Town and Country magazine published a list of the best 15 alt ivies. Unfortunately I’m unable to include the link here
Below is the list
Georgia Tech
Wisconsin
Virginia
Northeastern
Howard
Wake Forest
Miami
Colgate
Wellesley
Michigan
NYU
Boston College
Dennison
Emory
UCSD
How are they defining alt ivies? The differences between this list and that athletic league are pretty different. Of course, the schools within that league are pretty different, too.
Here is the link, but it is paywalled:
This group makes absolutely zero sense. The “Ivies” themselves are a fairly heterogeneous group, but at least they are all research universities. This group has three LACs, four large public universities, one of them with strong tech leaning, one HBCU, and a few private universities that are extremely different from one another.
Even acceptance rates vary between 50% for Wisconsin and 13% for NYU. That is without adding the fact that Virginia, GTech, and Michigan have large differences in acceptance rates between in-state and OOS applicants.
I cannot even begin to guess why these, since nothing actually makes sense.
Maybe the author asked their friends and family which college they would choose instead of an Ivy League college, and these were the ones that recieved the most votes.
The criteria are popularity/ desireability/ bragability. I hate to see one of my child’s schools on this list. Can only mean apps are going up…
From the article " Back in 2018, we published a list of Alt-Ivies, colleges that had previously been classified as safety schools but that had slowly risen to become nearly as selective and sought after as Harvard, Yale, Brown, et al. Last year we created a new list to spotlight 15 additional schools that are experiencing dramatic increases in popularity, once again consulting with the college counselors at [IvyWise], who examined changes in competitive acceptance rates, notable increases in applications, and other unique factors that are enticing prospective students."
That still makes no sense. There are a very large number of non-Ivies that are more “desirable” and “braggable” than half the colleges there. Where is CMU? Where is UIUC and UMN, since they have Wisconsin? They have UCSD, but not UCLA or Berkeley, Dennison but not Kenyon, Grinnell or Carleton. They have Wellesley and Colgate but not one of the other at least a dozen colleges very popular LACs in the NE. NEU, BC, and NYU, but not BU, Tufts, or Brandeis. Virginia, Emory, Wake Forest, Miami, and GTech, but not W&M, UNC, Vanderbilt, Georgetown, or Tulane. No Northwestern, WashU, or Notre Dame, either.
No sense at all.
I am assuming that they include Chicago, Stanford, MIT, and possibly Duke in the “Ivies” category.
Denison has one N
I find the tendency to call everything “Ivy” somehow a bit unnecessary and reductionist.
“Alt-Ivies,” “Southern Ivies,” “Western Ivies,” “Public Ivies,” “Hidden Ivies,” “Little Ivies.” Can’t they just be good schools? The cream of the crop needn’t be compared consistently to a singular athletic league (that, as mentioned above, is itself quite heterogenous).
Totally agree. If we’re looking at popularity and “hard to get in” schools that are not Ivy - take a look at this data of colleges with acceptances under 15 percent…(from College Kickstart)
| Institution | Applied | Admitted | Rate | Link |
|---|
|Amherst|12,700|1,143|9%|Admissions|
|Barnard|11,803|767|6%|Link|
|Bates|8,937|1,072|12%|Link|
|Boston University|80,484|8,612|11%|Admissions|
|Bowdoin|10,966|850|8%|Link|
|Caltech||412||Link|
|Carnegie Mellon|||11%|Admissions|
|Colby|17,800|1,142|6%|Link|
|Colgate|21,127|2,452|12%|Admissions|
|Duke|49,469|2,948|6%|Link|
|Emory|33,534|3,428|10%|Link|
|Georgetown|25,519|3,263|13%|Link|
|Johns Hopkins|38,200|2,411|6%|Link|
|Middlebury|13,297|1,463|11%|Link|
|MIT|26,914|1,259|5%|Link|
|NYU|120,000|9,600|8%|Link|
|Northeastern|96,327|||Link|
|Northwestern|52,225|3,656|7%|Link|
|Pomona||757||Link|
|Rice|31,049|2,399|8%|Link|
|Swarthmore|14,287|969|7%|Link|
|Tufts|34,000|3,230|10%|Link|
|Tulane|30,769|4,000|13%|Admissions|
residency.pdf)|
ns-by-campus-and-residency.pdf)|
|Notre Dame|28,351|3,399|12%|Link|
|USC|80,790|8,032|10%|Link|
|Vanderbilt|47,120|2,645|6%|Link|
|Washington and Lee||1,189||Link|
|Wellesley|8,400|1,092|13%|Link|
|Williams|11,258|1,113|10%|Link|
I really don’t get Wellesley, looking at the numbers from College Kickstart. There are 10 other SLACs that got more applications than Wellesley last year. Colgate makes a bit more sense since they got 21k apps, and it’s a big increase over past years. What we’ve also seen in California is more interest in the 3 Maine SLACs (Colby/Bates/Bowdoin) in recent years.
As a women’s college, of course they are going to get fewer applications as 1/2 the applicant pool can’t attend.
I’m not quite sure what question you are asking, but I note Wellesley has a pretty high yield–in the last CDS, they admitted 1152, and 585 enrolled, so that is about 50.7%. For comparison, Williams was 577/1302 (44.3%), Amherst 467/1079 (43.2%), Smith 619/1662 (37.2%), Holy Cross 903/2558 (35.3%), Mount Holyoke 544/1946 (28.0%) . . . .
Point being the Massachusetts LAC market is rather competitive (to put it mildly), but Wellesley actually does really well with yield given that context. Others can probably elaborate more meaningfully, but my sense is Wellesley is basically perceived by many women as the “best” women’s LAC. And that means it can have a lower admit rate for a women’s LAC.
But of course it gets fewer applications than the top Northeast co-ed LACs, and also Barnard which is in NYC and associated with Columbia. So it has a higher admit rate than those, but not like twice as much, because of its great positioning within its market segment.
Certainly by those who apply there, vs. the number of women applying elsewhere. 
That’s interesting - and I wouldn’t have guessed that for those colleges.
Are those the total admission/enrollment figures from section C1 in the CDS?
At first I wondered whether co-ed colleges generally have a lower yield (because I looked at Barnard’s 66%) - but then Smith wouldn’t make sense. Or is that mostly a function of how many people commit to ED (and are admitted) - which will skew an “overall applications” calculation/comparison.
Which of course is true in absolute terms - but then it will also be true that (per example) large universities tend to get “more” applications because they can accommodate many times the number students. So absolute numbers may not be a good measure?
I also wonder to what degree the absence of applications from one gender, might be made up by people expressly seeking out the “feature” of single-gender college?
So maybe expressing the number of applications vs. available spots (= acceptance rate) might be more telling. Obviously, there are the many brand-name selective women’s colleges – but now I start to wonder (strictly as an academic curiosity) how the totality of women’s colleges compare against the totality of co-ed schools.
Or maybe one need categorize by size, and compare women’s colleges against co-ed colleges of twice their size (to compensate for the “other gender” absence)?
Yes, nothing fancy.
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