<p>CC is so frustrating.</p>
<p>The top 25 or so on US News are all pretty much equal. Only on CC are such distinctions made... Duke could be put at #5 or #20 and it would still just be "rated."</p>
<p>gellino,
Thanks for your comments which actually reinforce my point that the non-HYP Ivies benefit greatly from their Ivy affiliation. Statistically, it is not a stretch at all to put Brown in the same category as Tufts if Brown were separated from the Ivy brand. </p>
<p>My point was that the HYP and Wharton brands are all strong on their own, but that the other colleges have much less brand value when identified on their own names. Once considered as individual colleges, I would place their inherent academic value/attractiveness at a level not greatly different than the colleges that I compared them to. </p>
<p>Consider again the Brown = Tufts example. Exchange their places and put Tufts in the Ivy League and Brown outside. I have little doubt that Tufts's relative selectivity would flip with Brown. Tufts would see a sharp reduction in its acceptance rate and a nice increase in its SAT scores while Brown would do the reverse. </p>
<p>This goes to the brand power of each college and this would play out similarly at the other non-HYP Ivies. So Dartmouth would end up being a terrific LAC that most people have probably never heard of (eg, Williams). Columbia would be a big-city center for academia with many important thinkers teaching there to a comparatively intellectual, quirky student body (eg, U Chicago). I think that U Penn (ex-Wharton), Brown and Cornell would suffer the greatest loss in prestige and relative atttrativeness from any separation from the Ivy brand, but not huge and thus they would be in the same buckets with Wash U/Emory (U Penn), Tufts (Brown), and Carnegie Mellon (Cornell). It's really not that hard to imagine this if you try. </p>
<p>It's an interesting exercise that will obviously never occur in real life, but it helps one better understand that these are just colleges like any number of other excellent colleges. And that their affiliations with one athletic league or another shouldn't have such an outsized effect on the way we judge their academic quality.</p>
<p>I agree kyledavid. There is no real difference between top universities. Sure there are statistical and departmental difference, but those do not affect the individual student or determine the overall quality of the institution.</p>
<p>Beefs - Duke just has better placement in banking and consulting, thats how it is. Sorry. Ask anyone who works on Wall Street (in my case, worked for 10 weeks). You get to meet a lot of people. I learned a lot over the past summer.</p>
<p>For example, Alexandre isn't lying when he says Michigan has ridiculous placement, or that Williams has the strongest alumni network, or that Yale is small on Wall Street. I also learned that Duke has great placement (why I went there in the first place) and Chicago not so much, atleast not in NYC banking or consulting. </p>
<p>To tell you the truth, I think Duke is losing its edge regarding its differentiation from Ivy's in terms of its social aspect. My fraternity, at least, has gotten screwed over by the University a lot. I think its equal in terms of academics, and with what I know now, I think Dartmouth or Penn are just as fun as Duke in terms of Greek scene/drinking.</p>
<p>...While Vanderbilt's social scene blows them away. The only people I know that went to Duke over Vanderbilt were social recluses.</p>
<p>"social recluses"...also known as "smart people."</p>
<p>Other than that lovely "vanderbilt: the answer to the question nobody asked" bit, I would like to comment that hawkette is conflating valid judgments and comparisons relating to athletics and such (in which Stanford can be compared to Duke) with more tenuous claims on prestige and the notion that Wharton can be separated from Penn when it is an integral part of my own SAS-centered Penn experience--and those of many other SAS and SEAS students (and conversely, SAS is an integral part of a Wharton experience as well)</p>
<p>^^ (Agree, believe it or not :) ) Hawkette, you simply must get over your impression that Penn without Wharton somehow suffers in quality and/or prestige. That simply is NOT true. If so, it would not have such excellent graduate programs in law and the humanities. All that filters down. My son had to sort that out for himself, but he figured out that SAS (Arts, Sciences) at Penn offers everything he could hope for and that Wharton was NOT for him and, while prestigious and the right path for some dedicated pre-professionals, did not offer the type of education he sought. You, Hawkette, seem to think that the rest of Penn rides on Wharton's coattails. Simply not true. You should know better than to base everything on "what you hear", since that seems to be the whole thrust of your problem with the Ivy League.
