<p>Syraylor, I understand your thinking process, but completely disagree with you. And I can go point-by-point and discuss each sentence with you and provide supporting data/sources.</p>
<p>1) Arts link with RISD for Brown --> well the top arts schools as ranked by US News are RISD, Yale and the Art Institute in Chicago. So if Brown has a formal joint degree program with RISD (which they do) Brown students can get the same quality arts education as Yale students.</p>
<p>2) "Pound for pound, Princeton....".... well, there's a book titled "The Rise of American Research Universities" which re-ranks top US schools using NRC data and adjusting for faculty size among other things (eliminating the bias favoring large schools). The result - in overall academic excellence in the arts + humanities + social sciences, Stanford ranked #1, then Princeton and a three way tie between HY and Chicago. In addition, Princeton ranks #2 among the Ivies for engineering. So again, I think my statement is easily proven. You may not like it, but that's another issue</p>
<p>Re the "student attitudes" comments, that information is anecdotal from this site, similar threads or people I know who've attended all of those schools. </p>
<p>I suspect you're mostly POed because of the Columbia description. Most people w/o the clear biases you have (and Poster X) think this is fair. You and I have gone back and forth too many times to rehash that debate. So with that, I'll say good night.</p>
<p>Oops - not yet. ColumbiaGirl, this ranking was originally in a thread about the Ivies' respective undergrad education programs. The ranking tiers the Ancient 8 according to which ones process a strong commitment to undergrad education vs other things (e.g, medical research, graduate students, etc.) All the schools have great programs across the board but the Tier I schools seem more institutionally organized around undergrads than the Tier II schools.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I would never want to go to Columbia for undergraduate (more for its being in the incredibly distracting NYC than anything with the school itself), but for grad school, Columbia is easily at or near the top of my list. (for a CBS/SIPA combo)
[/quote]
</p>
<p>This makes no sense to me. What's NYC "incredibly distracting" from? Why is NYC not "incredibly distracting" for grad students?</p>
<p>And if you don't want all that stuff that NYC has to offer, just stay on campus and go to frat parties or study at Butler or something. That's why Columbia is Pareto-optimal.</p>
<p>
[quote]
This makes no sense to me. What's NYC "incredibly distracting" from? Why is NYC not "incredibly distracting" for grad students?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>The difference lay in personal expectations for undergrad and graduate education. I expect a strong sense of community and campus-centric social life for undergraduate, which by and large I have gotten and loved. (I don't dispute that NYC is a better city than Philadelphia. It is, but that is precisely why I prefer Philly for undergraduate life)</p>
<p>For graduate school, I expect less emphasis on community and more cultural and professional opportunities.</p>
<p>
[quote]
The difference lay in personal expectations for undergrad and graduate education. I expect a strong sense of community and campus-centric social life for undergraduate, which by and large I have gotten and loved. (I don't dispute that NYC is a better city than Philadelphia. It is, but that is precisely why I prefer Philly for undergraduate life)</p>
<p>For graduate school, I expect less emphasis on community and more cultural and professional opportunities.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Don't you just mean that you don't prefer Columbia for ugrad because you want a college with campus-centric social life, yada yada? I'm still unclear how you wouldn't prefer Columbia because NYC is "incredibly distracting"...</p>
<p>I'm sick of this being posted in every single Ivy League forum with the same beginning: BalletGirl's post followed by the same post from Red&Blue.</p>
<p>Anyways, I don't think you can tier the Ivy League schools overall. They all have different characteristics and do attract intelligent, but different students. I don't think you can rank these schools on academic/student life experience for undergraduates.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I suspect you're mostly POed because of the Columbia description. Most people w/o the clear biases you have (and Poster X) think this is fair. You and I have gone back and forth too many times to rehash that debate. So with that, I'll say good night.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Actually, no. I'm more amazed that you could possibly put dartmouth as a tier 1 school. Also, you chose 2 things out of my original 6 to comment about while admitting to what I said about another. </p>
<p>As for your actual responses:
"So if Brown has a formal joint degree program with RISD (which they do) Brown students can get the same quality arts education as Yale students." You should know that that's almost a patently false statement to make.
