Comparative quality: Ivies and beyond

College Search & Selection
61

<p>"Luck isn't what gets people into Harvard it's being an exceptional student both academically and elsewhere."</p>

<p>As Clendenenator stated, there is a degree of randomness in it. There are students with absolutely amazing states who don't get accepted, yet there are some with great stats but not amazing ones who get in.</p>

<p>"but due to the lower selectivity Cal cannot be as picky as Harvard when it comes to students."</p>

<p>Cal isn't as picky as Harvard because Cal has the resources to accommodate more students. If, say, Cal were to be forced into the position that they could only accommodate one or two thousand students, they'd have to be much more picky. Which leads me to this:</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."</p>

<p>If Cal were forced to be much more picky, they'd have to raise their standards: higher SATs and better ECs, etc. Then it'd seem impossible to get in since only the very best students would get in, and thus Cal's prestige would rise, and then that would attract the very best students, and Cal would end up seeming like another Harvard.</p>

62

<p>Harvard in general has better students than Cal and I would argue that the top 10% at Cal would be fine at Harvard. </p>

<p>Cal has a much larger student population and since it is a public school designed to serve the needs of CA, it also has JC transfers, has carry more students, and needs to look at the overall student taking into consideration social economic backgrounds, it lets more students in who do not have the superior numbers like Harvard.</p>

63

<p>I agree. Cal has to accommodate students from California first. So they just let any qualified Californian/transfer student in. That lowers the quality of the student body. I don't think SAT scores are necessarily an indicator of intelligence of a student body.</p>

64

<p>
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Cal isn't as picky as Harvard because Cal has the resources to accommodate more students.

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<p>I don't think it has anything to do with 'resources' to accomodate students. If anything, Harvard actually has more resources than Cal does. Harvard has a far larger endowment, and I believe the overall physical infrastructure at both schools is quite comparable. If you look at the annual budgets for both schools, you will see that Harvard clearly spends MORE per year. For example, according to the financial data, in the last year, Berkeley garnered about $1.5 billion in revenue, whereas Harvard had about $3 billion.</p>

<p><a href="http://vpf-web.harvard.edu/annualfinancial/%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://vpf-web.harvard.edu/annualfinancial/&lt;/a>
<a href="http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/annualreport/2006/finschd.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/annualreport/2006/finschd.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>Hence, if anything, Cal has * fewer * resources to accomodate students, as compared to Harvard, but Cal tries to accomodate a larger number of students anyway. </p>

<p>
[quote]
If Cal were forced to be much more picky, they'd have to raise their standards: higher SATs and better ECs, etc. Then it'd seem impossible to get in since only the very best students would get in, and thus Cal's prestige would rise, and then that would attract the very best students, and Cal would end up seeming like another Harvard.

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<p>Well, let me give you the counterexample. What is the largest full-time MBA program in the world? Is it a public school's? Is it Berkeley's? Nope. It's Harvard Business School. HBS is a behemoth of a business school - in fact, with almost quadruple the number of MBA students that the Berkeley Haas School does. The largest public school MBA program out there is the one at Michigan, and HBS has more than twice the number of MBA students than Michigan does. HBS is a gigantic institution as far as business schools go.</p>

<p>The same thing is true of law school. Harvard has the largest full-time law school in the country, with more than double the number of students that the Berkeley Boalt Law School has. Harvard Law School is a gigantic institution as far as law schools are concerned. </p>

<p>The point is that merely reducing the undergrad student body of Cal would not, by itself, make it 'seem' like another Harvard. It might help, but I doubt that it would accomplish it all by itself. After all, the Berkeley Haas School of Business admits far fewer MBA students than Harvard Business School does. But I would hardly say that the Haas School in any way 'seems' like HBS, nor does the Haas School really attract the best MBA students. Similarly, I would not say that the Boalt Law School 'seems' like HLS. </p>

<p>Harvard has proven through its professional schools that you can have a program that is both huge in terms of population and also supremely prestigious. Again, HBS and HLS matriculate more students than any of their peer schools do. Yet I highly doubt that anybody would contend that HBS or HLS are not prestigious.</p>

65

<p>
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I'm just saying that you can't really rank them because they're all good for different things, and overall, the top 50 are all pretty much comparable.

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<p>Well, I don't know if I can go THAT far. Let's face it - there is a difference between the #1 and #50 ranked school. </p>

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So you don't get the genius professors Harvard's actually known for until you're like a senior or something.

