<p>Even in the U.S. there’s often a certain amount of brand confusion between Michigan and Michigan State. That’s especially pronounced in international surveys. It tends to happen with other similarly named schools as well–the University of Illinois-Chicago sometimes comes out ahead of the University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign in these kinds of international surveys, because people have heard of the University of Illinois and they’ve heard of Chicago and they assume the “good” Illinois must be in the state’s most important city. I’ve also seen international surveys where UMass-Amherst comes out ahead of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, especially when the latter is spelled out in full, because the 3-letter “MIT” is a more powerful brand than the full name of the place. </p>
<p>More generally, schools with the most famous places in their names–Boston University, New York University, the University of Chicago, the University of California - Los Angeles–tend to do very well in international surveys.</p>
<p>Garbage in, garbage out.</p>