<p>Oh I agree there are up and down swings. You had hypothesized that the entire curve of recognition for LACs shifted down after USNWR ratings got established – that’s what I was questioning.</p>
<p>Redblue- I meant, what schools had name recognition for me, other than alma maters of friends & family, the HYP or something in one’s home area. Also, to strip out my own later experience with college names, research, publicity, etc, I went waaay back to about 12. I think, after the Seven Sisters, the only other name recog for me, at that age, outside my own realm, was UCLA. Uh, because I read kids attended classes in bathing suits. See how crazy the media is !?</p>
<p>I think the ^ “dip” is in reference to what Average Joe knows about a college versus the nuances we on CC are aware of. AJ’s now got a tool to hold one better than another, to the detriment of the one with a lower rank, even if it’s still an extraordinary school to us.</p>
<p>I hadn’t heard of most of the colleges mentioned in this thread until I joined this site. But I am from Philadelphia and knew of Haverford, Swarthmore, and Bryn Mawr but had no clue that they were considered good schools. I had heard of Smith, Barnard, Wellesley, or Vassar (one of those all girls schools) probably due to some movie like Love Story or something. I knew of Oberlin as a music conservatory. I had no idea it was a “regular” college. I had some name recognition with Amherst but would have confused it with UMass @ Amherst</p>
<p>Redblue – that was exactly how I thought about Goucher too back then!</p>
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<p>Well, let’s try something. Let’s add Dartmouth College to the mix; no one can deny that Dartmouth is a widely known Ivy League college:
[Google</a> Ngram Viewer](<a href=“http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=the+Wesleyan+University%2Cthe+Amherst+College%2Cthe+Williams+College%2Cthe+Pomona+College%2Cthe+Dartmouth+College&year_start=1930&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3]Google”>http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=the+Wesleyan+University%2Cthe+Amherst+College%2Cthe+Williams+College%2Cthe+Pomona+College%2Cthe+Dartmouth+College&year_start=1930&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3)</p>
<p>It looms over its smaller cousins yet, it too has suffered a lull in print mentions relative to its highs in the thirties and forties, fifties and sixties. Could it be because it is the most LAC like of the Big-Ivies? Even its inclusion in the university section of the USNews rankings doesn’t seem to have helped it regain the name-recogniton it had prior to the 1980s.</p>
<p>I wonder how much that huge spike in the early to mid 60s had to do with us leading-edge baby boomers hitting college age.</p>
<p>^good point.</p>
<p>IME, Oberlin did have name-recognition both nationally and internationally. The national part was either centered on its Conservatory of music or its reputation for extreme radical-lefty politically active students(Moreso back in the '90s and before than now). </p>
<p>The latter was the reason why one of my first job interviews with a small New England based financial company went south within the first 5 minutes. Other than that jerk interviewer and other questions about the radical political reputation from a few others…it was regarded as a “respectable” college. </p>
<p>When I was in China, those who are well-educated or have spent meaningful time in the states were actually quite aware of my LAC’s academic strengths. Upon hearing where I went, many accorded me a level of respect one would find accorded to Ivy/elite university students/grads…heady for someone who graduated closer to the bottom of his public magnet high school class. </p>
<p>Even my immigrant Chinese family knew of it before they left Mainland China in the 1940’s because of Oberlin’s history of engagement with East Asia…especially China.</p>
<p>I am in a major lawfirm and am involved in hiring. My “gut reaction” is that Amherst, Williams and Swarthmore are very high prestige schools. Oberlin, Pomona, Bowdoin, Colgate, the Seven Sisters and most others mentioned on this thread are familiar names and very respectable, everyone will have heard of them. Reed and Oberlin have a “hippy” reputation, not that this is necessarily a bad thing. “Man on the street” recognition may be different but not sure why it sould matter.</p>
<p>John Wesley- my company recruits heavily at Dartmouth (both undergrads and grad students) despite the fact that it’s in snow country (and the bulk of our on campus interviews are in November and December) and hard to get to. The numbers of students we hire from there haven’t budged much in 20 years (or more accurately, the percentage of our new hires who come from Dartmouth since the recruiting targets vary from year to year). The recruiters all hate going there; you need to spend an extra night for the most part, etc. But we go where the numbers are, and despite the inconvenience, it’s a high yield school.</p>
<p>People who hire for a living are much less enamored of the "rankings’ than you think. We try to get what we need in the way of talent without having to spend millions more than need to. There’s a very visible cost/benefit analysis to recruiting. So if I’m hiring Mechanical Engineers for a facility in the midwest, I’m sending a team to Rolla Missouri. Very well trained engineers, I don’t give a hoot what the rankings say. If I need an entry level person to track legislation for my government affairs team, I don’t worry about the top ranked program in this or that… I want someone who reads voraciously, is strong on basic quant analysis (i.e. interpreting charts, graphs, statistics, economic data) and is a strong communicator. I’d go to Swarthmore or Williams before I’d even think about who has the highest ranking program in policy analysis or whatever.</p>
<p>Yes, we look at admissions trends but very broadly. The tippy top of the class at the public U’s in Georgia and Florida are better than they were a generation ago. (that’s what merit money buys you.) The re-centering of the SAT rendered the difference between a 740 and an 800 pretty meaningless- and although we ask for scores, having an 800 in Math no longer means that you are a mathematical prodigy, just that you are very good at calculating and solving math equations.</p>
<p>It takes a lot to stump me on a college- even a tiny LAC. Although the renaming fad tends to make reading resumes hard for a couple of years.</p>
