"IF YOU HAD A SON OF COLLEGE AGE AND HE COULD ENTER ANY
COLLEGE OR UNIVERSITY IN THE UNITED STATES AND YOU HAD
ENOUGH MONEY TO SEND HIM, TO WHICH ONE WOULD YOU MOST
WANT HIM TO GO?" (no, it didn't have a question about daughters). About 8% said they didn't know, 4 percent gave the reasonable answer that it would be up to the hypothetical son, and a handful (less than 1%) said they wouldn't send him to college, leaving about 1300 who named a college. The top choice was Harvard, but then things get more interesting. Second place wasn't Yale, Princeton, Stanford, or one of the service academies, but Notre Dame. Presumably a lot of Catholic parents wanted their son to go to a Catholic college, and Notre Dame was the best.
The list of colleges picked by more than 10 people:
1. Harvard 122
2. Notre Dame 104
3. Yale 78
4. MIT 41
5. West Point 40
6. Michigan 34
7. Columbia 31
8. Berkeley 28
9. Illinois 27
10. Chicago 25
11. Princeton 22
12. Cornell 22
13. Minnesota 21
14. Ohio State 21
15. Wisconsin 19
16. Stanford 17
17. Penn 16
18. Texas A & M 16
19. Purdue 14
20. Naval Academy 14
21. Northwestern 13
22. Dartmouth 13
23. NYU 13
24. USC 13
25. Penn State 12
26. UCLA 11
27. Kansas 11
28. Johns Hopkins 11
29. Michigan State 10Some other patterns: Midwesterners were loyal to their regional schools--the top 15 includes five Big Ten schools, plus the University of Chicago (and Notre Dame, although its appeal was probably to Catholics across the country). Californians also were pretty loyal: Berkeley, Stanford, UCLA, and USC appear on the list. Southerners were not: the only college in the South on the list is Texas A & M. Distinguished schools like North Carolina, Virginia, Duke, Texas, Vanderbilt don't appear on the list, and most of them weren't even close. Finally, the choices were scattered among a lot of schools--about 40 percent of parents chose one other than those listed (including 2 for UConn, which unforunately was not enough to make us #1 among public universities in New England).
Unfortunately, no one seems to have asked this question since 1950. I'd guess that the concentration on the Ivy League and similar places would have increased.
Both my uncles, from a good catholic family in 1950s Montana, were shipped off to Notre Dame. My aunt went to St. Mary's--right next to it.
ReplyDeleteI imagine the regional affiliation would be severely reduced in the present. Back in those days sending your son or daughter across the country might mean barely seeing them or talking to them for four years. Pretty different communication regime these days.
ReplyDelete