<p>haters gon’ hate. each ivy has its strengths and weaknesses, much like the rest of the top schools. i think it’s just cause cornell has “weird” majors that don’t really fit in with peoples’ ideas of academia. we have agriculture, the hotel school, fashion design, interior design, architecture, etc, which isn’t really what people think of when they hear ivy, but i also think that that makes cornell special. to me, it really is a place to find “instruction in any study”. to each his own :)</p>
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Duke yes; prestige wise though I would say a good chunk of the non-HYP Ivies are more prestigious than JHU and NW (namely Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth). And if we’re going by pure quality, well, that varies from opinion to opinion but I think what Dartmouth has to offer compares to HYP to a pretty significant extent.</p>
<p>“Duke yes; prestige wise though I would say a good chunk of the non-HYP Ivies are more prestigious than JHU and NW (namely Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth). And if we’re going by pure quality, well, that varies from opinion to opinion but I think what Dartmouth has to offer compares to HYP to a pretty significant extent.”</p>
<p>In the Asian community, in which one wears prestige on one’s face and person, Brown and Dartmouth aren’t as respected as Johns Hopkins, if only because it stands out as the ideal destination for the hoards of doctor wannabes.</p>
<p>Experts from JHU med school are also cited with high frequency in popular science articles, making the institution as a whole especially reputable.</p>
<p>The only thing Dartmouth has to offer that compares to what HYP offers is a mindless and pointless five figure career in Excel and Powerpoint.</p>
<p>“The only thing Dartmouth has to offer that compares to what HYP offers is a mindless and pointless five figure career in Excel and Powerpoint.”</p>
<p>What other distinctive advantages, other than a straight path into finance, do HYP offer? If you want to be doctors, lawyers, etc., your undergraduate school don’t even matter much.</p>
<p>I always thought Johns Hopkins was inherently famous for its medical school. It’s supposed to be a first class on its own medical school…Asian families confuse it for the undergrad program.</p>
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If by that you mean something pertaining to finance…Then you agree :).</p>
<p>So I gather, every Ivy League college has its weaknesses and strengths. Harvard, Yale and Princeton are no exception to that. Cornell has a higher acceptance rate as compared to its peer colleges, has certain departments (Agriculture, Design etc) which are unique and different, and has probably the largest class room size in all of the Ivy League… Things that make Cornell receive flak from high-schoolers.</p>
<p>As a whole (combined undergrad, postgrad and professional schools), Cornell’s brand power is not superior and inferior to UPenn, Columbia, Berkeley, Duke, Northwestern, Chicago, Michigan, JHU and UVa, among others.</p>
<p>For undergrad, its nearest equivalent is Berkeley. </p>
<p>For law and postgrad business, its nearest equivalent is UVa. (Berkeley and Michigan are slightly superior.)</p>
<p>For engineering, physical sciences, and social sciences, its nearest equal is Michigan. (Berkeley is slightly superior, but UVa is inferior to it.)</p>
<p>A college’s brand is based to a significant extent on its academic reputation. Cornell has a very strong reputation for the quality and breadth of its academic programs. USN&WR ranked Cornell’s undergrad academic reputation #8, behind only HYPSM, Columbia, and Berkeley.</p>
<p>[NRC</a> Rankings](<a href=“NRC Rankings”>NRC Rankings)</p>
<p>As for high-schoolers, my guess is many of them focus mostly on their perceived chances of admission (reported only as an aggregate in the reference source they are looking at, not by college) and US News ranking (ditto).</p>
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<p>Huh? If reading CC should teach you anything it is that there is NO consensus at all about the quality of Cornell. All the disagreement on this thread is a perfect example of that. One thing that is beyond dispute, however, is the simple fact that Cornell is a full-fledged member of the Ivy League. So the notion of “Cornell not an Ivy” is a meaningless concept.</p>
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<p>Precisely what is meant by “brand power”? What evidence is the basis for this claim?
