<p>People – by which we mean the man on the street, which is what this thread is about – don’t particularly care about how many schools are in the Ivy League and which schools, precisely, are those schools. To the man on the street, it’s a vague term that they might associate with Harvard, Yale, Princeton, maybe Stanford, whatever. It’s not something that they live and die for, and yk something? They’re not even particularly upset that they don’t know what those 8 schools are, or if they placed a school in there that isn’t in there, they don’t feel that it’s important enough that by gosh, they’d better really bone up on this. </p>
<p>Some of you need to get out more. Go ask the cashier at the grocery store, the lady who works at the barbershop, the janitor, the fireman, all the many, many people out there that work hard for a living. They won’t know. Their impressions will be superficial, and will vary by region of the country. And they won’t be upset that they don’t know. It’s just not this all-encompassing passion for most people that it is for those on this board.</p>
<p>My D’s first choice right now is Wellesley (everyone cross fingers!) and her second choice Bryn Mawr. Not many people know these schools out here in the midwest. Out of sight, out of mind. Oh well. Doesn’t reflect poorly on the schools in the least, just speaks to how uninteresting the topic of elite colleges is to most people.</p>
<p>Edit to my previous post: Obviously as a CCer I know that Emory is a great school, and I have done quite a bit of research for Georgia Tech and Emory. I was just noting the reputations, not reality.</p>
<p>Also, I can’t even count the number of times I’ve had to tell people that no, Duke is not an Ivy and that the Ivies are an ATHLETIC CONFERENCE of schools located in the North. I’ve found that the “layman” doesn’t quite seem to understand that.</p>
<p>I’m an East Coaster, not from near Boston. This is basically “Lirazel’s rankings from back when she was so college unaware [freshman year] that she didn’t think it was strange for her cousin to be accepted to Georgetown Law while rejected from UVa, American, and George Mason Law. In fact, her reaction was along the lines of “Oh, okay.””
Harvard
Princeton
Yale
MIT
Duke
Amherst
Brown
UMich
UVA
Wellesley
Dartmouth
Georgetown
Bryn Mawr
UPenn
UNC
Columbia
Stanford
Berkeley
UCLA
Cornell</p>
<p>Rankings from the great state of Ohio
Harvard/Stanford
Yale
Princeton
Brown
Cornell
Columbia/Penn
Northwestern
Georgetown
MIT
Ohio State
UVA
UNC
Michigan (although no one will admit it)
Dartmouth
Kenyon
Case Western
Miami (OH)
Any Big Ten School</p>
<p>314159, maybe the whole problem is that you’re (as you admit) not dealing with reality. I may sound like some snob… but if there is one thing I’ve learned, it’s that people are, in general, extremely misinformed. Misinformation runs rampant. When I say that the difference between Duke and Emory and Rice and Vandy isn’t that much in terms of the undergraduate academic experience, I’m trying my best to deal with reality… not lay people’s misinformed perceptions.</p>
<p>I’m not getting this thread either. If you really mean “the cashier at the grocery store, the lady who works at the barbershop, the janitor, the fireman”, who cares what they think? Its about as irrelevant as their thoughts on cutting edge techniques in open heart surgery.</p>
<p>314159, the layman doesn’t particularly care. Your attempts to educate them go in one ear and out the other. If they cared, they’d read up on it. It’s like someone blabbing on about who won the National League pennant in 1958 or something. People who care already know.</p>
<p>I this this discussion is rather pointless as well but there’s NO WAY that any of the Ivies besides Harvard, Yale and possibly Princeton and Columbia have more lay prestige than Duke in any region of the country. You have to first learn/realize the existence of a school before you consider it to be prestigious. I just don’t see how an uneducated cashier or janitor will have heard of these schools since people don’t really name drop them on the street and they have no national TV sports coverage.</p>
<p>Duke, on the other hand, is the premier college basketball program in the country. And even if 10% of the people who watch college hoops learn about Duke’s academic prestige indirectly through ESPN’s commentating and research they do themselves after first learning about the school, that automatically makes Duke more prestigious than every Ivy besides HYP.</p>
<p>The same arguments can be made for Michigan, Notre Dame and Stanford to an extent. Vanderbilt’s prestige as well is probably only beaten out by HYP and Columbia according to the “lay person”.</p>
<p>I always find these threads interesting. In my area (midwest):</p>
<ol>
<li>Harvard</li>
<li>Stanford/MIT</li>
<li>Yale/ Maybe Princeton</li>
<li>Northwestern </li>
<li>Notre Dame</li>
<li>Michigan
7.UIUC </li>
<li>Any Other School in the Big Ten</li>
</ol>
<p>I’m pretty sure most people don’t really know anywhere else as particularly prestigious. Duke might go somewhere around Michigan and Notre Dame. People will know the Ivy League is prestigious but have no idea which schools are in it. People place Stanford very highly, but won’t know where it is, and almost always place it in the Ivy League.</p>
<p>Post 435 proves post 433. It’s reeeeeally important to lesdiables that Duke be acknowledged by lay people as coming right after HYP. Heaven forbid it didn’t. What a blow to the ego! </p>
<p>What if you attended a really great school and not everybody knew?</p>
<p>^ Pizzagirl, how DARE you suggest that people put aside their obsession for prestige and attend the school that most suits them. This is CC you know… you can’t talk like that… may get banned. </p>
<p>So some poster just argued that Duke is very prestigious to the lay person because of its sports programs… that’s what I’ve been saying… Duke attains a LOT of its prestige and appeal from the basketball program it has… If people get their perceptions of which school is prestigious from other people (sports commentators etc.), isn’t that unreliable and doesn’t that continue the cycle of misinformation. Thus, lay prestige becomes more and more irrelevant. They are based on misconceptions, lies, propaganda, and word of mouth and should not be taken into account by high school seniors when making a decision of what school to attend.</p>
<p>I just don’t think “lay people” are as unaware as people on these boards think. Or maybe just the ones in Mass aren’t. I think almost all people I run into are aware of Columbia, Brown, or Dartmouth. On the other hand I never really bring the subject up when I’m at the grocery store.</p>
<p>firstly only 3% of the population tuned in to watch the finals of the NCAA basketball tournament this year. Almost everyone interested in college basketball would have watched this:</p>
<p>Of this 3%, most of the viewers will already be in college or be graduates of college who already have a pre-conceived notion of where Duke ranks. You seem to be delusionally over-estimating the factors which help Duke’s prestige and name recognition. The average person usually watches nfl, nba or major league. Finally I’m sure there are parts of the country where people just don’t give a **** about college basketball, so your claim that every region must know and be in awe of duke is absurd.</p>