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<p>Or what rapidly rising costs of attendance causes – many students who would otherwise have gone to private schools may now choose in-state public schools because they cost less. There are also some who blew off high school, but redeemed themselves in community college followed by transfer to a good in-state public school.</p>
<p>blossom wrote:
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<p>I never said, they were. It’s quite possible (without really knowing anything about what positions you recruit Dartmouth students for) that twenty years of drawing water from the same well, for a particular clientele, has proven wholly satisfactory, particularly where there might be a bit of a mutually reinforcing, feedback loop that keeps qualified applicants within the pipeline.</p>
<p>Just so that the rest of you understand where some of us are coming from:</p>
<p>I went to a WASPy private school in a near-Midwestern city in the mid-1970s, very tied in to the Establishment in my area. I felt like I knew the bank presidents, business leaders, etc., because they were the parents of kids I knew. Anyway, most of my high school class went to LACs. The only non-tech university colleges that were seen as clearly superior were Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, and within the Ivy League Dartmouth was seen as only a hair removed from their level. (The top boy at my school could basically go wherever he liked, and over the 6 or 7 years on either side of my class that meant one of four colleges – Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, or MIT.) Places like Amherst, Williams, Wesleyan, Swarthmore were highly, highly desirable and respected, more so than places like Columbia or Penn. Five people in my class – all smart athletes – went to Williams. My sister chose Stanford over Williams and Dartmouth, and most people thought that was an unusual, probably mistaken decision. The girls I dated in high school went to Smith, Vassar, Skidmore, Williams, and Middlebury, and my best friend-who-was-a-girl was at Wesleyan, where I spent plenty of visiting time. I knew people at those top-shelf schools, but also at places like St. Lawrence, Lake Forest, Hamilton, Wells, Hobart, Bucknell, Wheaton (MA), Trinity (tons, very popular), Colby.</p>
<p>I had no idea before coming on CC that there were intelligent, successful people in the world who didn’t know what these colleges were.</p>
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<p>JHS- I went to a big, urban and diverse public school in New England with many first generation American kids along with “came over on the Mayflower” types-- and we all knew about Swat and Amherst and Haverford and Williams, and of course, the 7 sisters (Radcliffe was still Radcliffe, Yale was all male, that’s how old I am…)</p>
<p>But being from New England we knew nothing about Lawrence or Pomona or Rhodes. I knew one guy who ended up at Reed and we all thought he was highly adventurous! So some of it is geography! And some of it reflected living in a place with so many first generation Americans-- who had heard about Harvard and Berkeley but had to learn from their guidance counselors about all the great schools in between.</p>
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<p>USNews did NOT create the divisions. They were created by the Carnegie Foundation. It is the Carnegie Foundation NOT USNews which determines which category a given institution is in.</p>
<p>The Carnegie website says it set up the divisions in 1970, which I believe predates any USNews rankings. They were last updated in 2010, again by the Carnegie Foundation, NOT USNews. </p>
<p>USNews merely uses them.</p>
<p>I’m not sure whether I can link to it, but just google Carnegie Classifications and you should be able to find the website which explains the classifications and has lot of other interesting info.</p>
<p>Lawrence- big winners on College Bowl, that’s how I knew them. That’s how old I am. I was terribly impressed.</p>
<p>And in my neck of the woods, Holy Cross was the powerhouse for quiz bowl. That’s how old I am!</p>
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<p>I’m familiar with the Carnegie Foundation and the related Carnegie Commission on Higher Education which published an exquisite series of monographs on higher education during the late sixties, seventies and early eighties, with contributing editors like Derek Bok, Nathan Pusey, Clark Kerr and Lewis B. Mayhew. However, the one thing they never did was rate colleges nor rank them by assigning arbitrary weights and grades to them. They never sold a magazine nor did very much to make themselves a household name; they just published some of the most thoughtful studies of higher education during a significant period of turmoil and growth. Which is one reason I respect them.</p>
<p>I haven’t read this whole thread, but I have one child at Williams and the other at a top 5 public well recognized school. I am not worried about the career prospects of my Williams child due to well known classroom rigor and business connections, but I am worried about career prospects at the one who goes to the one with the name recognition. There will be a large number of undergrads all scrambling for the same connections. In addition, grad schools are much more impressed with a high GPA at a SLAC then at even a excellent public.</p>
<p>What the Carnegie Corporation did was create the classifications of National Universities, Masters Universities, National Liberal Arts Colleges, etc., determine the criteria for each classification, and assign institutions to the classifications.</p>
<p>USNWR does its rankings within each classification, and I think determines the ranking a little differently depending on which classification it is ranking. So you never see Amherst and Vanderbilt compared head-to-head. </p>
<p>I think some people were saying that National LACs had lost status because USNWR did not rank them with the National Universities, and others said that USNWR was just following Carnegie in treating them separately; it wasn’t USNWR’s decision. But of course they had to decide to use the Carnegie classifications that way. No one held a gun to their head. At the same time, it’s hardly illogical to separate them. I think almost all of the LACs would get slaughtered rankings-wise if you applied USNWR’s National University standard to them without adjustment, and that would be pretty misleading, too.</p>