It's no secret that I have some concerns about Penn, mainly based on the freshman year classes and the general safety and overall harshness of my home city, but as far as academics in the arts and sciences, I would leave it right up there where it generally falls on the dreaded lists.</p>
<p>Agreed about Penn. The University of Pennsylvania is so much more than just Wharton. It's Medical school is arguably as good as Wharton and its Law School is also stellar. Furthermore, Penn has very strong departments accross the academic disciplines, particularly Economics, English and Sociology.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Beefs - Duke just has better placement in banking and consulting, thats how it is. Sorry. Ask anyone who works on Wall Street (in my case, worked for 10 weeks). You get to meet a lot of people. I learned a lot over the past summer.</p>
<p>For example, Alexandre isn't lying when he says Michigan has ridiculous placement, or that Williams has the strongest alumni network, or that Yale is small on Wall Street. I also learned that Duke has great placement (why I went there in the first place) and Chicago not so much, atleast not in NYC banking or consulting.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>This is probably due to the fact that the student body at chicago is not as preprofessinal as the ones at duke. chicago is very academically oriented and i highly doubt that the same number of chicago grads would be persuing the same number of slots in the wall as the ones from duke. you constantly claim that Duke is superior to these schools in placement, yet you have to account for many statsitical factors that you seem to be ignoring. </p>
<p>That said, the bottom line is that as long as the student is from a target school, it is up to the individiual, not the brand of the school, to obtain the job. Let's get real. An employer at Wall isn't gonna be like "hmmm...this guy is from duke, and the other guy is from cornell, so I will hire this guy from duke first". It is upto the student's gpa, ecs, demonstrated interest/passion, work experience, and most imporantly, crazy interviewing/social skills. Also, I seem to think that the student body at chicago may not be as social as the ones at duke and their interviewing/social skills, as well as their work experience, might not be as extensively accomplished on average as the ones from duke, which should all be included within your logic of reasoning for explaining the placement in banking/consulting, etc.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I think that U Penn (ex-Wharton), Brown and Cornell would suffer the greatest loss in prestige and relative atttrativeness from any separation from the Ivy brand, but not huge and thus they would be in the same buckets with Wash U/Emory (U Penn), Tufts (Brown), and Carnegie Mellon (Cornell). It's really not that hard to imagine this if you try.
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</p>
<p>Hawkette, I don't know why u are bringing up this pointless debate. The bottom line is that there are and always have been 8 ivy league schools, not just 3 (HYP). I find your posts about non-HYP ivies' prestige/rankings increasingly ridiculous. Talking about cornell, your claim that cornell's pretige is contingent on the status of being an ivy, is not a very educated observation. Just look at the rankings. Cornell is one of the few schools in the country that ranks top 15 in Law, Business (MBA), Engineering, Scinces, Architecture, Medicine, undergrad business, the overall undergrad school ranking, and other numerous academic departments. It has an international reputation around the world and its pretige is quite high. Carnegie Mellon, the school you say is equivalent of cornell...is only known for engineering/computer science and its rep/pretige at the global scale isn't even close to cornell's.</p>
<p>Except that it's hard to measure Penn without Wharton. I know everyone in my IB analyst class and the ones above and below me out of Penn were all from Wharton and none from the rest of Penn, whereas those from Cornell were mostly from Art & Sciences and few had the UG business major. Seeing the composition of my friends' analyst classes, this was the case at several banks and would imagine management consulting firms as well. Perhaps, this has since changed? </p>
<p>Being from Colgate, I remember there was always the rumor about Colgate turning down the Ivy League and then Brown was inserted as the last member. From what I have seen since, the closest this was to true is that Colgate once inquired about joining the Ivy League about 10 years before its formation when it was in its theoretical planning stages. Nevertheless, I used to kid that if Colgate had joined the Ivy League that none of us would currently be there and we would all be at Cornell or Brown or whatever school wasn't part of it instead and therefore had not developed as strong an academic reputation. However, you can't just ignore this evolution and its effect on modern day selectivity and how students react to it. The better students are the ones drawn to Dartmouth and Brown and are the ones that choose to go there and the lesser ones do not gain acceptance and have to go to places like Tufts, Colgate, Middlebury instead.</p>
<p>I don't think anyone is disputing that Dartmouth=Williams=Brown=Amherst despite the fact that two are in the Ivy League and two are not.</p>
<p>I think that this was a troll thread started by someone on the waitlist...</p>
<p>Patlees, agreed.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Let's put the whole Penn/Wharton question in some factual perspective. In the last National Research Council (NRC) rankings of graduate programs (released in 1995 and somewhat out of date now, but still the most highly respected rankings of individual academic departments and scheduled to be updated later this year), Penn was one of the top 10 schools with the highest number of departments ranked in the top 10. Specifically, out of the 41 fields that were ranked, the following Penn departments were ranked in either the top 10 or the top 20 in the country:</p>
<p>TOP 10 (15 total, in no particular order)</p>
<p>Art History
English
French
Linguistics
Music
Religion
Spanish
Neurosciences
Pharmacology
Physiology
Biomedical Engineering
Materials Science
Anthropology
Economics
Psychology</p>
<p>TOP 20 (10 total, in no particular order)</p>
<p>Ecological/Evolutionary/Behavioral Science
Molecular and General Genetics
Chemical Engineering
Physics
Classics
Comparative Literature
German
Biochemical/Molecular Biology
History
