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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]^ Most people in the country don't know that Berkeley, University of California, and Cal are the same thing, or that they are different than any Cal state campus.[/quote]
Most people in this country don’t realize that there’s an enormous difference between say, UC-Berkeley and University of Kentucky or Duke and Florida State. They just know them all as “big D1 schools good at sports” and that’s that. That’s why I always take these “my SO grew up in XYZ and no one knows UVA!!” (or insert any number of schools) reports with a grain of salt. The average American knows very little about colleges and using the opinion of random people to evaluate the prestige, selectivity, desirability etc. of a school is just silly. [/quote]

Except for here on DCUM, where everyone is sooooo educated about everything that they know it all.  [/quote]

This is generally correct.  I'd say many people, if they had to name academically elite schools, would just name Harvard, etc.  Beyond that, they may have some regional bias that influences them.  Not a lot of academic names travel broadly.

[b]However, in academic circles and some hiring circles, the people in the know, a lot more schools are known, and overall, for better or worse, they probably track pretty close to USNews in perception.[/b]

At the end-to-end graduate and research level, people in the know are aware that UVA is well below Michigan, Berkeley, etc. as the previous posts showed.  People keep arguing against this but it can be objectively supported.  They have to understand that universities are composed of a number of components.  Very few indeed are strong across all or most.[/quote]

This is not surprising since a big part of the US News ratings is exactly this -- perception of schools by those working at universities.  In fact, it was originally the only criteria for ranking.  It has very little to do with the actual education happening on campus.[/quote]

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