<p>For those who love top ten lists: as part of the "College Hopes and Worries Survey", the Princeton Review identifies the results of its fifth annual poll of 3,890 college applicants and 1,012 parents of applicants. The "dream college" students most wish they could attend is New York University, while parents most wish their kids were headed to Princeton.</p>
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Top 10 Dream Colleges
In answer tallies on the survey's only fill-in-the-blank question, "What 'dream college' would you most like to attend (or see your child attend) were prospects of acceptance or cost not issues?," the schools students most named were 1-New York Univ., 2-Harvard Univ., 3-Princeton Univ., 4-Stanford Univ., 5-Yale Univ., 6-Brown Univ., 7-Columbia Univ., 8-Duke Univ., 9-Cornell Univ., and 10-Univ. of California Los Angeles. The schools parents most named were: 1-Princeton Univ., 2-Stanford Univ., 3-Harvard Univ., 4-Univ. of Notre Dame, 5-Duke Univ., 6-Yale Univ., 7-Boston College, 8-Brown Univ., 9-Cornell Univ., 10-Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
<p>haha. sorta random, but i was by NYU with some friends the other day. We're doing a project on the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire for a competition and there was a memorial service down in the village on Monday. The fire took place in the Asch building, now the Brown building in NYU, so the memorial was right outside that.</p>
<p>Because other schools with similarly good reputations are not on the list. Why Boston College and not Emory or Northwestern or Georgetown or Rice or Tufts?</p>
<p>It's a bit of an anomaly.</p>
<p>I think it's also notable that Penn is not on the list, presumably because everybody confuses it with Penn State. I have this mental picture of generations of Penn alumni confronting Benjamin Franklin in the hereafter, saying, "You doofus! Why didn't you name the place Franklin University? Then we wouldn't have had this problem."</p>
<p>RIght. Nothing against Boston College AT ALL, its a fantastic school, but there were other schools that I would have thought would have the edge over BC.</p>
<p>Marian - By your response you imply that the other colleges not listed are better than BC because it was listed while they were not -- so that it would have been allright if any one of them was listed and BC was not -- but not the other way around! If BC is the equal of those not listed then what is the problem since only ten are on the list?</p>
<p>Furthemore, perhaps BC just lucked out with the (random) parents who responded, another group may have voted in Appalachian State. So, again, where is your argument?</p>
<p>By the way, maybe those parents value one thing that BC emphasizes, that is the Jesuit ideal of service to others, which is what it tries to instill in its students.</p>
<p>Hmm...service to others -- there is something that hasn't had much play in the last 20 or 30 years!</p>
<p>I agree with Marian about Georgetown. Heck, it made it to the Final Four.
And most of the other dream schools didn't. ;)</p>
<p>(I do think a lot of the BC popularity relates to its spirited athletic program and its desirable location, in addition to its other attributes.)</p>
<p>All I am saying is that if I were making a list, I would have put either Penn or Georgetown on it, and I probably would not have included Boston College, which I see as simply one of several excellent choices in the Boston area.</p>
<p>At the same time, I was pleasantly surprised to see my own alma mater, Cornell, on both the students' and parents' lists. I wasn't quite expecting that, either. I would have thought it would not make the top 10 because of the "but it's in the middle of nowhere" problem.</p>
<p>I had a dream school, when I was in 10th grade (This would have been some time in the second half of last century). Growing up on the east coast, my family took a trip to California during the summer and I fell in love with UC Santa Cruz. I thought about that idyllic campus ever after, and missed the out of state application deadline by about 2 months! :(</p>