@TheGreyKing (#22): I used to get the same reaction to Reed [I’m old enough now that people seldom ask or care where I went to college]: blank stare; or wow! I think it’s gotten better known in recent years but maybe not.
@yucca10 : You’re in Kensington? If so, hi neighbor [from across the city line in Berkeley – where many streets are named after California counties … but that’s another story entirely].
Me: I went to Vassar
Them: But that is all girls
Me: Indeed but once they accepted me they had no choice but to allow me to attend
Them: Really, that must have been awkward
Me: Not really, because I was rejected at Smith I had to make it work.
Wrong user name @Nocreativity1 – I think creativityprime would have been more accurate.
@AboutTheSame No, I’m in CO, but currently trying to convince DS that Berkeley is not as bad as he thinks 
Santa Clara back in the day was called the University of Santa Clara. Caved in to the University of Spoiled Children and changed its name to Santa Clara University. My grad class was the first to have SCU on the diplomas.
When I tell people where the kid goes to school, they know it’s a top 20 school. Although it’s located in St. Louis and not Seattle.
@My3Kiddos I figured out the CMU thing years ago, only because future H and I were working at an amusement park in Ohio for a summer during college. H went to CMU, we kept seeing CMU t shirts. It took a while to realize they were from Central Michigan !
S goes to Ohio U. I have heard people say to him, “Ohio State?”
“No, Ohio University. It’s in Athens, near the West Virginia border.”
If they still look blank, he’ll say, “Where Mike Schmidt went.” Fortunately we live in the Philadelphia suburbs so that usually works.
I went to UConn. The University of Connecticut. Animal Science major. My first job was maybe 50 miles from UConn, but in Massachusetts. I was interviewed by the local paper who listed my education as Yukon University in Connecticut. (Maybe my first clue was the reporters comment that she didn’t know they had horses in Alaska …)
I went to St. Lawrence University. In New England a lot of people know ti, but here in Florida it is a shock if anybody has heard of it. If it ever comes up I usually assume they won’t know and start with, “I went to a tiny college way up north in NY about 1/2 hour from Canada…”
@cnp55 That is funny! I went to high school in CT and my anatomy teacher had graduated from UConn. She was still friends with the people there and she brought our whole class on a field trip to the UConn cadaver lab where we did a human dissection. @-)
Me: Loyola.
Person: Marymount? Chicago? New Orleans?
Me: Baltimore.
Person: In Maryland? Really? There’s one there?
Me: IT WAS THE FIRST OF THE LOYOLAS.
RPI.
Most often: Never heard of it.
Second most often: Isn’t that in Rochester?
Rarely, usually from a techie: Good school.
Well, if UConn didn’t want people to be confused they shouldn’t have picked Huskies as a mascot.
@Marilyn That’s very clever ;))
Person who shall remain anonymous: “Where does your D go to school?”
Me: “UCLA”
Her: “Where’s that?”
Me: “…Los Angeles?”
Daughter applied to Pomona College.
Multiple people: “Oh yeah, the Cal Polys are good schools!”
We live in Michigan. My S went to Michigan Tech, my D went to Lehigh.
When I tell people where my kids went to school, they’ll say, oh your son must be very smart. I just smile and say both of my kids are pretty smart. 
Have to explain to almost everybody except our doctors that URochester is not a SUNY, but a private university. Just about every doctor we deal with either studied there or knows a colleague that did.
Oh, and that RIT is a different school.
Apparently no one has mentioned my brother’s alma mater yet.
Kenyon College.
In Gambier.
Question to him: “Why are you going to college in Africa?”
Until I got on CC I had never heard of a lot of schools especially in Northeast. I had a conversation with a coworker about colleges and he said he graduated from Williams and I must have had a blank stare on my face because he said it was good enough to get him into Stanford med school.
A parent at my son’s high school Athletic Acknowledgment day came up to me and asked me where Cornell was because he had never heard of it. I said it was somewhere in New York by some lake where it gets really cold for a long period of time 
I live in the Midwest now, but I went to Wake Forest for undergrad. Apparently no one here has heard of it, because all I get is “Isn’t that a suburb outside Chicago?”
Sometimes they’ve heard of Arnold Palmer or Tim Duncan, so that helps.