Scratch what I wrote: it was too broad. At the same time, I was definitely not talking about “international prestige”.
I still think U of Chicago generally suffers a lot in name recognition in the U.S. among non-academics compared to the more prominent Ivies, Stanford and Duke. And that part of that particular name-recognition issue in the U.S. is lack of high-level athletics.
Even the Ivy League schools have their conference basketball champion get some run during each NCAA tournament. The Ivies even produce a smattering of NFL players, and it’s often prominently mentioned that so-and-so went to Yale or Harvard.
I think you’re on to something. When you mentioned U of Chicago, I thought “Yep, forgot about them. They’re definitely prestigious.” And they definitely are.
But why did I forget? Because I’m not an academic, and they are very rarely in the news, unlike schools with more prominent sports programs. I mean, I hear about stuff going on at Texas universities all the time, because the state & local news outlets cover them in detail. But the big universities in adjoining states get almost no mention outside of sports coverage. 99% of the OU coverage that we get concerns either the Texas-OU game, or Big-12 sports related stuff. Same with the other states- we hear about LSU and UofA in reference to SEC sports and playing Texas A&M. I can’t say that I’ve ever heard a peep about New Mexican schools.
And if I don’t read about scientists and scholars from those schools in the course of other stuff I read, they just don’t cross the threshold of awareness. Only the “popular” academically successful schools (Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, Berkeley, Yale, Caltech) or schools with *successful *division 1 sports programs get mentioned in popular culture, and other perfectly prestigious schools are ignored (Brown, Dartmouth, U of Chicago, Duke, Penn, Cornell, Rice, Emory, Vanderbilt, etc…)
Some of the Ivy League schools compete at the Division I level in men’s ice hockey and have success there. In recent years, both Harvard and Yale have won the national tournament and sometimes send players to the NHL.
That I could agree with. I mean, I live in Chicago, so I obviously hear about it more, but when I lived internationally, University of Chicago was well-known among my foreign cohorts. Other schools that in the US would be immediately recognizable and considered prestigious, not so much.
Sorry, sloppy fingers (heh) - I meant UCLA, not UCA. And Royal Veterinary College. Not that I’d list that among the most prestigious in general, only because it’s so specialised most people won’t have heard of it.
Berkeley is one I should have included. I mean, it has an element named after it! Some of the other Ivies barely register for me, though, and one, Tulane, I’d never heard of at all. McGill in Canada is familiar. For most of the others in other countries I’m afraid it’s the first time I’ve heard their names. I’ll try to remember, though, because it actually does affect my work a little.
There are several companies or publications that rank universities globally and there are others that rank schools only within the US. One is the Times Higher Education World University Rankings.
Of course, there’s no perfect measure to rank schools, so you have to take any listing with a grain of salt. But if someone mentions a school you’ve never heard of, a high listing in the Times publication should be a good sign.
I wouldn’t include Livermorium in this group. The element was named for Lawrence Livermore Lab, which isn’t in Berkeley, and isn’t associated with the University of California. Both LLL and Lawrence Berkeley Lab are part of the Department of Energy, but that doesn’t mean LLL is an outpost of LBL.
The U.C. system has ten campuses spread through a pretty large state, so it’s another university of universities. U.C. Berkeley is well-known and prestigious, although a some others are also very well-respected. U.C. Davis has very good veterinary program and an influential oenology program. U.C. San Francisco has one of the best medical schools in the country (it’s a specialty campus with only one field of study).
Tulane is my undergraduate alma mater. It is a medium sized (very expensive) private university in a very pretty area of the New Orleans Uptown area. It is truly national university with an unusual mix of being very difficult academically and very socially invigorating due to its setting. It is definitely a prestigious school in the South like Vanderbilt, Emory and Duke but it is also known as the most distant suburb of New York City because of all the Jewish students from that area. They tend to come because of legacy heritage because many prestigious schools in the Northeast once had Jewish quotas while some private schools in the South did not.
The problem in the U.S. alone is that there are too many prestigious schools for the average person to know and knowledgeable prestige has to be broken down much more finely than that. I live fairly close to Harvard and MIT which are world famous but there are more than 100 colleges and universities in the Boston area alone (over 3000 in the U.S. as a whole) and many of those have programs that are highly ranked than than Harvard or MIT.
Having a huge number of prestigious schools is a good problem to have but it makes clear distinctions difficult and ambiguous. Harvard is a great school unless you want to focus on Latin American studies because Tulane is much better for that. The same cross-comparison can be said for a countless number of subjects. Even some minor state schools have very prestigious specialties because they happened to land some of best experts in their respective fields.
And Royal Veterinary College. Not that I’d list that among the most prestigious in general, only because it’s so specialised most people won’t have heard of it.