<p>Yeah, my point is that every individual Ivy isn't better than every non-Ivy - Stanford, MIT, Duke, Chicago prove that point. However, as a group, Ivies are still the best overall schools</p>
<p>"However, as a group, Ivies are still the best overall schools"</p>
<p>But the thing is, the only thing that unites the Ivies is that they were among the first established universities in the US, all in the same area, etc. Otherwise, they aren't really united. I could just as easily establish another group with a different name that includes Stanford, Berkeley, Northwestern, CalTech, MIT, UChic, WUStL, and JHU, and it'd be just as good as the Ivies.</p>
<p>i agree.....</p>
<p>I have to bring up LACs. Are colleges like Amherst, Pomona, Claremont Mckenna eternally flawed because they aren't in the same sports league as Harvard and have less students than Yale?</p>
<p>I'm not trying to say their academic quality is directly equivalent, but it they are all great schools to go to, and particularly on the west coast do not have the elitist "CULTURE" that HYP have. Yes, they do have sports and therefore are eternally flawed (wait, Harvard and Yale have sports too! sarcasm). It seems ridiculous to say that Harvard and Yale and the Ivy League are the end-all of education. Collegehelp, what makes Amherst inferior to Cornell or Brown? What makes any top LAC inferior to the Ivy league?</p>
<p>Nobody said LACs were inferior. The thing about liberal arts colleges is that they're very, very different from universities. Here's where the "apples and oranges" analogy is most apparent. Not inferior, just a different kind.</p>
<p>While I'm definitely not a fan of USNews, I think there is some validity to the point that the very highest-ranked schools (HYPS) are distinctly higher in certain kinds of academic "quality" than the next tier of schools. That's not because of anything that the institution itself does. Instead, the fact that those schools are viewed as being of such high quality attracts students who are almost all among the very, very best of their generation. Students like that absolutely also go to Rice, and Michigan, and to a lesser degree places that none of us have ever heard of. However, while everyone at Rice is quite bright, not all are so uniformly outstanding. </p>
<p>Of course, that assumes that the techniques colleges use to assess students are valid, and that you actually want a college filled with brilliant people. There are people who are very bright in ways that don't show up in SAT scores, transcripts, or college essays. I never considered applying to Harvard, which for me would have been a very long shot but not impossible, because I find the atmosphere of elitist arrogance there, which may be an automatic result of this kind of quality, unpleasant. However, I do know plenty of people going to Harvard, Princeton, etc., and they are all extremely intelligent and talented people. I can't say that about everyone going to schools, like Rice and Michigan, that may provide equally excellent professors and resources but aren't as sought after by the very best students. So, maybe the very fact that USNews says those schools are better effectively makes them better.</p>
<p>"Harvard is at the top of everyone's list..."</p>
<p>27th (out of 31 schools - members of the Consortium on the Financing of Higher Education/COFHE) in student assessment of academic quality and quality of campus life.</p>
<p>Perhaps that is why their yield is only 80%.</p>
<p>Courtesy of mini and afan, the last two posts aptly state “the truth”</p>
<p>Harvard, and IMO the other Ivies, have powerful brand names that most high schoolers can’t turn down as the brand will stay with them for the rest of their lives. This craving for “prestige” partly explains the high yield numbers of the Ivy schools. However, as the COFHE study reveals, the actual quality of the educational (and perhaps social as well) experience that the Ivy undergraduates receive is no better (and may even be worse) than what one would experience at nearly any of the Top 25 USNWR colleges.</p>
<p>
[QUOTE]
27th (out of 31 schools - members of the Consortium on the Financing of Higher Education/COFHE) in student assessment of academic quality and quality of campus life.
