It’s been on this board for at least 10 years.
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/96772-top-universities-vs-wasp.html
It was in the Urban Dictionary in 2004
“3) abbreviation for Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, and Pomona (the top four Liberal Arts Colleges in the nation. Strangely, those colleges are full of WASPs themselves)”
The top four LACs in the nation according to whom? The person who entered this into the urban dictionary?
Certainly not USNWR…
I made it up on your prestigisiosity thread a month ago but apparently someone made it up before I did, @hunt .
@arcadia It’s pretty close to USNWR, except for Wellesley at #4 and Bowdoin tied with Pomona at #5.
Also, it seems like besides Williams, Amherst, and Swarthmore, the remaining top 10 on USNWR seem to alternate from year to year. Carleton used to be #5 and is now #8, Wellesley has alternated between #4 and #7 a few times, and Davidson and Claremont McKenna also go in and out of the top 10. To claim that Pomona is leagues ahead of a school ranked one, two, or three colleges below it would not be valid.
Based on that, I believe the academic quality of all the top 10 LACs is roughly equal due to the fluctuations in ranking. Someone will disagree with me on that but let’s face it, they’re simply all great schools.
@BrownParent Maybe not all the schools in NESCAC. Tufts isn’t a LAC anymore, and Trinity, Connecticut, Hamilton, Bates, and Colby are generally less selective and lower ranked. The rest - Amherst, Bowdoin, Middlebury, Wesleyan, and Williams certainly would be a analogous Ivy League, however. However, it seems like Wesleyan’s rankings have steadily fallen from making it a top 10 school to more of a top 20 school (maybe due to its endowment, although it is still very selective and has extremely high-achieving students).
And remember before someone freaks out, top 10 and top 20 isn’t the same as comparing Harvard and a for-profit online school.
@shavree287 If you are junior planning a list of schools to visit please don’t analyze the risk the way you are doing in the post. Yes the difference between Trinity and CC compared to the other nine is enough to make a decision on, but the other nine at your peril. One half to one percentile difference in students of the remaining nine is a crap shoot, especially if you are not being recruited for anything, or you are a female. In a class of 500, about 100 are athletes, legacy and underrepresented students, perhaps a bit more. There are too many variables for the remaining spots to rely on being one half to one percentile better than average.
If we have to limit ourselves to 8 like the Ivies, then Williams, Amherst, Swat, Middlebury, Bowdoin, Pomona, Wellesley, and Wesleyan. BUT Haverford, Carleton, and Davidson are all right there and could easily be included with the other 8. The first 6 are hard to argue with and should be on everyone’s list.
@2019Parent I’m actually a parent of a high school junior, am an Amherst alum, and a current parent of a student at Swarthmore and Carleton. A complaint my S at Swat had when visiting Wes was that he felt they lowered the standards quite a bit for URMs (he’s a URM himself) and felt that it almost made him feel tokenized. Wes isn’t alone in this, but he felt that kids at Swat got in regardless of their ethnicity because they are brilliant. My D at Carleton felt the same way about Swat, admitting kids regardless of race and more so on potential. Of course, there are exceptions.
@urbanslaughter Regarding Carleton, people easily discount it due to its location in MN and lack of name recognition, but honestly if it were in say MA or MD, it’d certainly have that East Clast prestige. My kids at both Swarthmore and Carleton have received equally good educations, although my D says the food and collaborative culture at Carleton is a little better (she got into Swat and hated the food and the level of academic pressure) and my S says the academics at Swat were crazy intense (why he chose Swat).
My high school junior is at the same level of achievement if not a little higher as my D & S so I’m not concerned about getting in as much as narrowing down. And by no means do I believe Trinity and Connecticut are leagues below, so please forgive me if I made that implication.