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<p>True, but this happens at the lower-ranked schools too. I would rather be taught by a Harvard graduate student than a grad student at a low-tier school. </p>

<p>
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Of course, it's a great school, but I don't think it's a whole 3 tiers better than Brown or Johns Hopkins or wtvr

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<p>It depends on how many tiers you got! In this case, it would seem to me that you would be talking about hundreds and hundreds of tiers. After all, if there are 3000 undergrad schools in the country, and each tier had 5 schools, then that's 600 tiers. With that in mind, being 3 tiers behind really isn't that bad. Not bad at all. </p>

<p>
[quote]
The "top 50" rule seems to be a good indicator, but you have to remember the LACs, so it's really like the top 30 universities and the top 20 LACs (maybe one or two of those "master colleges" or whatever they are, also). That makes sense because it's perfectly okay to say Michigan (24) or USC (27) or Colgate (16 lac) are comparable to HYPSM,

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<p>I would hardly doubt that anybody would seriously compare Michigan to Harvard for undergrad. I think even our esteemed poster Alexandre, a Michigan superfan, wouldn't say that undergrad at Harvard and Michigan are truly comparable. The same for USC.</p>

66

<p>"Well, I don't know if I can go THAT far. Let's face it - there is a difference between the #1 and #50 ranked school."</p>

<p>There may be, but in "comparative quality", do you know which is which? (We know that H., for example is somewhere below #27.)</p>

67

<p>I guess what has always perplexed me is this idea that somehow a school can be "better" than another. In high school it makes sense to the point where you have schools where people don't graduate, gang violence, and stuff like that, but that stuff doesn't happen at all for any of the top fifty, or top one hundred universities. What exactly about a lecture hall at Harvard University is better than a lecture hall across the river at BU? Is it the professors who aren't teaching the class? Is it the "intelligence" of the students (as measured by the impecibly accurate SATs of course!)?</p>

<p>I really strongly feel that if you really want to get the best education possible, you can do it at whatever school you think fits you best.</p>

68

<p>The kids at Harvard are smarter than kids at a top 50 school, the professors are more reknowned, there are more opportunities, Harvard undergrads have a proven track record of succeeding in the corporate world...etc. etc. etc.</p>

<p>Same goes for when you compare any top 10-15 school to any lower school</p>

69

<p>
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I really strongly feel that if you really want to get the best education possible, you can do it at whatever school you think fits you best.

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I personally believe that you can get an amazing education whatever school you go to but if you want the best education you can get I (personally) believe that you need to go to the best universities.</p>

70

<p>Yeah, but any of the universities in the "top 100" are one of the best universities. There was a post awhile back where one guy showed how schools in the top 10 were better than 99% of the Universities and schools in the top 50 were better than 98%... or something like that.</p>

71

<p>
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Harvard undergrads have a proven track record of succeeding in the corporate world...

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<p>Not always, from the WSJ:</p>

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Two years ago, famed hedge-fund manager Victor Niederhoffer (himself a Harvard alumnus) and Laurel Kenner did a study measuring the performance of Nasdaq 100 companies run by Harvard graduates, of which there happened to be an unusually large number at the time. The results were not pretty. Mr. Niederhoffer and Ms. Kenner looked at the nine Nasdaq 100 firms headed by Harvard grads and found that they had, over a five-year period, dramatically underperformed Nasdaq firms run by graduates of other Ivy League schools, Ivy League equivalents (Stanford, MIT, Berkeley) and state schools.

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72

<p>
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Yeah, but any of the universities in the "top 100" are one of the best universities. There was a post awhile back where one guy showed how schools in the top 10 were better than 99% of the Universities and schools in the top 50 were better than 98%... or something like that.

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The problem is most americans believe that the top 100 universities in the US equal the top 100 in the world. That's not true. According to both international rankings that I know of (I don't know if there are more) American universities are not the only ones on the list.</p>

73

<p>So what? How does that make it mean that Harvard University is that much better than BU?</p>

<p>If you took all the colleges and universities in the world, Harvard is still "better" than 99% of them and BU is still "better" than 98% of them........</p>

74

<p>^Oh my point was just a side note.</p>

<p>Anyways I agree that the top 100 us universities are very very very good but I don't think they are all the best.</p>

75

<p>I don't think any of them can be the best, its all too relative to measure quantatively.</p>

76

<p>IBankers and Consultants for entry-level positions are recruited from a select number of schools (top 15 or so)</p>

<p>Thats a definite advantage of going to a top school, unless you aren't interested in those fields which many aren't</p>

77

<p>Many aren't? I think you mean most aren't.....</p>

<p>Fine, I'll give up that if you really really want to be an iBanker (and you know that when you are a senior in high school!) when you grow up, its better to go an ivy league school.</p>

<p>For the everyone else, the vast majority of people, it doesn't really matter all that much.</p>

78

<p>"The kids at Harvard are smarter than kids at a top 50 school, the professors are more reknowned, there are more opportunities, Harvard undergrads have a proven track record of succeeding in the corporate world...etc. etc. etc."</p>

<p>And those really, really smart kids at Harvard ranked the academic quality of the education they were receiving 27th out of 31 schools. (and they should know, being so smart.)</p>

79

<p>
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I don't think any of them can be the best, its all too relative to measure quantatively.

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I agree not one university can be called the best but I think there definitely are a very small number of universities that are definitely part of the top 20.</p>

80

<p>They ranked the education they received 27th out of 31st? I mean, if some kids at Busch State think they are receiving a great education and rate themselves the highest...would that mean anything at all? Nope. When students rate their own schools you end up with garbage like the Princeton Review rankings which for most category change vastly year to year.</p>