haverford vs. georgetown.

swat69
Fri, 17 Apr 2009 13:15:47 +0000

People who matter know the name Haverford, and know it very well. People who don’t know the name Haverford don’t matter. (If the ones who don’t know are your relatives, they can look it up, whereupon they will be very, very impressed.) I was told this by a Washington lawyer who used it when speaking of Williams (where he went), and it is the same with any of the outstanding colleges. People who never heard of Haverford have also never heard of Amherst, Swarthmore, Williams, etc., etc. Or they confuse Amherst with Andover prep school (“Amherst – isn’t that where George W. Bush was a cheerleader? Isn’t it a high school?”) They may have heard of Wesleyan because Obama gave the commencement address there last year after Ted Kennedy fell ill – but they often mix it up with other colleges and small universities whose names begin with W. Occasionally somebody who should know better makes a mistake, probably while writing under deadline. Maureen Dowd, the NYTimes columnist, who obviously knows better, wrote “Wesleyan” in a recent column instead of “Wellesley” – but it was hastily changed before the print version of the paper hit the street the next morning.

The only exception to this “name” rule comes if you are abroad: somebody from Britain or France or Latin America s more likely to have heard of a big American university than a small college – but so what? They even confuse the names of huge American universities. Le Monde Diplomatique (which surely knows better) recently confused the University of Michigan with Michigan State. It was embarrassing to the writer and editors, not to the universities.

Grad schools, law schools, medical schools, etc. all know Haverford very well. I’ve never gone to Haverford, although I strongly considered it, but they have an engineering arrangement where you take 3 years of liberal arts at Haverford and then 2 years of engineering at Caltech, and get 2 bachelors degrees, one BA from Haverford and one BS from Caltech. Similar arrangements exist with Amherst (and Dartmouth engineering), Williams (and Columbia engineering, I think), and Colgate (Columbia or Washington University in St. Louis engineering). Swarthmore has its own excellent, and highly regarded engineering program. All of these schools are superb, and known to be. I would say that they all outshine Georgetown, but that may be a personal taste.