@urbanslaughter I’d take out Wellesely (even though it’s my wife’s alma mater) because it’s single-gender so it’d be hard to categorize in one list and Wesleyan (even though it’s a member of the Little Three, its reputation has faded and I’ve heard negative things about its current president) and replace them with Haverford and Carleton. Haverford often doesn’t get the credit it deserves, and both my kids in college now highly considered Haverford.
…so say numerous universities not in the northeast, about the ivy league. 
Also, maybe a decent (?) comparison between Ivies and elite LACs could be the following:
Harvard - Williams
Yale - Amherst
Princeton - Swarthmore
Columbia - Pomona
UPenn - Carleton
Brown - Bowdoin
Dartmouth - Middlebury
Cornell - Haverford
Most would agree (at least CC people) that HYP would be Williams, Amherst, and Swarthmore, but the rest of the LACs listed above (like the rest of the Ivies) could be comparable in any order really.
@OHMomof2 It’s not like Carleton is actively attempting to improve its ranking or attract more attention. If it were, the student culture would certainly be different, more competitive, and more desiring a name than an education. And yes, numerous universities do say that, I will agree with that, but Carleton is not just some state school in rural Nebraska trying to recruit high-achieving kids with random accolades.
No, I had schools like vanderbilt and northwestern in mind when I made that statement.
@OHMomof2 Oh I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to be rude! Vanderbilt and Northwestern do seem to have growing prestige, though, and are certainly on par with the top schools.
In many ways Davidson is the LAC of “Duke”. The two have very similar student bodies and attitudes on campus.
@LordSwag I hadn’t thought of that, but good point! Same state, and although Duke is not an Ivy, it is certainly on par with them.
@shavree287 I’m not trying to get up on a soapbox or be argumentative, but after reading my post I realize text hardly connotes tone. I apologize if I seem brusque, but I digress…
The US News & World Report rankings are hardly the end all and be all of rankings, let alone prestige and reputation, and I hope you aren’t basing your perception based on that metric alone. Look at the methodology of the rankings. Look at peer assessment scores. Look at faculty resource rankings. Look at SAT scores. Look at graduate school placement rates. They all form a picture, and one number from one publication hardly denotes reputation. Even peer evaluation scores don’t correlate perfectly.
Look at US News 10 years ago and compare. I’ll pick out two schools: Middlebury and Wesleyan, because they’ve each had movement of the same magnitude, in different directions. Wesleyan was tied with Haverford at #9 and Middlebury was #11. Is Midd truly a “better” school than it was 10 years ago because its US News ranking bumped up by 4 spots? Is Wesleyan a lesser school because its ranking dropped by 6 spots? I’d argue that Midd has edged up a bit because of endowment and Wes down a bit for the same reason. But I’d hardly argue that their reputations have changed because of a few spots in one publication’s ranking.
UChicago was #5 in 1985. It fell all the way to #15 by 2006, and now has climbed back up. Was its reputation really all that different through those periods? I’d argue no.
It’s true, reputation (and academic strength) can change over time, but to peg reputation to US News ranking is a bit of a stretch. I suppose my point is, don’t fall into the CC trap of parsing 1 vs. 10, as it’s really 1 vs. 50 where differences start to come into play (though I suppose it’s bound to happen on CC). It’s the forest, not the trees.
I also realize you’ve made a similar point to mine in some of your other posts, but I still think it’s worth repeating to the lovely CC crowd 
I think the case can be made that Middlebury and Wesleyan have barely moved at all, even over the course of those ten years. Really, it depends on what one thinks about the relationship between Williams and Swarthmore. If one thinks they are “about equal” according to USNWR rankings, then one must think the same regarding Middlebury and Wesleyan, since the six point difference in “overall score” that separates Middlebury and Wesleyan also is what separates Williams and Swarthmore.
The problem with that approach is that it’s really hard to ignore two LACs that between them spend twice as much per year on peer-reviewed research as their nearest competitors and one of which has at least one internationally recognized academic major and very possibly two…
Carleton and Haverford are great schools, but, overall they don’t bring as much to the table as Wesleyan or Wellesley.