It's a 5 year program that gets you a BA and an BFA. There is more to "education" than taking classes with certain professors and i know you know that.</p>
<p>Princeton - again, you are making generalizations and over simplistic reductions. I will still contend that education is more than just the amount of money available to students for research, the number of ta's teaching classes, overall endowments, etc. etc. etc. Yes these things are tantalizingly easy to measure and therefore rank schools on but you cant ignore the fact that all 8 ivies are incredibly different in every social aspect. </p>
<p>As for your student attitudes stuff, all i'm asking is that you footnote or disclaimer that stuff. A lot of your original argument was based off of numbers and when you go mixing in subjective judgments of things with hard numbers, you become misleading.</p>
<p>I guess what is really at the heart of this is our definition of "education". You want to stay with the concrete and measurable things but I completely agree with the old saying "90% of education happens outside of the classroom". The reason you get transfers is rarely ever because of the classroom education, it's because of the social atmosphere. Basically I take issue with the fact that you are trying to rank something, not the actual placement of each school (which, with the exception of D as a "tier 1" school, i pretty much agree with).</p>
<p>Hmm.... Skraylor this back and forth is getting tiring with you (as always).</p>
<p>The tiering is based on which schools are focused overall as much or more on undergrads than grads. Dartmouth is undoubtedly more of an undergrad focused institution than H, P, Co or Cr. In terms of resources per student, advising and extracurricular support Dartmouth is a great institution.</p>
<p>Re the per school statements I've made, the majority of them are concerned with the academic qualities and school-supported extracurriculars. In some cases, it's a comment on the school's alumni and overall reputation. Princeton is academically stunning in quality and scope (although not scale); it's resources per student are unmatched, and the range of opportunities outside the classroom for its students is immense. It's a great place to go to school; and all the better given how much the entire university focused on undergrads. </p>
<p>My comments are student attitudes are quite few in number. BalletGirl added those comments in the OP, particularly in the Dartmouth section (which I don't agree with at all). He/she also added crap into Yale re students being unhappy which I completely disagree with. Elis are as fanatical about Old Blue as Princetonians are re Old Nassau.</p>
<p>Finally, you aren't really reading the things that I post clearly. The entire point of my OP was to state that it's not just academic firepower that makes for a great education. Otherwise, the listings would look different and there would be no segmentation into one group or another. Extracurriculars, alumni support, the overall environment makes a huge impact to a student's educational development. Those are things that can't be measured in quantitative terms, hence the need to mix soft and hard items together in an overall ranking. </p>
<p>Sorry to disappoint you if I can't be as scientifically precise as US News LOL</p>
<p>Here is what you ignore in attempting to parse the top 10 or 15 schools: If you do extremely well at any of them, doors will be open to you. That's why I've never seen the point in comparing them, other than in terms of which ones appeal to you most as a place to spend four formative years of your life. Certainly they can't all appeal equally to any one student, because they are all different -- not only in terms of pluses and minuses, but in terms of student bodies and cultures. Yet, all excellent. </p>
<p>Therefore, choose the school that you think you will enjoy, and take full advantage of its opportunities. If you think that Columbia's location and curriculum make it number one among the Ivies for you (as my S does), that's all that matters. :) We don't live in a country where you have to get into the single most prestigious university or else you won't get on in life. Relax.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Hmm.... Skraylor this back and forth is getting tiring with you (as always).
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Ditto!</p>
<p>
[quote]
The entire point of my OP was to state that it's not just academic firepower that makes for a great education. Otherwise, the listings would look different and there would be no segmentation into one group or another. Extracurriculars, alumni support, the overall environment makes a huge impact to a student's educational development. Those are things that can't be measured in quantitative terms, hence the need to mix soft and hard items together in an overall ranking.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Um....so, basically, you're agreeing with me (See post 28, last paragraph). </p>
<p>On the flip side of that though, look at your post #17. For all the sources of your info you list, the vast majority have to do with hard, measurable numbers (which is what I said in my last post). Now, however, you are trying to say that you are also taking into account the "soft" items in making a ranking.....which is, again, something I said you can't really do in my last post. I won't reiterate why you can't do that in any depth but it should suffice to say that bias and personal need cover that topic fairly well. </p>
<p>You see my point, don't you? Your ranking may mean something to you but it may be far from useful to other people. I know you want to construe me as simply being mad that you have columbia as a tier 2 ivy but it's really not the case. It's more that you come up with some arbitrary ranking just like USNWR (which if you do a search you can find whole tirades by me of why I think it's a flawed system) and so freely mix the "hard" and "soft" items. If you want to stick with numbers, fine. If you want to compile a list of student's exact thoughts, fine (if you think you can measure happiness reliably, go for it). But putting them together does not in any sense of the word make for a useful comparison (especially since there is no, to my knowledge, research done into the relationship between something like "having more money to spend on extracurriculars" and the "overall ranking" of a school). </p>
<p>That's it. red&blue is free to miss my points, i'm done.</p>
<p>I am not "agreeing with you" ... I am pointing out that the summaries I prepared took into account quantifiable and qualitative items to provide an overview of each school. Again, to make things clear - the tiers were clusters based on how much a school focuses on ugrads vs grads. To all the readers who think Tier II is somehow inferior to Tier I, you are completely misreading the summary. BalletGirl unfortunately took it out of it's original context/thread so it is easily miscontrued.</p>
<p>Re your other so-called point, it's kind of obvious that any ranking (and the associated parameters used for measurement) may not appeal to any and all users. The utility of a ranking is to provide a metric which readers can use in preparing an overall assessment and then make their choice. </p>
<p>A hard data only ranking a la US News is completely silly (since stats can easily be cooked or often tell only half the story) [West Point is extremely selective, but that doesn't mean it or its students are better than Cornell or Chicago]. Soft fact rankings are too subjective to be very reliable, but have merit in and of themselves [eg., Yalies have great social lives vs Johns Hopkins students who study A LOT in an intense environment -- you can't easily quantify this, but it's an important differentiator). </p>
<p>It all can be validly factored into a summary. And the summaries can be split into groupings based on common institutional characteristics. Which - to repeat - is what I did.</p>
<p>Skray, you are trying to make this a debate when there isn't anything TO debate LOL. You get a B+ for your efforts though.</p>