for her, a strong argument against moving to another state—one with a reasonably good public university but one that no one would say is comparable to Michigan—when my Dad needed to change jobs. </p>
<p>Where did she get her information? Not from football or basketball broadcasts, which she never paid attention to. Probably a lot from her husband and those of her siblings who had attended college—none at Michigan—who knew a bit more about the lay of the land and the pecking order in higher education, and had enormous respect for Michigan. Probably from teachers in our local schools who boasted up my (and my siblings’) scholastic accomplishments and encouraged my parents to dream big, pointing to Michigan as an outstanding educational opportunity. Probably from other parents in the neighborhood, who were clear either that their kids didn’t have the academic credentials to get into Michigan, or that they did—and it was always a healthy slice of the top-performing kids who ended up heading in that direction. Probably from things she read in the local newspapers, which proudly boasted of all the local HS valedictorians going off to Michigan, and in the Detroit newspapers which we sometimes got, which every now and then had features on in-state colleges which invariably mentioned Michigan in the most favorable light. Perhaps even from an article or two on higher education that she read in some national magazine or another, not as part of a thorough research effort but as something that caught her eye as the parent of a bunch of kids who seemed to be college material.</p>
<p>I think the average Joe is often not the common idiot you make him out to be. It’s not a carefully researched opinion, but it’s not just mindless repetition of something someone heard on television; in my mother’s case, at least, I believe her opinion was reasonably well informed. And if Gallup had asked her to name the two “best universities,” I’m pretty sure she would have said Michigan and either Harvard or Stanford, though she viewed the latter two as “colleges for Kennedys and Rockefellors” and not for the likes of us. If she had been asked to name more top schools, I’m pretty sure she could have identified Yale, Princeton, MIT, and UC Berkeley—that is, pretty much all the schools that came out at the top of the Gallup survey—and I believe I even heard her utter names like Amherst and Swarthmore once or twice. Never once heard her mention Northwestern, except when the son of a prominent local physician went there she said it “must be a school for rich kids,” and when I came home with some info from my HS guidance counselor suggesting that I consider the University of Chicago, she assumed it was an obscure (and probably not very good) public university in a city she regarded as terrifying. Brown? Penn? Totally off her radar screen. So not fully informed, granted, but not just mindless repetition of what some television announcer told her, either.</p>
<p>She never disparaged other public universities, by the way. One of my siblings went to Michigan State, another to Western Michigan, several to Michigan Tech, and she was proud of all of them and thought all those schools did a fine job. But her whole life–or at least, my whole life—she believed Michigan was just clearly a cut above, and she was right, of course. That view had nothing whatsoever to with big-time college sports, though she was just about as “lay” a person as you’ll ever find.</p>
<p>No doubt – and if you had asked MY mother, she’d have said Penn, Princeton, Haverford, Bryn Mawr and Swarthmore – because that’s what she had heard growing up in Philadelphia. My grandparents – blue collar workers with hs educations – thought the world of Haverford, BM and Swarthmore because that’s where the smart kids went. I have to say, I developed a different college list for my midwestern kids that I think definitely reflected the fact that I didn’t grow up here.</p>
<p>The document linked in post #32 has some interesting stats. One is that in 2010 only 5606 people in Michigan took the SAT. Also, the third most popular school to have their results sent to, after Michigan and Michigan State, was Harvard. I know the stats don’t necessarily mean people actually applied to those schools, and there’s the whole ACT factor, but it does seem like these stats would tend to support what a lot of us Michiganders have been saying for a while…that the people in Michigan who seriously consider leaving the state to go to college are a tiny minority, and that even the vast majority of the top students are content to stay in their home state for college…with mostly only the very tip-top out-of-state schools turning many heads.</p>
<p>^^so true. In Michigan, yes, we are all required to take the ACT. And all of my top-student friends are perfectly content staying instate. U of M is their first choice and very few of them apply or even consider the possibility of going OOS. I am a huge minority for NOT applying instate.</p>
<p>^^^ Just to give some perspective on this, while only 5,606 college-bound HS seniors in Michigan took the SAT in 2010, a total of 120,930 took the ACT. So that’s about 4.6% taking the SAT. There are only a few reasons a kid in Michigan would take the SAT. One is if she’s not satisfied with her ACT score and hopes to do better on the SAT. Another is that she did well enough on the PSAT to make National Merit Semifinalist and is taking the SAT in hope of winning a National Merit Scholarship (looks like 569 Michigan kids did this in 2010, submitting SAT scores to the National Merit Scholarship Program). And a third is that she needs SAT Subject Tests to apply to the handful of elite colleges that require them; so far as I know, no college in Michigan, public or private, requires them. A total of 2,237 Michigan kids took 1 or more SAT Subject Tests in 2010. Only 634 sent their SAT scores to Harvard, the most popular out-of-state college. Other popular choices were Northwestern (586), Princeton (529), Cornell (444), MIT (439), and Yale (433). No doubt there was a lot of overlap in that tiny applicant pool, with the same handful of kids applying to multiple elite schools.</p>
<p>There just isn’t the same kind of mania for elite private schools in the Midwest, where public universities are very strong, as there is in the Northeast. Contrast Michigan’s SAT figures with New Jersey, a state with about 1 million fewer people than Michigan. In New Jersey, 14,282 college bound HS seniors took SAT Subject Tests in 2010, or roughly 6 to 7 times the number in Michigan, the larger state. The most popular Ivy among New Jersey kids was Cornell, with 3,519 NJ residents sending their SAT scores there—again, nearly 6 times the number of Michigan residents who sent SAT scores to that state’s most popular Ivy, Harvard. And it’s not as if the NJ kids are just smarter. The Subject Test scores of the Michigan kids ran pretty consistently 20 to 40 points higher than the NJ kids, suggesting that Ivy-mania extends significantly deeper into the potential applicant pool in NJ than in MI.</p>
<p>But it all makes sense. Why bother with Ivy-lust when you’ve got one of the world’'s greatest public universities—actually, one of the world’s greatest universities of any stripe—right in your backyard?</p>