<p>It seems to me that most Georgetown students, other than those applying ED, did not get into their first choice - usually an Ivy.</p>
<p>seniorpop, GTown doesn’t have ED. And even when you correct ED to EA, your statement is still not right. I applied to GTown as a “range, acceptable” school and saved my reaches for regular. </p>
<p>I personally feel that GTown is a sub-Ivy school. I basically see it on the same level as Duke and Notre Dame. This ofc has no applicable validity but just sharing my perception.</p>
<p>I could be wrong, but my understanding is that the SFS is highly selective and equally as impressive as any of the Ivies. </p>
<p>On a different note, what about the FLL? I’ve heard that, other than Penn and Cornell, the Ivies can’t compare with GU’s linguistics and language programs. If that’s a valid statement, isn’t it kind of unfair to say that Georgetown can’t compare with the Ivies in Arts and Sciences? </p>
<p>And isn’t it also a little unfair to say that most people who choose Georgetown just didn’t get into their first choice Ivy? Georgetown is well renowned for international relations. I would think someone who was pursuing any kind of international field, going into linguistics/languages, or trying to get into SFS might prefer Georgetown for one of those specific reasons, even over HYP, and not simply choose it as a back-up.</p>
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<p>You are delusional! Who really thinks this? You’ve been drinking too much of that koolaid and I think it is downright irresponsible for you to make such ridiculous comments. There’s a reason why G-town has never been ranked within the top 20 of schools. You might as well say that, say, Tufts, is more prestigious than some of the ivies as well. </p>
<p>G-town is not more prestigous than any of the ivies, perhaps a few in DC might think so…</p>
<p>G-town doesn’t compete with any of the ivies, although I can see someone choosing to go there with a full ride. Please join us on Planet Earth!</p>
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So I guess why they all seem to do well in practically every survey of the best schools in the US. Gtown is not even more respected than Hopkins for goodness sake. The PA scores mean something and are not just random assessments of the intellectual vitality of schools. Gtown is a good school but it is not at an ivy level.</p>
<p>[Best</a> Colleges - Education - US News and World Report](<a href=“http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/national-counselor-rank]Best”>http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/national-counselor-rank)</p>
<p>According to the USN survey of high school counselors, who are in the thick of debates about perceived prestige, Georgetown is tied for 9th with CalTech, Dartmouth, Duke, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, Cal-Berkeley, and UPenn. Now, I’d be the first to argue that perception does not equal reality, but insofar as this whole debate seems to be about prestige, which is inherently a question of perception, I think this bit of data is a useful corrective.</p>
<p>[List</a> of Georgetown University alumni - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgetown_alumni]List”>List of Georgetown alumni - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>TrollNYC-It is hard to get back down to planet earth when a Georgetown Alumnus ran the international space station for NASA.</p>
<p>But seriously, how can you on blog indicate that a School with four current Heads of State, a recent US President, three current Governors, five current senators, a federal reserve board governor, the current Secretary of Defense and NSC Advisor, is one of only seven schools with a Supreme Court member, has cultural icons like John Guare and James Carroll in its ranks, has the Presidents of MIT and Barnard etc. etc. etc. etc.(I don’t need to continue as the list speaks for itself)is not “competitive or in the same league as various Ivy League Schools”? </p>
<p>A piece of advice-In any serious environment with people with any cultural literacy, as opposed to a blog such as this, you would run the risk in 2009, of being either laughed at as an ignoramous for making your statement or pitied as as an anit-catholic bigot. I suspect that you are neither.</p>
<p>By the way Georgetown was ranked 17th by US News in the mid 1990s.</p>
<p>trollnyc - isn’t that a little harsh? I felt the statement you cited was quite an accurate way of stating it, and it didn’t seem to me that it would be “irresponsible” or “ridiculous” to state that opinion even if it had been completely inaccurate. GU’s academics are recognized as extremely impressive, even outside areas like languages and international affairs that are their specialties. I know several people who have turned down schools such as Penn, Brown, Dartmouth, or Cornell to go to Georgetown.</p>
<p>vienna man - The way you worded your response amuses me. It’s very eloquent, like reading a novel :)</p>
<p>dzleprechaun, counselors are perhaps the thickest people I know. If they knew anything, they wouldn’t be working $30k government jobs at the ages of 40. My counselor strongly suggested that I got to Bucknell or Villanova. I’m going to Wharton ffs and she could have called that since I was advising her regarding her finances!</p>
<p>As for GTown alumni --no one is saying GTown doesn’t rock. It certainly does. GTown alumni shape the world. But I would say the frequency of big names out of Ivy schools is higher than for GTown. Yes, the brand is a confounding variable and in all likelihood, the people attending the schools are the same level. However, as long as we’re talking about prestige, Ivy schools are on a level all of their own perhaps even more clearly due to the effect of the Ivy brand.
