<p>According to a Princeton Review survey, UCLA ranks No. 1 among public schools and in the Top Seven overall in the category of "Dream Schools" for both the applicants and the parents.</p>
<p>The Princeton Review, an education services company, has conducted its "College Hopes & Worries Survey" since 2003. Findings this year are based on 12,174 surveys completed on paper or online by students and parents from all 50 states and DC. The 15-question survey ran in The Princeton Review book, "Best 371 Colleges" (Random House, July 2009) and on Test</a> Prep: GMAT, GRE, LSAT, MCAT, SAT, ACT, and More from late January to mid-March. All but one question was multiple-choice.</p>
<p>For the survey's only fill-in-the-blank question, "What 'dream college' do you wish you (your child) could attend if acceptance or cost weren't issues?" respondents wrote in the names of more than 600 institutions from Adrian College to Yale.</p>
<p>The schools most named by students as their "Dream Colleges" were:</p>
<p>1/ Stanford University
2/ Harvard College
3/ New York University
4/ Princeton University
5/ Brown University
6/ Yale University
7/ ** University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) **
8/ Massachusetts Institute of Technology
9/ University of Southern California
10/ Cornell University
The schools most named by parents as their "Dream Colleges" were:</p>
<p>1/ Stanford University
2/ Princeton University
3/ Harvard College
4/ Massachusetts Institute of Technology
5/ Yale University
6/ *University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) *
7/ University of Notre Dame
8/ Brown University
9/ University of Southern California
10/ New York University</p>
<p>I hadn’t heard of UCB until I was 14… even then it was just a single obscure reference from one of my teachers.</p>
<p>that said, I live in the OC-LA area so I might get a bit more bias in terms of news. I’m sure those in the bay area hear about UCB a fair bit more.</p>
<p>I’ve been told by my counselor that most people don’t give UCB much attention because they see it as a lot harder to get into. They feel like UCLA is a lot more tangible, that’s why people talk about it more. Not saying it’s true, but sounds logical. </p>
<p>But with Standford and Harvard on that list, it might not hold much water. But those are privates…</p>
<p>We have reps from the UCs come to my CC and UCLA is appointment only and UCB you can just drop in. I’ve always wondered why so little people bothered to talk to the UCB rep but the UCLA rep was so busy you had to schedule an appointment.</p>
<p>it’s because noone other than nerds have heard of UCB…</p>
<p>tell a stranger you got into Harvey Mudd or Pomona and they’ll raise an eyebrow and ask if that’s good or not. Prestige, strength of academics and the like don’t mean fame. UCLA is the most famous UC from my understanding. If you get into UCLA, you’re big **** in Asia.</p>
<p>google doesn’t lie,
UCLA 17.3mil
UCB 3.3mil
Cal .133mil</p>
<p>and just to be plain unfair…
Los Angeles 246,000,000
LA 3,820,000,000
Berkeley 61,900,000
Berk 8,100,000
Bay Area 74,200,000</p>
<p>I live in a secluded little bubble. I’ll admit it. The fact is I’m not alone. Berkely is a small city in this big world, more 5 year olds have heard of Tokyo than they have Berkeley.</p>
<p>in the end this is moot, the only people who need to know what uni you went to are your prospective employers, places you’re applying to for graduate studies and potential mates and colleagues. If any of these people don’t know of UCB, you might want to rethink dealing with them.</p>
<p>Worldwide, Cal is very (very) well known. It’s probably among the most well known in our country along with Harvard and Stanford. (They all call it Berkeley though!)</p>
<p>please don’t think i’m being partial when i say this, but UCLA is THE most branded (as in recognized) university in the world (and when you get here, they make damn sure you know it…). </p>
<p>the only other school i can think of that might have a bigger universal rep / recognition is Harvard.</p>
<p>^ Stanford is also very popular as a brand.</p>
<p>All my relatives in Taiwan care only about UCB, and in terms of business, everyone knows about Haas over Anderson (UCLA). I still believe Cal is more recognized over LA.</p>
<p>I’m very content with those lists posted by the op. Makes my prospective schools look way more desirable.</p>
<p>the top 20% most intelligent people might be more interested in UCB and ivy.
