level of Brown's name recognition?

College Search & Selection
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<p>In terms of name recognition, not prestige, I would say Brown definitely has less name recognition than Columbia, Cornell and probably Penn. (Columbia seems to be in the news alot and everyone seems to know it.) I think it has more, however, than Dartmouth, which is more along the lines of Williams, Amherst, etc. in name recognition. However, Dartmouth does have Tuck so that might increase D's visibility.</p>

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<p>45%, I have done extensive research on Franklin's role in the University of Pennsylvania's "founding." His efforts were limited to a school for poor children of elementary age, which proceeded only sporadically, and some vague ideas that paralleled efforts in other colonial cities. He was only one of many "trustees" of the Academy and the Charitable School who had similar roles. There were no traditional college students ever educated in anything in which Franklin was directly involved while he was alive, unlike the College of New Jersey, Columbia, Harvard and Yale (although one needs to recognize that those institutions were not anything like a modern college themselves in pre-colonial times.) Penn's archivist and I have corresponded and he acknowledges that there is a great deal of bootstrapping involved in attempts to increase Franklin's role. If you closely read what is actually written, you will recognize that res ipsa loquitor.</p>

<p>Franklin was an amazing individual, moved from one effort to another easily, and was stretched thinly. Equating his role, for example, to the yet-greater Jefferson's somewhat inflated one at UVA would be incorrect.</p>

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<p>slipper, the more and more I think about it, you have some incredible ego issues. If I were this so-called bball character that everyone has alluded to, why on earth would I be commending Cornell in this regard? Bball supposedly hated cornell and transferred out. Just face it, your self-worth is not based on the college you go to. Now that US News has your school ranked not in the top 10 anymore, you seem to disregard us news. However, when D-mouth was in the top 10, you were always pro-us news. "Follow the rankings and go to the highest ranked university." Now, I am not so sure. It is absolutely a fallacy that people in the real world will be like yes, I think that Brown is of higher quality than throw in, Duke, Cornell, and Northwestern, U of Chicago, u name it. They might be more impressed by it simply b/c they have an uncle or relative that attended. However, the distinctions you make are simply unrealistic and only serve to justify your intent to promote Dartmouth over other universities.</p>

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<p>
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Brown is higher than Cornell and on par with Dartmouth, Columbia, and Penn.

[/quote]
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<p>Well I think this group is simply the non HYP Ivies, and a five way tie. Depends entirely on who you are talking to.</p>

<p>
[quote]
To illustrate: most other Ivy grads recognize Brown as an extremely selective school.

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</p>

<p>If they have recently gone through it, or have kids who have done so. Otherwise, I doubt they would predict any difference among these places. After all the relative admissions difficulty varies over time, and only admissions professionals and the CC obsessed keep track of these changes.</p>

<p>The PR results were not proposed as scientific, but they are a much larger sample than one will get on CC. </p>

<p>the revealed preferences study looked at actual enrollment decisions, so people, one hopes, were looking at more than name. It showed the Ivies to be highly ranked, with relative ranking somewhat depending on how the data was analyzed.</p>

<p>Real life answer "graduating from any Ivy will impress anyone you need to impress in the US. If you go overseas, you may encounter educated professionals who have never heard of the less famous Ivies. If this matters to you, then base this aspect of your college decision on reputations in the country where you expect to work. In the US, reputation of your college counts for very little in most fields."</p>

25

<p>redcrimblue, nevertheless, Franklin was President of the Academy from 1749 to 1755, and--through his writings and direct involvement as President and Trustee--laid the foundation for securing the charter for the successor College of Philadelphia in 1755. And, Franklin hired William Smith as Provost, who served in that position for the first 25 years of the existence of the College of Philadelphia. Franklin's direct participation may have diminished after 1755 (although he continued to serve as a Trustee until his death), but there is no denying his significant involvement in and influence on the evolution of the Charity School and Academy into the College. As you point out, in that regard, res ipsa loquitur (one of the few things I still remember from the distant past of first-year torts :) ).</p>

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<p>


</p>

<p>I have to respond to this point because there are a lot of high school students here who may be studying the AP statistics curriculum. If the sampling procedure is biased, an ever-so-large sample size still produces junk data. The famous example that appears in most statistics textbooks is the Literary Digest poll to predict the results of the 1936 presidential election. The sample size was huge--but it systematically oversampled people who owned telephones, so it predicted a victory for the Republican candidate, who carried very few states, and completely missed the landslide that carried Franklin D. Roosevelt into a second term as President. The poll didn't predict the result of the election, but it trashed the reputation of the magazine, which soon went out of business. </p>

<p>One professor of statistics, who is a co-author of a highly regarded AP statistics textbook, has tried to popularize the phrase that "Voluntary response data are worthless" to go along with the phrase "correlation does not imply causation." Other statistics teachers are gradually picking up this phrase. </p>