Sociology</p>
<p>NRC</a> Rankings in Each of 41 Areas</p>
<p>To summarize, in 25 out of the 41 ranked fields, Penn was in either the top 10 (15 fields) or top 20 (10 fields), and NOT A SINGLE ONE OF THOSE WAS A WHARTON DEPARTMENT. By contrast, WUSL was ranked in the top 10 in only 3 fields (German, Cell Biology, Neurosciences), and in the top 20 in only 4 fields (Biochemistry/Molecular Biology, Ecological/Evolutionary/Behavioral Science, Molecular and General Genetics, and Anthropology). Emory was ranked in the top 10 in only 1 field (Religion), and in the top 20 in only 2 fields (French, Pharmacology).</p>
<p>So: Penn in top 10 or top 20 in a total of 25 fields, WUSL in top 10 or top 20 in a total of 7 fields, and Emory in top 10 or top 20 in a total of 3 fields. And NONE of this involves Wharton.</p>
<p>Further, as already pointed out, in addition to the high standing of many of its academic departments, Penns professional schools rank very highly (Wharton generally top 3, Medical School generally top 3 or 4, Law School generally top 6 or 7, Annenberg School for Communications generally top 5, School of Design generally top 5, Nursing School generally top 2 or 3, Veterinary School generally top 5, etc.). Very few other schools match this record across the board, and neither WUSL nor Emory are among them (although WUSLs medical school, alone, ranks at this level).</p>
<p>Moreover, anyone who dismisses the reputations of Penns grad and professional programs as not affecting undergraduate education, has no understanding of Penn and its undergraduate program. For several decades now, Penn has vigorously pursued its One University policy, which encourages undergrads to take courses in more than one of the undergrad schools (College of Arts and Sciences, Wharton, School of Engineering and Applied Science, Nursing), as well as in 8 of Penns grad and professional schools (Law School, Annenberg School for Communications, School of Design, School of Social Policy and Practice, Graduate School of Education, etc.). Penn is quite serious about this policy (it considers it a hallmark of the school, similar to how Columbia and Chicago view their cores, and Brown views its open curriculum), and most undergrads take advantage of it. Furthermore, while recitation sections in some of the larger intro classes may be taught by graduate teaching assistants, all lectures themselves, and all smaller intro and all upper level classes, are taught by the same professors who teach the graduate courses. And as already stated, under the One University policy, undergrads can AND DO take graduate level courses.</p>
<p>As has already been said, there is much, much more to Penns current academic quality and reputation--on both the undergraduate and graduate levels--than just Wharton or Penn's membership in the Ivy League, and the idea that without Wharton or the Ivy League Penn would somehow fall a few notches in academic excellence or prestige, is utterly belied by the facts.</p>
<p>Of course, similar analysis would apply to the other non-HYP Ivies.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Being from Colgate, I remember there was always the rumor about Colgate turning down the Ivy League and then Brown was inserted as the last member....However, you can't just ignore this evolution and its effect on modern day selectivity and how students react to it.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Indeed. Even though it started out as a simple athletic conference (and on paper, it remains just that), it ended up being the most brilliant strategic marketing decision ever made by Columbia, Dartmouth, Cornell, Penn, and Brown. It created a self-fulfilling prophecy of excellence that was, well, fulfilled.</p>
<p>I hear Johns Hopkins University was another school that was offered a place in the Ivy League, but turned it down. I would bet any amount of money that if the JHU trustees had a crystal ball and saw what the Ivy League would become, they would have joined it in a heartbeat.</p>
<p>I dont get why Harvard's yield is 85%--how does EVERYONE accepted think Harvard is the best fit for them? Prestige-wise Harvard's not much different than Yale or Princeton or Stanford</p>
<p>hawkette, are you seriously claiming that cornell a&s = carnegie mellon a&s. cornell may have the strongest ivy league eng program, but its liberal arts is also comparable to penn and brown.</p>
<p>
My understanding is that these stories of other schools being considered/invited (e.g., Colgate, Hopkins, etc.) are apocryphal (i.e., they never happened). Although I've read this in the past, I can't find anything specific at the moment, but this sort of covers it:</p>
<p>
[quote]
Within a year of this statement and having held one-month-long discussions about the proposal, on December 3, 1936, the idea of "the formation of an Ivy League" gained enough traction among the undergraduate bodies of the universities that the Columbia Daily Spectator, The Cornell Daily Sun, The Dartmouth, The Harvard Crimson, The Daily Pennsylvanian, The Daily Princetonian and the Yale Daily News would simultaneously run an editorial entitled "Now Is the Time", encouraging the seven universities to form the league in an effort to preserve the ideals of athletics.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Ivy</a> League - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia</p>
<p>These were all schools that had had fairly significant football programs, and that had a tradition of playing each other--and other things in common--that went back quite a few years. It evolved fairly gradually until its formalization in 1954.</p>
<p>Here's more on the history, further supporting what I've indicated:</p>
<p>There was a reference to Colgate inquiring about joining the Ivy League cited in the Dartmouth newspaper about 4-5 years ago.</p>
<p>I don't know to what extent it was a great marketing ploy by the lesser five Ivy schools. My understanding is that they were already considered strong academic schools before this that already played each other and had a common mission to de-emphasize sports (except for Penn, which wanted to keep playing the Notre Dames of the world; hence the 1953 boycott by Princeton, Dartmouth, Columbia).</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Here's an interesting article about that from the Pennsylvania Gazette, Penn's alumni magazine (excerpted from a book entitled "Football: The Ivy League Origins of an American Obsession," by Mark F. Bernstein, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press):</p>
<p>Nov/Dec</a> Gazette: Harold Stassen and the Ivy League</p>