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

Yes, I had to educate my mom, a CPA and former vice president of a company, that Penn was not the same university as Penn State. How could she be in a position of reviewing resumes and vetting employees. This is the general American public, unaware.

Barnard is an Ivy League school?

No.

I'm from PA and people there don't even know the difference. I remember finding out when applying to college and I have Ivy league educated parents (not Penn). It's just not something most people sit around talking about.

Not everyone knows all the colleges. My personal experience with this scenario is, my rural PA family members did not know of schools DCs were applying to several years ago - Midd, Case Western, Brown.

Was so bizarre to me.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:People get Georgetown, George Washington, and George Mason confused. People get Penn state and Penn wrong. People get Dickinson and Fairley Dickinson wrong. People are largely uneducated.

Being confused is not uneducated. Some are not as obsessed with all the colleges as the DCUM crowd. If you’re not from a particular area it’s easy to confuse names.

This. Plenty of people from the East Coast don't know the difference between Santa Clara University and UC Santa Cruz, the difference between the University of Colorado and Colorado College, or between UW or WSU in Washington. I know the difference between all of these including differences in prestige, cost, setting, and reputation of various programs, because I grew up out there and knew people who went to all of them. But I had never met anyone who went to Penn or Penn State until I moved to DC.

A lot of people's knowledge about colleges is based on watching college sports.

Happens all the time. Pretty sure some people do it on purpose. You can call Penn UPenn but that doesn’t always help. DS is student at Penn (not Penn State).

Anonymous wrote:People get Georgetown, George Washington, and George Mason confused. People get Penn state and Penn wrong. People get Dickinson and Fairley Dickinson wrong. People are largely uneducated.

I feel for the Georgetown people if they tell someone they went there and the other one thinks its George Mason!!

Anonymous wrote:Do they have a child applying to college soon? Where did they go to college? Where did they grow up? Where did you grow up? What is their socioeconomic background, and what is yours?

I think it is myopic of you to assume that other people would prioritize knowledge like this when it might not be relevant to their lives at all. For most people, the difference between Penn and Penn State likely has no bearing on their lives at all.

+1

Parents here make it their lives.

Anonymous wrote:My child’s first choice school is Penn. I had mentioned that it would be a reach for him and that usually 1 kid gets in from our school. At some point, I realized that they thought I was referring to Penn State. When I mentioned UPenn was an Ivy League school, they seemed confused. These are Americans. Do people really not know the difference????

I've had the same discussion. Football>Ben Franklin.

Anonymous wrote:What about people that don’t know what Barnard is or that it is an Ivy League school and part of Columbia? This is a weird one too. Almost like a litmus test for your education level.

Barnard is not an ivy league school, it merely has a close affiliation with one of the ivies. Barnard has separate admission(much lower bar than ivies) and separate governance.

Anonymous wrote:My sister went to UChicago for undergrad. I went there for grad school.

We still have relatives think it was the University of Illinois — Chicago. These are all people who went to college.

I have multiple advanced degrees and wouldn’t realize those are different in conversation. What’s familiar to you is not household info for all.

Anonymous wrote:What about people that don’t know what Barnard is or that it is an Ivy League school and part of Columbia? This is a weird one too. Almost like a litmus test for your education level.

I did not know this until right now and have a T5 MBA.

Anonymous wrote:What about people that don’t know what Barnard is or that it is an Ivy League school and part of Columbia? This is a weird one too. Almost like a litmus test for your education level.

You just don’t realize how you come off do you?

Anonymous wrote:People get Georgetown, George Washington, and George Mason confused. People get Penn state and Penn wrong. People get Dickinson and Fairley Dickinson wrong. People are largely uneducated.

I don’t think that makes people “uneducated.” There are thousands of universities in the country and except for Harvard, most people have not heard of most of them. People in Pennsylvania and the East coast will know the difference between all the Penns.

And I had never heard of “Fairley Dickinson” and I have an advanced degree so I just googled it. Even if you spell it correctly (Fairleigh Dickinson), it’s not a school that I ever heard of. I have a vague notion that the other Dickinson exists and is a liberal arts school.