<p>


</p>

<p><a href="http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=194473&tstart=36420%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=194473&tstart=36420&lt;/a> </p>

<p>I do agree with the point that CC is also not a scientific way to gather data on the reputation of various colleges. Our discussions here can guide us to interesting questions, but can't always provide valid answers, if the valid answers require simple random samples of large populations rather than referrals to documents about colleges. </p>

<p>I still would be curious, just for my own information, to see the results of a properly designed scientific survey on what colleges members of the general public have actually heard of. </p>

<p>I also agree with the poster whom I have quoted with approval above that the issue of name recognition may not be important to the student who has a career goal that a college can meet. If Brown has a strong program in applied mathematics (as I believe it does, knowing locally a Brown alumnus who is an applied mathematician), then the student who wants to do applied mathematical research might well choose Brown, even if the majority of the nonmathematical public has never heard of Brown (which I suspect is the case).</p>

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<p>Brown probably has lower name recognition than some other great schools, because its recognition is mostly from its undergraduate school, and is not reinforced so much by its grad programs, which are relatively small, or its professional schools (only med). Some other schools that may come more readily to people's tongues are bigger and have a broader range of outstanding programs at all levels of higher education.</p>

<p>To put things in perspective, I recently worked in the lower midwest. When I first started, my boss asked me if Cornell was in the Ivy League; he had some vague notion, in the back of his mind, that maybe it was. Then he asked me if Rutgers was also in the Ivy League; he'd met a guy who went to Rutgers and had the same vague notion about Rutgers. There's a good chance he might not have heard of Brown, and if he did I'm sure he might have had the same vague notion.</p>

<p>Which is to say, as others have mentioned, outside of about ten schools name recognition goes way down outside of one's geographical area.</p>

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<p>Columbia,</p>

<p>I still think USNEWS is a very accurate description of where people should go, plus or minus a few spots (you can't read it literally). Dartmouth falling 2 spots has nothing to do with my opinion on USNEWS or the placement of schools. For recruiting and grad placement, USNEWS is relatively accurate. </p>

<p>I have felt that when it counts (including selectivity, name recognition, recruiting, grad placement) that for undergrad the list of schools must be placed by "tiers". My experience tells me that the top tiers fall into this order:</p>

<p>1) Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT
2) Caltech, Columbia, Dartmouth, Brown, Penn, Duke, Amherst, Williams
3) Swarthmore, Northwestern, Pomona, Cornell, Rice, Chicago, others</p>

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<p>Out here, Brown certainly has less name recognition than Boise State, and less reputation for quality than BYU. But I don't think anyone cares.</p>

<p>Meanwhile, in my 36 years living in big cities on the east coast, in the midwest, in California, and now in the state capital in Washington, I have yet to have a single employer or potential employer know what a "Williams" is - though I did get one, "oh, you mean in Virginia? William & Mary? I visited Williamsburg once."</p>

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<p>Monydad is correct that research and grad programs drive name recognition in academic circles. Lawyers are going to be most familiar with law schools. Doctors are going to know what the best med schools are. Businessmen will know Wharton and Harvard. Researchers at the NIH will know Hopkins, Cornell, Harvard, and whatever schools have top notch bio research programs. </p>

<p>Brown doesn't have prestige in any of those fields. It is known for its undergrad education. Thus, to HS seniors and their parents, it has name recognition. Outside of that, it lags schools with stronger grad programs.</p>

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<p>.... I would suggest that most people in the country, in any part of the country (the ones that don't post here) tier schools in the exacting way that we do. We've also come to the conclusion that prestige is subjective, yet we continue to act as if it were objective. Brown is a good school, or it's a school people don't know. Nobody is going to think it's a bad school.</p>

<p>In my corner of the universe (when I'm in suburban NYC), a "really good school" is any school more selective than, say, Penn State. I don't know a single person who is discriminating enough to parcel apart the Ivy League or even the Top 20 from the Top 50-- and this includes a good number of professionals.</p>

<p>When I was growing up, I was really into American history, and I thought that UVA and WILLIAM AND MARY were the best schools ever, because I read about them in my history textbooks. When I was a little bit older, I heard about kids at the local church going on to GEORGETOWN and FORDHAM and BOSTON COLLEGE, so I thought those schools were amazing too.</p>

<p>Somehow Michigan, Berkeley, and UCLA also entered the picture. It was only later that I learned what a Dartmouth and a Bowdoin were.</p>

<p>Anyway, as has been mentioned before, prestige has many, many calibrations, and prestige in a school is not always the best thing. You don't want other people to think you're a snob because you went to a high-caliber school; unfortunately, I've seen and experienced cases where the less-qualified person from Familiar U gets the job over the more-qualified person from High-Class U.</p>

