<p>JHS,
Thanks for your comments. I applied to colleges not too long after you did. I attended a competitive public high school in the Boston area. There really were no rankings back then, although my classmates and I had some sense of the relative academic reputations of various universities and colleges. However, I do not think that was the single determining factor in our college decisions. In fact, many of my classmates, including myself, chose top LACs over top Ivies. Additionally, I think some of the colleges I mentioned may have had more regional pull as there were more opportunities to know alumni and it was easier to visit those campuses since they were closer to home. Where I lived, there certainly were more alumni, parents, and teachers in my h.s. from Brown and Dartmouth, than Princeton. Given this familiarity, applications to those schools from my classmates were much higher than to Princeton. The impressions we had of Princeton were probably inaccurate (perhaps even biased by reading the Great Gatsby junior year!) but we had no way to verify them as none of my close friends even visited Princeton unless they were accepted. Likewise, my classmate who attended U of C, did not visit until after he was accepted. I also remember when a classmate decided to attend Duke, most of us wondered why someone would go so far south to attend a good school. Perhaps for a student from NYC or NJ, Princeton would have been more familiar at a personal level and easier to visit, and thus made a stronger impression. This relative parochialism is definitely a phenomenon of the past. The world is a smaller place as students visit colleges much farther away. They fly rather than drive or take a bus. The internet also has brought the campus experience-sometimes live-into the student’s home. One can take virtual tours now. I still remember looking at college catalogs with virtually no pictures in our public library. Additionally, the common app which Chicago will soon adopt, makes it much easier to apply to colleges so typically students apply to many more than we did. Last, I think that colleges themselves have tried to market themselves on their websites, catalogs, and road shows. When I applied, colleges did little of that. It was a bit unseemly as most felt that the excellence of their respective programs was self-evident (perhaps not). Moreover, LACs like Amherst, Swarthmore, and Wesleyan, (and I would suspect great universities like Chicago) and their students did not seem to perseverate over the name recognition of their college but were content, even enthusastic, about attending someplace where they were getting a great education. I am also reminded that this is the era that Allan Bloom wrote about in his book “The Closing of the American Mind.” Perhaps a combination of factors in academia ranging from overemphasis on multiculturalism (I say this as a racial minority myself), PC-ness, and the commercialization of the college experience (with quality of food and dorms touted by schools and weighed by students more than the quality of profs) coloring the college selection process. Sadly, in many cases, colleges and students both look at undergraduate education as a product rather than a special opportunity in a critical time of a student’s life.</p>