[/QUOTE]
Do you know where I can find the whole list?</p>
<p>The list isn't published, unfortunately (because it would be far more valuable than anything put out by USNWR). Each school's data is proprietary. However, Harvard's data was published in The Crimson. And there are a whole bunch of top 25 unis and LACS that are not members of COHFE, so the actual rank is likely even lower.</p>
<p>Yield is a function of prestige. I know folks who purchase Jaguars, too, but you'll never see them anywhere close to the top of either quality or value data.</p>
<p>The COFHE schools are as follows:
Amherst College
Barnard College
Brown University
Bryn Mawr College
Carleton College
Columbia University
Cornell University
Dartmouth College
Duke University
Georgetown University
Harvard University
Johns Hopkins University
MIT
Mount Holyoke College
Northwestern University
Oberlin College
Pomona College
Princeton University
Rice University
Smith College
Stanford University
Swarthmore College
Trinity College
University of Chicago
University of Pennsylvania
University of Rochester
Washington Univ. in St.Louis
Wellesley College
Wesleyan University
Williams College</p>
<p>In general, I don't think it's what school you go to that is important, but rather what you make of your experience in the four years that you are at that school.</p>
<p>I would also say that, among the Ivies, Brown, Dartmouth, Princeton and Cornell are strongest in undergraduate education. They are all more than 70%undergraduate.</p>
<p>The following have about 50% undergraduate or less:</p>
<p>GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY 11970 6314 53%
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA 19267 10047 52%
DUKE UNIVERSITY 12328 6252 51%
STANFORD UNIVERSITY 12891 6506 50%
JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY 10315 4946 48%
YALE UNIVERSITY 11165 5243 47%
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY 2171 896 41%
MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY 9985 4078 41%
HARVARD UNIVERSITY 19007 6954 37%
COLUMBIA 18498 6275 34%</p>
<p>In my opinion:</p>
<p>The biggest difference between Harvard and a school like Berkeley or Northwestern is that more people apply to Harvard per spot allowed. Why? Because it's Harvard.</p>
<p>The biggest difference between students at Harvard and students at Berkeley or Northwestern is that Harvard students had enough luck to get through the 9% acceptance rate.</p>
<p>If you took the smartest person from each of these schools, I bet there probably isn't much difference at all in terms of intelligence. Maybe if you took the dumbest person at each school you could tell, but is that really a good way to judge a school?</p>
<p>
[QUOTE]
The biggest difference between students at Harvard and students at Berkeley or Northwestern is that Harvard students had enough luck to get through the 9% acceptance rate.
[/QUOTE]
I have to politely disagree. Luck isn't what gets people into Harvard it's being an exceptional student both academically and elsewhere. I mean no offense to Cal (which I believe is a great school-this coming from a Stanford student should mean something!) but due to the lower selectivity Cal cannot be as picky as Harvard when it comes to students. There are brilliant students in Cal but I believe the average student in Harvard is smarter than the one in Cal.</p>
<p>Well, Harvard turns down students many times over who are exactly as intelligent/qualified as the few students they accept. Perhaps Berkeley just takes all of it's students who are of the same level of qualification. You have to admit that there is a huge factor of luck in a place like Harvard when over half of the 2400 scorers get turned down, while random people who score below 2000 are accepted.</p>
<p>I do agree that the average person at cal is probably worse off than the one at harvard, but what about the very best of each? It boils down to a matter of opinion as to whether you want to judge a school by its worst person, its exactly average person, or its best person. The former two won't have as much as an impact as the last, so...I would say go with that one, which puts Cal and Harvard not too far off from each other.</p>
<p>if you think the Ivy league athletes are on the same level as athletes at the football powers (So. Cal, Michigan, Texas, etc), you are very wrong.</p>
<p>google about the guy who had a 2.8 / 820 who went to USC after ND withdrew their offer because he didn't meet their academic standards.</p>
<p>Are football players on the lower end of the sats pool? Yes. But how many other kids at those schools can do what they do? None.</p>
<p>
[QUOTE]
It boils down to a matter of opinion as to whether you want to judge a school by its worst person, its exactly average person, or its best person. The former two won't have as much as an impact as the last, so...I would say go with that one, which puts Cal and Harvard not too far off from each other.
[/QUOTE]
Why would you pick the smartest of the bunch? I believe average is the way to go.</p>
<p>Uh the kids at Harvard are definetely much better academically than the kids at Cal...</p>
<p>I mean, how could you really compare the student bodies at Harvard and Cal? 25% of the students at Cal have SATs below 1200. At HYPSM the rest of the Ivies and similar schools, the only students who have below 1200 are prodigies at something or scholarship/recruited athletes.</p>