I am curious to hear your reasoning…
I would venture that there are thousands of people in Massachusetts and Rhode Island that confuse Penn and Penn State but have heard of Tufts. Tufts is a major health care plan provider in these two states, so there are literally thousands and thousands of people who see the Tufts name every time they go to their doctor, the hospital, or pay their insurance premium.
Then there are all the families and patients of the Tufts teaching hospitals…
Then there are all the patients of the thousands of Tufts trained doctors, dentists and veterinarians across the country…
Then there are all the inner city kids (17,000 per year) that have been helped by Tufts community service programs…
Then there is the thousands in the K-12 engineering education outreach community where Tufts created both the national scope Nerd Girls programs and the international scope Lego Mindstorms programs.
Then there are the millions of people from around the world who have watched the Boston Marathon over the last decade and cheered on the 100-200 Tufts runners (each year) who have raised raised $4.5M for health and medical programs and research as well as the hunreds of Tufts volunteers (each year) manning the water stations along the route.
Then there are the millions of people who have watched the TV program Glee, where the Beezelbubs provide the background vocals and arragements.They had sold over a million copies of their CD as of 2011 and they perform around the world.
These are all communities that would have little to no interest in USNews rankings and College Confidential and therefore unlikely to have even heard of Penn.
Of course there is a corresponding “world of Penn” where people will have have heard of Penn and not Tufts.
If you look at the big picture, the world is much much bigger than Penn’s sphere of influence and within it’s sphere of influence it shares almost the same name with another bigger, more visible University that industry prefers for recruiting and academics rank more highly for engineering disciplines. If you go back and read the articles, you will also see that even within Penn’s Sphere of influence, “well educated” journalists also confuse the two schools.
Of course this is no big deal - unless Penn is attempting to brand itself as being “a level above everybody else”.