<p>whats with this stupid idiotic one-liner often attached with Penn?
What does this mean??????
And how on earth is a school like Penn a "doormat"!!!
<em>CRAP</em></p>
<p>Do you really care? If you do, then you should reconsider your application. Are you applying to Penn because it's Ivy,or because it's a good fit? Penn is bigger than HYP, probably more pre-professional (after all, Princeton does not have a law school, med school, ed school, social work school etc), but has other fine qualities.</p>
<p>ell oh ell</p>
<p>It's been quite some time--in fact, decades--since that expression was "often attached" to Penn.</p>
<p>Why are you making threads about Cornell in this forum?</p>
<p>Cornell threads???</p>
<p>@duffay:I applied to Penn because I think it is the best fit for me...it was just a simple question I asked because I could not find any reason for PENN being called a "doormat"!</p>
<p>Penn is absolutely excellent, a far cry from the safety school it was thirty years ago.</p>
<p>And if you've already applied, but concerned about this, then you've made a mistake.</p>
<p>^I am not concerned about it.I just heard it somewhere and was curious to know the reason behind it.I know very well what Penn is like else I would not have applied ED for no reason at all</p>
<p>@pretfun: "Why are you making threads about Cornell in this forum?"
Hint: There's some humor in the above question :D</p>
<p>I second that. The "doormat" of the Ivy League? That sounds to me like Cornell or Dartmouth.</p>
<p>^Dunno about Cornell...Dartmouth maybe..but Penn=BEST!</p>
<p>If you look at the 60s-90s, Penn and Cornell were at the bottom of the Ivy pile. Columbia was close, Brown/ Dartmouth were the closest to HYP in terms of selectivity. </p>
<p>Even as recently as 1996 the acceptance rate at Penn was 36% (vs. 22% for Brown, 25% for Columbia, 23% for Dartmouth). Things changed significantly after 2000 with Columbia and Penn significantly developing their campuses and increasing resources. </p>
<p>Right now if I had to rank the schools I would do so as follows:</p>
<p>Harvard
Yale/ Princeton
Columbia (selectivity)/ Dartmouth (resources per undergrad)
Penn
Brown
Cornell</p>
<p>Slipper - US News (maybe a little more famous than slipper) has a different ranking - Penn is ahead of all the schools in the Ivies except HYP according to them. </p>
<p>Wharton is #1 undergrad b-school - nobody's doormat.</p>
<p>Keep in mind, regarding selectivity, that Penn is 2nd largest Ivy (behind Cornell) w. 2500 seats to fill every year vs. say Dartmouth that only has to find 1000 people. All the Ivies are competing for an overlapping applicant pool, so the smaller schools automatically have a low admit rate as a statistical artifact and not a reflection of school quality. In the days ('70s to early '90s) when the pool was smaller, this lead Penn to have a very high admit rate, just to fill all the seats - thus it was a "doormat" or "safety". But now that they are getting 20,000+ applications, no more doormat.</p>
<p>There are a lot of ignorant people around whose perception is stuck in some past time period. Let them (or their kids, as they are probably that old) try to get in to Penn today and they'll find out how much of a "doormat" it is.</p>
<p>Penn does an amazing job considering how many seats it has to fill. Cornell is the Ivy doormat, period.</p>
<p>And even then, Cornell is a demanding, selective institution where I wouldn't be unhappy going. What it supposedly lacks in selectivity, it makes up for in difficulty.</p>
<p>^ Nice... so not only are you going to a school that is a joke to get into,but once you are in it you have to work your butt off thrice as hard as the rest of the Ivy-students. Sweet, sounds like fun to me!</p>
<p>j/k, I know Cornell is a good school... I'm just way bored right now.</p>
<p>^ See? Penn's not challenging enough for you. You should be at Cornell. :)</p>
<p>I do agree that Cornell is very intellectually challenging. I would be more than happy to go there (if I ever got in). But the tag "doormat of the Ivy League" makes me sick. Besides, admit rate isn't a good indicator of the school's privilege though. Penn is a large school, located in the city with the highest crime rate in the States. So really... ppl who choose to apply here gotta love it enough in order to survive the crime rate. And Dartmouth shouldn't be mentioned here actually, it should be compared with other LACs.</p>
<p>I believe Penn and Cornell should really love each other, because no matter which one should win the "doormat" tag, the HYP people is still gonna look down on both of us. Oops... I'm saying "us" just like I'm already a Penn student:D</p>
<p>^ Philly is NOT the city with the highest crime rate in the US. It recently has had the highest murder rate among the 10 largest cities in the US, but there are many other large cities in the US, and several of them have higher crime/murder rates than Philly's.</p>
<p>Asian people I know still think that other than Wharton, Penn is still the "doormat" of the Ivy League. Cornell gets wayyy more cred in asian and generally among the asian population. Cornell has greater prestige and name recognition overseas too.</p>