A Blatantly Unscientific Inquiry

Well, I can tell you that in my family it's Harvard, then everything else. In fact, Wharton is a literal unknown. Columbia, Stanford & Yale all had much better name recognition that Pennsylvania or Wharton when talking with my older relatives.

To expand on your question a little more, when talking to college educated friends who aren't necessarily interested in business school, the Wharton name definitely carries a lot of weight, while Columbia, Haas, Sloan, Kellogg, and Chicago seem a little under-appreciated. This is definitely from a west-coast perspective. I guess Haas & Columbia suffer a bit from an uneven past, while MIT loses a little credibility for being too much an engineering school I guess.

Chicago & Kellogg? Well I have a funny story about that. When I was looking into law schools, the director of admissions from Chicago Law School made a presentation at UCLA. He had a big display folded 3 times. He opened the left side of the display and showed an outline of the west coast. He said "to a lot of you, this is what the US looks like." Then he unfolded the right side of the map and it showed an outline of the east coast and said "and some of you here are even willing to concede that this is part of the US as well." He then waived his hand over the bland space in the middle and said something like "but I want to assure you that there really are things here in the middle that might be worth looking into." It was a funny story, but I think it really captures how people on the coasts (especially the west coast I guess) view the country. I would say that very few people from California or NY go to law school or business school with hopes of landing a job in Chicago or Detroit (or Milwaukee or St. Louis). Schools like Chicago and Kellogg are obviously top notch, but they are somewhat unknown to the general public on the coasts.