the lower 80% aren’t. UCLA, OSU, and USC are EVERYWHERE. I see them EVERYWHERE. Try going to a forum other than this one… you’ll see people spamming their emblems(particularly OSU) EVERYWHERE.</p>
<p>popularity isn’t about being the best, it’s about making others think you are.</p>
<p>That has a whole lot (and I mean a WHOLE lot) to do with college athletics. Predominantly college football and men’s college basketball, and the success of a USC/OSU in football or UCLA in basketball.</p>
<p>@xelink
At the undergraduate level, UCLA and UCB have virtually the same acceptance rate with the former having a lower acceptance rate (if you include UCB’s spring admits) as of last year. Is it really fair to classify UCB students as the “top 20%” and UCLA students as “the lower 80%?”</p>
<p>“popularity isn’t about being the best, it’s about making others think you are.”</p>
<p>I don’t think there is anyone more guilty of gloating about how much better their academics are than Cal students or aspiring Cal students. Especially when it comes to UCB vs. UCLA comparisons. USNWP ranks Cal #21 and UCLA #24 nationally and Cal #1 and UCLA #2 for best public universities, but somehow that translates into a million mile gap in your minds. Ridiculous…</p>
<p>BTW, I love how you guys place yourselves in the same melting pot as ivy league students:</p>
<p>“the top 20% most intelligent people might be more interested in UCB and ivy.”</p>
<p>jesus christ on a cracker, get f**king real.</p>
<p>Haha, SO true. Cal students are the biggest boasters EVER.</p>
<p>But I do have to admit, Cal is up there with the big shots (especially when it comes down to certain disciplines in graduate school). UCLA and Berkeley are both renowned in Asia. Berkeley for it’s education and LA for it’s sweatpants and jerseys.</p>
<p>I think it’s a combination of athletics and academics. While academically UCLA is strong, athletically they’re also strong. So you have a good football team, good basketball team, good students and hard to get in.</p>
<p>Berkeley is more about academics than they are about sports. Do they have a team? Sure. Are they competitive? Sure. But UCLA athletics is miles ahead of Berkeley athletics. </p>
<p>Any of you notice that Stanford was ranked #1 ahead of Harvard and Yale, despite Harvard and Yale clearly being tougher institutions and recognized as elite more widely? That list has nothing to do with what school is recognized, but rather what their parents would be so stoked to hear their child got accepted to.</p>
<p>Obviously if the parents didn’t list Cal, they don’t know how good of a school it is. That’s what the debate is about. Is UCLA more recognized world wide than Berkeley? Absolutely. Even stupid people in other countries know about UCLA. I knew about UCLA when I wasn’t even thinking about going to college. I didn’t learn about Berkeley until I was like 21 or 22 and someone was like, “My sister got into Berkeley! Berkeley!” I felt like an idiot because I didn’t know. Went home and researched it and I was like “Whoa, it’s ranked higher than UCLA.”</p>
<p>But why would I know about it before I cared about college? Sure, after I started thinking about coming back to school and transferring, I knew everything about Cal and other schools, but when you don’t care about college, don’t go to college, don’t live in California and only care about things that have to do with regular life, you’ll never hear about Berkeley unless you either meet someone who wants to go there/is going to go there or went there already or knows someone there. But UCLA? You hear about it.</p>
<p>How did I hear about UCLA? When I was 12, my older sister was in high school and she was doing really well. She was a junior and started putting in applications for colleges. She applied to a handful and my mom was talking about UCLA and told her to apply. She cried because she didn’t get in and my mom was talking about how a lot of Hispanics apply to UCLA and how affirmative action might be why she didn’t get in. Berkeley was never even mentioned. (This was in 1996 or so) So in between me being 12 and me being 21 and randomly hearing about it, UC Berkeley never came up to me.</p>
<p>It’s because of Berkeley’s real or perceived left-wing environment. They surveyed the whole country, not just California. I’m sure a lot of people in other parts of the country think of hippies, drugs, violent protests, etc. when Berkeley comes to mind.</p>
<p>from my own experiences, including a lot of travel since i have relatives throughout the world, ucb is much more known than ucla, though ucla is also mostly heard of, ucla just doesn’t make as big of an impression, i think you are all missing the point of being a “dream school”, cal doesn’t have many kids who wish to go there, even the kids who go there probably wished they had gotten into stanford, there’s a reason stanfordrejects.com redirects to cal’s website, stanford is most of their dream schools…i think what happened was the parents who would wish their kid goes to cal instead of la still ended up putting stanford as their dream school while parents who don’t prefer more elite institutions would have put ucla, which is a great school though generally not thought of in the same echelon of academic eliteness or even being near the (perceived) competitiveness of cal</p>