<p>Wells! they go to graduation on stagecoaches (or at least they used to).</p>
<p>I just googled it and it seems to be in the Finger Lakes area, which makes the BBB experience all the more puzzling, as they were talking about some Wells that they was in Iowa or Indiana. Or maybe they were just confused with all the Illinois, Ohio and Ioea Wesleyans.</p>
<p>They either got all their Wesleyans mixed up (there’s one in Ga too) or they confused Wheaton (IL), Wabash (Indiana) and Waldorf/Wartburg (Iowa) with Wellesley, or with Wells (NY) – that or they are deaf, or are IIT dropouts working at BB&B ;)</p>
<p>Sounds like, instead of rate my prof, Forbes could have polled BBB folks. We could all go play “name that college” at our local store and report back. Or no, why give away such a great idea? We could publish it and make the big bucks.</p>
<p>It’s not much better when they poll college deans about other schools’ "academic quality’. Most of them have never set foot on the other campuses, rarely met any of the faculty, and have never met any of the students.</p>
<p>Californian here. I’d heard of the Seven Sisters as a kid, the Claremont Colleges although Claremont Mckenna was a men’s college in those days, and a favorite teacher graduated from Occidental. My friend’s sister went to Reed. Was never acquainted with the concept “liberal arts college,” only colleges of arts and sciences at the various UCs. I might have heard of Amherst. The acting mayor of San Francisco is a Williams grad, so a some folks out West heard about Eastern LACs back in the day when dinosaurs roamed the earth!</p>
<p>^Agreed 100%. And that’s the most heavily weighed criterion, I believe, for USN&WR.</p>
<p><em>edit</em> meant that to mini</p>
<p>But they know what their USNWR rank is. Oh wait - that’s supposed to be the output, not the input - isn’t it? </p>
<p>Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using CC App</p>
<p>^Every time you post I’m worried your dryly making fun of me.</p>
<p>Nope, not you; we cross-posted. </p>
<p>Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using CC App</p>
<p>Being Northeasterners, we knew the usual LAC suspects like Williams, Amherst, Middlebury, but we frankly had never heard of some of the other well-regarded LACs around the country before our public-school S attended a summer program his junior year at the tony private school in our town. Now he’s loving life as a premed at Davidson, and we’re very comfortable that med schools well understand the value of the education he’s getting.</p>
<p>I created an N-gram tracing how many times the name “Pomona”, “Wesleyan”, “Amherst” and “Williams” have been mentioned in books or other publicatons over the past eighty years (the peak seems to be sometime in the sixties):
[Google</a> Ngram Viewer](<a href=“http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=the+Wesleyan+University%2Cthe+Amherst+College%2Cthe+Williams+College%2Cthe+Pomona+College&year_start=1930&year_end=2011&corpus=0&smoothing=3]Google”>http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=the+Wesleyan+University%2Cthe+Amherst+College%2Cthe+Williams+College%2Cthe+Pomona+College&year_start=1930&year_end=2011&corpus=0&smoothing=3)</p>
<p>The real credit goes to Google: [Google</a> Ngram Viewer](<a href=“http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=the+Wesleyan+University%2Cthe+Amherst+College%2Cthe+Williams+College%2Cthe+Pomona+College&year_start=1930&year_end=2011&corpus=0&smoothing=3]Google”>http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=the+Wesleyan+University%2Cthe+Amherst+College%2Cthe+Williams+College%2Cthe+Pomona+College&year_start=1930&year_end=2011&corpus=0&smoothing=3)</p>
<p>Back in the days, didn’t we just call them “private colleges?” And we referred to places like UVA as “public privates” - ? Think the term LAC is newish. </p>
<p>I’ve been racking my brain - well, not really, it’s a thread- for the name of a school I knew well, as a kid in the mid-Atlantic, that many others would have also known. And other than the bit about knowing where parents, neighbors or teachers went, I think the only one that fits, for me, is ^ “Seven Sisters.”</p>
<p>But also, deans know more about other schools than seems apparent on the surface. It’s their cohort. They may not know the deep inside scoop, but there are many institutional ways U’s constantly review themselves against others- retention, research, and more. No, it’s not enough. But, it’s little different than docs rating the top medical programs per where they and colleagues went.</p>
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<p>A by-product of the USNews asserting control over what’s best for higher education has been the somewhat artificial division they set up between small colleges and larger universities. You’ll notice the dip in name-recognition really began to take effect just as the rankings began to gain traction in the eighties.</p>
<p>I doubt most doctors could really say much about medical schools and / or programs unless they attended them or have other connections. Even so, a lot of it is based on hearsay. Someone you trust says “x is good” and you believe it.</p>
<p>What makes you think there was a dip in name recognition? I suspect it’s always been low among John Q Public.</p>
<p>@lookingforward: I’m just coming in on the tail end of this discussion, but is the mid-Atlantic school you’re racking your brain on, Goucher College? It had a reputation of a top women’s college in the mid-Atlantic region before it went co-ed in 1986.</p>
<p>One misconception on which Mom needs to be informed is that undergraduate alma mater correlates with job prospects. A bachelor’s degree - if it’s career-related at all - will impact an entry-level job. It’s graduate school that will create long-term career prospects.</p>
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<p>I’m talking in relative terms. Colleges experience ups and downs in publicity. Look at the spike in printed chatter about Amherst in the N-Gram in the sixties. Might it have something to do with the number of times it was mentioned in connection with the courtship of a certain Smith student by one David Eisenhower? It’s conceivable. A spike at the end of 2008 for Wesleyan could have something to do with a commencment speech by Obama.</p>
<p>John Q Public is constantly exposed to the names of LACs,; but, for the most part they go in one ear and out the other; they just aren’t planted as firmly in their minds as the sports powerhouses and the the local flagship state U.</p>
<p>And, familiarity = good for most people. </p>
<p>AAG - my niece just graduated Davidson and I’d never heard of it before she went (athletic scholarship).</p>