<p>Unalove...To the people who count, The University of Chicago is very respected. Really. The level of awareness that people have is directly related to their life experiences. People in the know, who are well educated, themselves, or who are responsible for placing graduates in high level jobs, really do understand the value of a Chicago degree, and that goes for all over the country. This business about "locality" presupposes that people outside the Northeast are ignorant to the value of top college degrees. Nonsense. Don't believe it for a moment.</p>
<p>
[QUOTE]
The Ivy League name has near universal brand awareness and prestige
[/QUOTE]
</p>
<p>I agree even internationally the term Ivy League is well known. Of course that doesnt mean people know which universities are part of the Ivy League. Heck I've had to argue to my friends and my family about what the Ivy League actually is (ie me arguing that its not 'an organization of the best American universities' but rather just a sports league lol). I get: Stanford isn't part of the Ivy League?? from pretty much everyone who knows both Stanford and the Ivy League lol</p>
<p>gabriellah,
If your comment about "locality" was directed toward me, let me very clearly state that it is NOT the people outside of the Northeast who are ignorant to the value of top college degrees. The people in the know, as you call them, know that there is quality all over the country, including the Northeast...and the Midwest, the West, the South, the Southwest. Frankly, from my experience, the ignorant ones are much more commonly found in the Northeast where many place a lower value on college degrees from schools outside of their region.</p>
<p>Chicago students don't really need the ego massage, do they?</p>
<p>Of course the school is highly respected in academic circles and among employers who know the college. The whole point of some of the posts in response to the OP is that prestige is relative, except for a handful of universally recognized brand name colleges. If the OP was simply trying to start a discussion of prestige in regard to the usual CC conventional wisdom, with the same 12 colleges exchanging places in "rank," that would have made for a pretty dull discussion. As predictable as a sunny day in So Cal. Where's was the "fun" supposed to come in?</p>
<p>If undergraduate rankings were done purely, by a brilliant and objective alien who could ignore popular sentiment and absorb the tangibles and intangibles of quality at each school. I'm just sayin'.</p>
<ol>
<li>Yale</li>
<li>Harvard</li>
<li>Stanford</li>
<li>MIT</li>
<li>Princeton</li>
<li>Amherst</li>
<li>Cal Tech</li>
<li>Pomona</li>
<li>Penn</li>
<li>Chicago</li>
<li>Columbia</li>
<li>Cornell</li>
<li>Berkeley</li>
<li>Williams</li>
<li>Wesleyan</li>
<li>Carleton</li>
<li>Hopkins</li>
<li>Dartmouth</li>
<li>Brown</li>
<li>Swarthmore</li>
<li>UCLA</li>
<li>U of Michigan</li>
<li>Duke</li>
<li>Wellesley</li>
<li>U of Virginia</li>
</ol>
<p>prefrosh,
It's an interesting list, but do you really think that an objective (and brilliant) alien would select 60% of the schools in that slim sliver between DC and Boston? And 80% would be there or in California? Or that there would only be 2 colleges in the entire South and none in the Southwest that would be considered high enough quality to make the list? Or only 3 in the Midwest? Unless your alien is from the Upper East Side of Manhattan (in which case it is probably hopeless to argue the point), then you may want to encourage it to take a little broader view of the many great colleges across the country.</p>
<p>^or, he could just make a longer list.</p>
<p>yea, man, lac's have hardly any prestige. theyre not even in the discussion. schools like notre dame and vanderbilt outdo williams, swat, amherst, middlebury etc.</p>
<p>brownplease,
If you're being sarcastic, let me be the first to inform you that, in the South, very few have even heard of Williams, Swarthmore, Amherst, Middlebury, etc. and Vanderbilt is an extremely well regarded school and considered a peer to all of the non-HYP Ivies. Likewise in the Midwest with Notre Dame. Put it in competition with any LAC you like and ND will more than hold its own and provides an exceptional undergraduate experience. </p>
<p>The problem is not that places like SWAM aren't excellent schools-they most certainly are, but what you and others with a NE-centric view of the world is that this is a big country and there are a lot of great schools with great students all across the country. To go along with the schools that prefrosh mentioned, how about Vanderbilt, Rice, Emory, Wake Forest, W&M, Davidson in the South/Southwest and how about Northwestern and Wash U to go along with Notre Dame in the Midwest-again, all are terrific schools and certainly can provide as good or better an undergraduate experience as any of the schools you mention while turning out graduates that are every bit as qualified. </p>
<p>johnwesley probably has it right-the alien needs a longer list to account for all of the quality institutions that are out there....</p>