Are we talking about the power of a college affiliation to help a graduate win a job interview? To command a higher salary? To win a grant proposal, or a marriage partner? If it is any of these things, how do we observe and measure this power? How do we separate its effects from the effects of a graduate’s own talent and motivation?</p>
<p>Please see Dale and Krueger’s 1998 paper, “Estimating the Payoff to Attending a More Selective College” (<a href=“http://www.irs.princeton.edu/pubs/pdfs/409.pdf[/url]”>www.irs.princeton.edu/pubs/pdfs/409.pdf</a>). The authors analyzed the earnings of students who had been admitted to very selective universities, but who chose to attend less selective schools instead. They concluded that for most of these graduates, there is little or no earnings payoff from the choice to attend a more selective school, per se.</p>
<p>If this is true even of very selective v. less selective schools, how is the difference in “brand power” objectively manifested when we are talking about one highly selective school compared to another? Is the alleged difference specific to one particular career field, or does the claim apply to everyone from astrologers to zoologists?</p>
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<p>Obviously Cornell is a member of the Ivy League. I don’t deny that. In fact, my question inherently suggests that I’m very pro-Cornell. But as I said, I’ve read lots of users degrading Cornell, and I was just trying to find out the reason behind it. From the above discussion, it’s perceptively clear that because of its “higher” acceptance rate, it’s considered a sub-par member of the Ivy League by some people. It seems nearly everyone had good things to say about Cornell on this thread, and I don’t see any reason why Cornell should be any less than the “lower Ivies”, if that’s what they are called. </p>
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I fail to understand why GAtech is at number 18. USNEWS ranks it at number 3, or 4. That’s HUGE gap, between 3 and 18.</p>
<p>Thanks everyone for posting. :)</p>
<p>“Brand power” is only, or largely, relevant when evaluated by college, from the perspective of evaluators at the next level and up. Nobody in the Arts looks at a Tisch graduate by reference to some ficitious aggregated #33 rank for NYU by US News. When law schools are evaluating grads of NYU’s top 5 law school they are not worrying about some “aggregate” ranking of NYU, they are concerned about its law school. Relevant parties understand what Wharton is. A graduate of Cornell’s engineering school is not lumped together with graduates of its hotel school when employers are making their decisions, or vica versa.</p>
<p>“Brand Power” means something to me in the context of fast food restaurants. I can walk in to any McDonald’s in the world confident that I will get a consistently mediocre product at a cheap price. I cannot assume similarly consistent quality out of a stack of resumes from any school in the world.</p>
<p>“USNEWS ranks it at number 3, or 4…”</p>
<p>I didn’t know US News ranked doctoral programs, but if it does I wouldn’t trust it (not that I would “trust” it anyway, without applying my own criteria…). I understood NRC to be the most respected source for that, but unfortunately it is old and they haven’t repeated it.</p>
<p>"I cannot assume similarly consistent quality out of a stack of resumes from any school in the world. "</p>
<p>Not consistent, but one can envision a distribution having a mean and a standard deviation. And the distributions are not all identical. Of course a single data point drawn from any of them can be anyplace on the scale. This may play no role in evaluating a particular resume, but it might play a role in, for example, deciding where a firm elects to recruit, to look for those resumes in the first place. Or what part of the class it will grant interviews to.</p>
<p>In my opinion the distributions are conceptualized by college by most relevant, knowledgeable parties. A hospitality industry employer coming to cornell’s campus will have preconceived expectations as to the training and capabilities of its Hotel grads, vs. say Ag school grads. Then of course he will look to the particular person to find truth.</p>
<p>^ Right. But I don’t look to my particular McDonald’s-branded value meal to find truth. I know exactly what I’m getting every single time. And if it gives me food poisoning, I have recourse. Not so with my recruited Wharton grad.</p>
<p>You can proceed that way where the standard deviation of a population is known to be trivially low, approaching zero. </p>
<p>Where the standard deviation is not near zero, but is still meaningfully narrow compared to a completely unsorted group, some people conserve their time by using it as a first screening device, then finding truth from among that screened subset. This approach saves them time and money, though it may cause them to miss some gems hiding within the upper tier of a wider-distribution population.</p>
<p>I think if you randomly pick 10 students from each of the eight Ivies, shuffle them and compare them, they would be indistinguishable: they would be all very smart, academically exceptional and hard-working.</p>
<p>Only on CC will we see the the ingrained bigotry with which Cornell is deemed not good enough. A sufficient conclusion: Cornell is one of the best schools in the nation, and regardless of the degradation or disparaging that happens on this anonymous forum, in real life Cornell grads are not going have any less opportunities as students from any other top school, Ivy or not.</p>