<p>There’s a saying I once heard:</p>
<p>“The high school valedictorian goes to Harvard. The kid the valedictorian was scared of goes to the University of Chicago.”</p>
<p>That’s obviously not exactly accurate, but it does poke fun of Chicago’s obscurity relative to a school like Harvard, but the people who know Chicago know it’s a magnificent school (and it really is!)</p>
<p>I would argue that schools like Swarthmore and Pomona have even more of a struggle in putting themselves out there, because they are so small and their names are not exactly memorable. At least we have the honor of having the country’s third-largest city in the title of our name, we have world-class business school, law school, hospital, economics research, sociology, you name it prestige, and we pull visitors in to Hyde Park from all over the country and the world-- though they usually come to see the Robie House and the Museum of Science and Industry.</p>