Reply to Not knowing the difference between UPenn and Penn State

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My super educated, Ivy parents had no mental data points on half the colleges my kids applied to. I mean, they had heard of them but they had no idea if Colby was ranked 5 or 40.  Or if Wash U was a top10 or a top50.

The only people who sit around with a continually updated mental google doc of college rankings are:

-parents with kids in the admissions process
-people who work in academia
-DCUM posters
[/quote]

I got a crash course in colleges and their comparative rankings and prestige in law school. I went to my state flagship on scholarship and never really considered other schools because even just the expense of traveling to them would have been a major burden on my family. I was a big reader and had seen lots of movies, so I wasn't totally uneducated on the subject, but didn't have some encyclopedic knowledge either.

I remember being scolded when I referred to a classmate has having gone to Penn undergrad, because she'd technically gone to Wharton which is considered more prestigious. I also learned the difference between Bates and Bowdoin, two colleges I'd never heard of before in my life. I learned the nuance between Ivy League schools, how Yale is culturally different from Harvard and Princeton, and why Cornell gets treated differently than all of them. Why Dartmouth has certain reputations. Also all about Catholic colleges (I would not have been able to tell you that Georgetown or Boston College were Catholic schools before this) and the parochial pipeline into them, and the nuance in how they are viewed by Catholics and non-Catholics.

Law school is also when I learned about how a lot of people think cars convey a lot of information about a person and that people get very offended if you confuse their expensive, luxury car with a less-expensive, luxury car. Though that one I honestly still struggle with because it makes no sense to me. Some people read a lot of nuance into this that I will never understand. That's probably true of colleges too, to some degree. It's so important to some people that their college (or their kid's college) be hard to get into, or expensive, or both. My own experience says that none of this matters so much as what you actually do while you are there, but it's very, very important to many people here, so I try to be respectful about it even though I think it's a little silly.[/quote]

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