I would also add William & Mary, Vanderbilt, Emery, Wake Forest, Dickson, UNC Chapel Hill, Tulane, Georgia Tech, and Rice. Although I may have missed one or two other top schools, most of the remaining Southern colleges and universities are pretty mediocre or worse. And as you have pointed out, the rankings from US News, Barons, Princeton Review, Peterson's, Kaplan's, etc., are not only based upon objective statistics like SAT scores, graduation rates, high school class rankings, and student/faculty ratios, but also upon subjective input from college administrators, faculty, and students from all regions of the country -- including the South.
From a personal standpoint, I transferred out of a southern college after one year because of the weak academic programs. For example, the required freshmen math class covered stuff I learned in 10th and 11th grade in high school and the required freshmen writing program was remedial course teaching kids what they should have learned by the 8th grade.
You may also add to your list of execlent southern schools: Baylor, Rice, SMU, TCU... a few of the nations finest medical schools.
Just out of curiosity, what schools did you transfer from and to?
There are plenty of weak programs all over the country, and some of the Southern cow colleges are as weak as they come. But you can still get a decent baccalaureate education if you apply yourself, challenge yourself, and let your board know you want to work, and don't take those weak courses you mentioned. Sometimes you can't get out of them: my freshman math was the third time I'd seen that material in four years, and then I reprised some more of it the next year in analytical geometry and introductory calculus. Probably just as well: my instructor in calculus was a master's man from MIT who prided himself more in delivering his lectures in fully-parsed Standard English than on getting the content across to the students. Understanding was our problem. I barely passed. My classmate who had to take it over, took another instructor during a summer session and achieved a good grade easily.
What was the college you left, whose program was so unimposing?
What they don't explain to high-school students is that matriculating in one university and getting by with a gentleman's "C" will open more doors than taking the same degree from a college less well thought of. Haverford versus Florida A&M, Oberlin versus Sul Ross State or New Mexico Highlands. It's a class descriptor, like Paul Fussell pointed out in Class, and not just an education.
Shell Oil doesn't even recruit geophysicists and geologists at a number of "oil-patch schools" that are well-known for the preparation of their students for industry. It's that snob factor; and when products of other schools encounter ex-Shell managers at other companies later on, the prejudices are applied nearly as strongly as they would have been at Shell. Companies play favorites unremittingly and for keeps, and managers who are veterans of those companies carry those prejudices elsewhere without inspection, because they serve the useful purpose of reducing the inventory of subordinates the manager has to take seriously.
I agree. There are fine schools in both the North and South as well as bad. I guess to some all those kids in public schools in the North are graduating as certified geniuses. I think the problems with education is countrywide and not limited to a particular region.