<p>Just for the fun of throwing it out there, given that the acceptance rates at Brown and Columbia this year are virtually identical and are both lower than MIT and are relatively close to Princeton, have we entered the era of HYPSCBM?</p>
<p>Nope, not for me. University of Chicago gets to become part of that before Columbia and Brown does.</p>
<p>U of C is sooooooooooooooooooooooooo cool lol. I like how people think their special for thinking Chicago is better than the ivy league. cute hipsters.</p>
<p>^ umm, U. Chicago IS better than half the Ivy League. It is called a fact. I don’t think I’m special. Many would agree with me.</p>
<p>but U of C has lame students. so therefore its a bad school…</p>
<p>haha scotchtape i bursted a laughter when reading your post 
hey i ll be at brown so i ll be fine with that (though it means nothing to me… )</p>
<p>While I do think that Columbia and Brown deserve to be at the same level as HYPSM, HYPSCBM is a really inconvenient acronym, so I say keep it HYPSM.</p>
<p>Other than Cornell and Penn (and they will close in too), all of the ivies are now within a few points, the spread just keeps getting saller among the very top.</p>
<p>In my anecdotal experience, I’ve seen kids with no shot at Ivy Leagues get into U of C. I think its a bit overrated on these boards. It strikes me as a school that might be more competitive as an undergraduate college (with the Ivies) 10-12 years down the line, rather than now. It reminds me of Columbia, except Columbia from the 70’s–phenomenal graduate school, growing as an undergraduate school, and in an unbelievably terrible neighborhood.</p>
<p>As for Columbia and Brown, I’m a Columbia legacy, so I’ve always tended to overrate CU. You’d think if they could get a good administration in place, they should be able to easily move into the upper levels of the Ivy Leagues down the line in the next few years. Think about their resources as a result of being in the middle of NYC. They should be able to attract the best professors by allowing them the scope of opportunities available in the NYC area. They should be able to attract the best kids, with all NYC has to offer in terms of both lifestyle and work opportunity (Finance Capital of US, News Capital of US, a handful of Corporate HQs, and etc.).</p>
<p>Unfortunately, I’ve heard the administration at Columbia is less than desirable. They just aren’t as good at taking care of their students and haven’t grown the University like is possible with their location.</p>
<p>Its always stunned me, I guess, that they don’t offer an undergraduate business school (like Wharton) or at least a focused program (like Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson school, except for business) in business. Look at what Wharton has done for UPenn. It makes their numbers better in almost every category, increasing the University’s selectivity, yield, quality of applicant pool, and etc.</p>
<p>So if Columbia got some good direction, you’d think it would be able to jump up into the upper Ivies. I don’t think its quite on that level now. As for Brown, I don’t mean to be disrespectful to any Brown students here, but until they compel every student to receive grades I’d think it would be hard for them to be considered on the level of a school like HYPSM.</p>
<p>^No one said U of Chicago is harder to get into than the Ivy Leagues… although this year U Chicago’s acceptance rate is lower than 20 %. What I am saying is purely academically, Chicago is better than half the Ivies. I made no reference to selectivity.</p>
<p>^obviously has had first hand experience. Hey hipster! my bro goes to Chicago; i go to Dartmouth (low tier). Our students are smarter. he agrees :). im sorry :(</p>
<p>^dude, please read my post. I am agreeing with you that Dartmouth is harder to get into and that Dartmouth students probably have higher SAT entering averages. I am talking about strength of academic programs where U of C outshines lower Ivies. Is that so hard to understand?</p>
<p>Chicago certainly doesn’t outshine Dartmouth at the undergrad level, it’s reputation and focus is about grad school where Brown and Dartmouth are much more desirabe undergrad experiences.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>HYPSM is not defined by acceptance rates. If I recall correctly, Columbia always had a lower acceptance rate than MIT (and I believe Princeton one year?). This is new for Brown though.</p>
<p>
At the graduate level? Sure. Otherwise, no.</p>
<p>I disagree with your statement, based on my anecdotal experience. This is going to come off as obnoxious, I think, because I am going to split hairs about which elite schools are more elite than others. When I say that the schools I would not rank among HYPSM or even among the lower Ivies are still fabulous, amazing, impressive, etc., I do mean it. </p>
<p>Brown, Columbia, and Chicago are all fabulous schools giving fabulous educations, but I would not rank them among Yale and Stanford rather than among Cornell and Duke. Also, the kids going to my school to Penn are smarter and more impressive than those going to Columbia, and much much smarter and more impressive than those going to Brown, as a general rule. Brown did get one terrific kid, and Penn did get a female stoner jock, but since generally Penn does better, if I had to add another Ivy to HYPSM, that would be the one. Brown and Columbia are great, but not quite in the same circle of prestige. </p>
<p>In my head, there is “elite,” which is broadly the top 20 schools and a couple of the top LACs, but there are also spheres of prestige within that. The holy-crapazoidal-Batman-my-jaw-just-hit-the-floor, HYPSM and sometimes Penn, Amherst, and Williams. They tend to get (withdrawing myself from the equation) ~40 real superstars–the IPO people, the state student Latin organization president, etc.