<p>How did the brilliant alien manage to miss Grinnell and include Wesleyan considering the super-human objectivity that supposedly went into this list? Does the alien have a good friend at Wesleyan perhaps? </p>
<p>I think this alien drank the CC kool-aid and turned in a highly subjective list as predicted. Personally, I think a truly objective alien would have given a lot more weight to those schools that make up the top 20 national research universities and the LACs would not be in the running. <a href="http://mup.asu.edu/research2006.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://mup.asu.edu/research2006.pdf</a> </p>
<p>I repeat the assertion that national prestige belongs to only a handful of colleges and that for most others, the level of prestige or recognition or respect or whatever you call it is relative to region of the country, socio-economic class (say, prep school vs. public), specific professions, specialties within professions, and any number of variations on the groups of people being asked.</p>
<p>On pure prestige (in my neck of the woods, NJ suburbs):</p>
<p>Harvard
Princeton
Wharton (Jewish ppl)
MIT (Asian ppl)
Yale
Cornell
Stanford
Duke
Brown
Columbia</p>
<p>With most people in my area (80% of the population are Jews or Asian and nearly all wealthy) there's no Ra-Ra military so the service academies are seen as a joke. Also, we value pre-professionalism that's why Yale and Columbia aren't ranked that high.</p>
<p>Hawkette: Your rude and defensive commentary is annoying, already. You are quite narcisscistic to assume that I was talking to you, when I was involved in a discussion with a student from U Chicago. Furthermore, I stand by my statement that, people who know, understand that a degree from Chicago is very respected, and very valuable. Often, comments coming from people who have never heard of a school, even though it is clearly amongst the best in the nation, is due to their limited knowledge concerning the high ranking colleges and universities, not the respect the school actually deserves. Please do calm down. No one is saying that there are not fine schools everywhere. Also, you speak as though someone were calling you "ignorant." At least, that is what your responding post implies. If you relax, and re-read my post (clearly directed to unalove), you will see that I never said anything near that.</p>
<p>Also, Hawk, please don't insist that "people who know," from all over the country are not extremely impressed by a degree from Swarthmore, Amherst, and Williams. To think that is just plain wrong.</p>
<p>Some people are aggressive in their ignorance of prestigious colleges. We, obviously, are not those people.</p>
<p>I'm reminded of my summer job. My immediate boss (not my hiring boss) was a no-name SUNY (SUNY= State U of New York, very decentralized system with many small schools and no real flagship) grad. She thought she was asserting her SUNY's (relative) prestige when she said to my co-worker, "Bates College? I've never heard of it."</p>
<p>But this NY resident (presumably) would probably not have said "never heard of it" in regard to Vassar or Columbia or Princeton, etc. I'm not sure how she's trying to pump up her SUNY's prestige by saying she never heard of a small LAC in Maine, but maybe you had to be there. It's more likely her message was: where you went (or are going) to college doesn't mean anything to me one way or the other --- just do the job.</p>
<p>The way I read into it was the condescending, "Since I've never heard of your school, it's obviously inferior to mine" tone. However, the tone itself doesn't matter-- that she hadn't heard of a quite prestigious liberal arts school is significant.</p>
<p>Significant to you, not to her. </p>
<p>Until I started reading up on colleges two years ago, I'd never heard of Bates either, or a slew of other wonderful LACs in the farthest frozen corner of the U.S. Oh, I was aware of several top-20 LACs because friends, friends' spouses, or work colleagues had attended them (Williams, Amherst, Colgate, Carleton, Oberlin, Wellesley, Smith and such) but I'd never had occasion to hear or learn about Bates, Colby, Bowdoin or dozens of others among the best LACs throughout the country. Is that significant somehow? Not to me. All it signifies is that I don't live in the NE and didn't attend or send my kids to boarding school or a pricey prep. I think it just underscores my point that prestige is relative, except for a small handful of colleges. And we all --- even Ms. SUNY, your former supervisor --- know which ones they are.</p>
<p>^ Yeah, didn't Lisa Simpson make Vassar a popular choice?</p>
<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ1pZjb-YyA%5B/url%5D">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ1pZjb-YyA</a></p>
<p>As an immigrant having lived half of his life in the SF bay area:</p>
<p>Harvard and MIT, knew about this pair since I was learning how to write.
Princeton, Yale, UPenn, Columbia, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA, Johns Hopkins, Carnegie Mellon, learned about these rather quickly after settling down in the US.
Everything else: completely did not know until I started researching schools.</p>