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<p>I’m with those who feel that geography will decide most of the brand recognition for Brown. If you live in the urban corridor from DC to Boston and are in the professional circuits there of (Wall Street, Big Law, Big Medicine, etc.), then you can’t help but come in contact with folks who did their undergrad work at Brown. But head on out to other parts of the country and there is a rather significant drop-off and the power of the Brown brand lags that of the local top privates and top publics (I believe that this pattern holds true for nearly all of the non-HYP Ivies). For people outside the NE who have had some direct contact with Brown graduates, they have seen the quality of the people and they get it. But more often than not, this is not the case and people will look at you with a blank stare when you talk about Brown. IMO, it’s sort of like talking about Rice with people outside of the Southwest.</p>

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<p>I personally feel that in the top circles you are surrounded by top school grads. You operate in networks where a majority of people went to top schools, and a great majority are aware of the difference between top undergrad schools vs. top grad schools. At my firm probably 80% of the employees went to a "top 10" undergrad school. I would surmise almost everyone I work with is aware how amazing Williams is for undergrad for example. More often than not, these are the types of places where the most lucrative or strongest opportunities exist. Going to a place like Brown gives you access to these types of jobs and this type of network. This might not mean much to many people and in no way am I advocating high powered careers on the east coast. But its nice to know, should you choose that direction, that a degree from a school like Brown will be a great advantage.</p>

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<p>"Lisa Simpson made it famous, "Oh no! Not Brown!""</p>

<p>I remember watching the episode with that quote, haha.</p>

35

<p>Brown is an Ivy League college- enough said.</p>

<p>Anyone that is somewhat aware of the college situation in the US would know that brown is elite.</p>

<p>I'm on the easy coast, and everyone in my town knows Rice is the real deal. </p>

<p>While not everyone in the east would equate rice with brown or those in the south would (vice versa), everyone that matters does (or should) get the point that both Brown and Rice are elite universities.</p>

<p>If anything, people often overestimate schools. The common folk generally dont realize that the Ivy League is a conference- they think it just means elite college. I remember in 7th grade I had a reading teacher adamantly telling me that Duke was an Ivy. Stanford usually gets confused too. Ive even heard Berkeley being called an Ivy before... </p>

<p>To tell you the truth, the average people in NJ dont realize that University of California, Cal, and Berkeley are the same place. Cal is the good football school, Berkeley is the place with the smart hippies, and University of California is some state school....just like Rutgers! Right? Lol</p>

36

<p>ChaseD13 - it's not just in New Jersey. Here in California, you'll meet graduates of "Cal" and "Berkeley." They may know it's the same place but you get a pretty good feel for "which" school they went to by the way they identify it. </p>

<p>---A "Berkeley" grad.</p>

37

<p>Kallikak University?</p>

38

<p>Brown's prestige is slightly hurt by the fact that a number of people view their undergraduate curriculum to be about as rigorous as kindergarten. </p>

<p>Personally, the whole "take any class pass/fail!" "no requirements whatsoever!" stuff sounded to me like Brown was attracting students by saying "our college is insanely easy!" Eh.</p>

39

<p>At the risk of another lecture about why speculation is preferred over systematic data, I point out that the Revealed Preferences study looked at regional variation in enrollment decisions.</p>

<p>Brown retained the same position for each of the 9 regions into which the country was divided for this purpose.
Region 1: CT, MA, ME, NH, RI, VT
Region 2: NJ, NY, PA
Region 3: IL, IN, MI, OH, WI
Region4: KS, MN, MO, NE
Region 5: DC, FL, GA,MD, NC, SC, VA
Region 6: AL, KY, TN
Region 7: AR, LA, OK, TX
Region 8: AZ, CO, ID, MT, NM, NV, UT, WY
Region 9:CA, HI, OR, WA</p>

<p>There was remarkably little variation by region among the top 10-15 in the national preference results. A quick look suggests that 8 of the top 10 in the national pool were also in the top 10 in each region. The national and regional rankings were highly concordant for the top 30, and substantially similar even for the next 30.</p>

<p>Regional sample sizes were small (but much larger than the number of people participating in this thread).</p>

<p>I know this is not as reliable as "I once met a guy who went to Brown, and he was pretty smart, therefore I am now an expert on national opinions about this college", but it is one more piece of information.</p>

40

<p>

Yeah, pretty much. Very few people-on-the-street have heard of Brown here in the South, at least.</p>

<p>Before I started reading books like the Fiske Guide, the only elite colleges I had heard of were Harvard, Princeton, Yale, MIT, Berkeley, Duke, Stanford, and Caltech (vaguely).</p>