Parents' Top Ten "Dream Colleges" - from Princeton Review

The list of students' top 10 dream colleges does not match the top 10 picks by parents, according to a recent survey by Princeton Review. Notre Dame, Penn, Cornell, and Duke were all top picks by parents but not by students. The survey asked, "What 'dream college' do you wish you or your child could attend if acceptance or cost weren't issues?" Of the more than 500 institutions named by respondents, parents gave these schools the most votes:

1. Stanford University
2. Princeton University
3. Harvard College
4. University of Notre Dame
5. MIT
6. University of Pennsylvania
7. Cornell University
8. Duke University
9. Yale University
10. University of Southern California

NYU, UCLA, Columbia, and Brown all made the top 10 for students but not parents. Perhaps parents worry about their kids going off to large cities like Los Angeles and New York?

To learn more about the ten schools chosen by parents, you can click on the name in the list above to get a description, admissions data, costs, graduation rates, and other information.

To get a sense of your chances of getting in, you can also check out these GPA, SAT score and ACT score graphs for each institution: Stanford | Princeton | Harvard | Notre Dame | MIT | Penn | Cornell | Duke | Yale | USC