Then there are the wow-you-are-really-smart-but-my-jaw-is-only-dropping-at-your-accomplishments-to-my-waist-not-to-the-floor Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Caltech, Duke, and sometimes Chicago, Swarthmore, and Wellesley, etc., which get ~50 kids who are impressive, but not quite as much so. They sometimes with some kind of pretty prestigious national recognition on, say, the National French Exam, or placed 8th in our state science fair, etc. Then there is the that-is-a-really-elite-school-but-your-extracurriculars-and-test-scores-and-general-level-of-wow-falls-a-bit-lower-than-the-first-two Emory, Rice, Brown, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, Bowdoin, Carleton, Pomona, etc. All are elite, and all of the kids they get are, and when compared with, say, Auburn, which is still a fine school, I wouldn’t differentiate. In terms of the purpose of this thread, though, I do.</p>
<p>I respect Chicago a lot because I think it ends up doing more with what it gets, perhaps more with what it gets than any other college in the country, it’s just that what it gets isn’t the same level as HYPSM (some of the kids going there this year were waitlisted at the non-Berkeley state flagship where half the class goes). Likewise for Brown–the kids going to Brown from my school (~7/year) either were rejected from all the other Ivies, or are turning down other Ivies because they want an easy undergraduate education with no requirements that they take challenging courses. Columbia’s kids are also not quite as amazing. </p>
<p>Story about why I don’t think Columbia should be added to the list. There was once a perpetual assistant/visiting professor, who was very good at teaching, but who had writer’s block so severe that he hasn’t published anything in decades. He was once assistant head of one of the concentrations at Harvard (or something along those lines). He left Harvard about five years back because the pressure to do some piece of research was too much, so now he is an assistant/visiting professor with a leadership role in a similar major (in the interdisciplinary humanities) at Columbia. He is Lirazel’s father’s college buddy, so Lirazel and her father and this professor had lunch before the Columbia visit days.
Lirazel’s Father: So, you know she’s deciding between Chicago and Columbia and Harvard, right? Any advice?
Professor: How important is being in the greatest city on earth to you?
Lirazel: Not all /that/ important.
Professor: Then you’d be crazy to choose Columbia.
Lirazel (having just come back from an unofficial visit to Harvard): Yup, that seems about the shape of it.
That is why I would not change HYPSM to HYPSMBC.</p>
<p>Wishful thinking.</p>
<p>@Lizrael Excactly.</p>
<p>I desperately wanted to love Columbia because of its location in NYC. And I was really disappointed to see that it was so difficult to love. Its clearly on a separate tier from other schools, from my experience, which seems ridiculous to me. It seems like it has the sort of draw that could turn in into the C in HYPSMC.</p>
<p>As for the people saying “Well, I concede Dartmouth is harder to get into, and the kids may be smarter, but the academic programs at Chicago are better” I think you completely miss the point. A big part of the academic experience is your peers. If other schools really are full of, on average, smarter or more excellent students, that’s probably going to lend itself to a smarter or more excellent atmosphere.</p>
<p>With the recent trend of increased applications per student, I think yield is a more accurate measure of whether Brown/Columbia are on par with HYPSM.</p>
<p>@Lirazel, I don’t think you’d be crazy to choose Columbia over Harvard for reasons other than NYC, an assistant/visiting professor’s perspective is just that, there’s no reason that a professor is any better at distinguishing colleges than college students are, and many of their distinguishing factors like resources for them to carry out their own research are fairly irrelevant to undergrads.</p>
<p>I go to Columbia and I’ve witnessed it become a better university, even in a short 4 years. Columbia has a history of a being a badly managed bureaucracy, but Columbia is also acutely aware of its problems and is taking steps to change that, which have made a tangible difference in my time here. Steps like hiring more friendly and enthusiastic deans, more advisers per student and giving them more information with which to help students. </p>
<p>With all that said, I do think Columbia does not belong in the HYPS acronym because Columbia does not have the endowment to compete with these schools, and having a larger endowment does have a real effect on undergraduate life. Columbia has been investing well and departments and rankings are beginning to reflect Columbia’s growing prestige, so I would say that Columbia could be part of the league in 10-20 years, but predictions that far into the future are pretty worthless. </p>
<p>Brown has a longer way to go, because while Brown is a hugely popular and desirable school, it doesn’t have the same research involvement and top 10 departments which partly lend HYPS and MIT their prestige. Brown is more like Amherst and Williams - top notch liberal arts place, without household name recognition (unimportant to me).</p>