Did that make sense?</p>
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While Georgetown is decent in both linguistics and languages, it’s not amazing. Top 20-30 in both at best.</p>
<p>In any case, one department does not a college make.</p>
<p>I’m sorry guys- I don;t want to deflate your bubble. I like Georgetown. But at my top prep school the kids who got into Brown, Columbia, Penn, Dartmouth, and even Cornell were much more qualified than the kids who got into Georgetown. I think Georgetown is a solid school - sort of like Emory and Rice. But please get back to reality.</p>
<p>Collectively the Ivy League is obviously stronger academically than all other conferences, and being a member of the league obviously increases an institutions prestige. However, affiliation is only one component of prestige. Selectivity also plays a huge role, as does the quality of the student body, desirability, location, and alumni. Georgetown, unlike some of it’s more recently higher ranked peers in US News, is strong in all of these categories despite not being a member of the Ivy League. </p>
<p>Historically, other highly ranked schools (including some non HYP ivies) had acceptance rates well above 20% and sometimes near 40%. If you had the grades you could get in. Not that they weren’t good schools, but they were relatively easy to get into. Guidance counselors from the most competitive high schools know this and that’s what their rankings show.</p>
<p>Is anybody from your top prep school sitting in the situation room of the White House?, the Supreme Court Conference Chamber?, the Senate-House Leadership conference room?, the Open Market Meeting room of the Federal Reserve? In any Governor’s mansions? If Jesus Christ were a Georgetown alumnus you and your friends at at your “top prep school” would probably say that he used it as a safety school.</p>
<p>“Historically, other highly ranked schools (including some non HYP ivies) had acceptance rates well above 20% and sometimes near 40%. If you had the grades you could get in. Not that they weren’t good schools, but they were relatively easy to get into.”</p>
<p>Actually when I was applying, Penn was over 40%. But the interesting thing is, it did not feel relatively easy to us at the time. We were worrying and sweating it out, just like you guys are. Acceptance did not feel automatic, based on numbers, it felt pretty much like today. Though by the numbers obviously it wasn’t. Maybe because we weren’t applying to so many schools, so each one mattered more? </p>
<p>As for this thread, I don’t know what you guys are talking about Georgetown is a great school, if it appears to be the place that you feel you can best maximize your potential by all means go there. These little rankings by some magazine do not dictate who you will become, or what you will accomplish, it is all much more complicated than that.</p>
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<p>Necro, your description may hold true for some public schools, but I there are also counselors at private schools who make six digits yearly. My guess would be that it is counselors from elite private schools, as well as highly competitive public schools (e.g. those that send multiple students to top-ranked schools year each) that were solicited for this survey.</p>
<p>I think the point is that its well known that Georgetown is amazing for SFS and getting into the DC world. There might be no better school outside of Harvard for this. But in terms of broad - across the board - success overall if you look at the data the Ivies do much better and are more selective. For instance look at the Harvard and Yale law rates - Georgetown is pretty much Ivy level. But when you look at the top med schools, Georgetown doesn’t do as well. In my opinion Georgetown is Ivy level in some areas, but the Ivies are stronger overall.</p>
<p>dzleprechaun, my school was ranked 17-50 over the last decade for all of US. For a public school, we are darn good. I would venture to say that we are even stronger than most private schools. And yet, the counselors were not the people to go to for advice.</p>
<p>SFS is better than the Ivies other than Harvard and Princeton (and it easily gives those a run for their money). The TRIP survey of international relations faculty places Georgetown as the 4th best school for the undergraduate study of IR (behind Harvard, Princeton and Stanford) see <a href=“http://web.wm.edu/irtheoryandpractice/trip/surveyreport06-07.pdf?svr=www[/url]”>http://web.wm.edu/irtheoryandpractice/trip/surveyreport06-07.pdf?svr=www</a> On the same survey, Georgetown is ahead of Columbia (5th), Yale (6th), Dartmouth (9th), Cornell (16th), and Brown (17th). Penn didn’t even do well enough to be ranked.</p>
<p>At the graduate level, SFS is generally recognized as the best school in the world. Johns Hopkins is the only other school that comes close with Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia trailing far behind and all of the other Ivies completely irrelevant (note: this is not about PhDs, but rather masters degrees as SFS grants no PhD).</p>
<p>The faculty of the SFS and the student body are on par with or superior to the Ivies. I personally declined offers from both Princeton and Yale in favor of Georgetown SFS, and I have many friends who did the same. The SFS faculty is studded with stars that even Harvard can’t match, from Madeleine Albright (former Secretary of State), Anthony Lake (former National Security Adviser), Charles Hagel (former US Senator from Nebraska) and George Tenet (former CIA Director) to Bruce Hoffman (certainly one of the top 3 terrorism scholars in the world, and probably #1), Michael Oren (one of the leading scholars of the modern Middle East), George Shambaugh (leading scholar of political economy), etc. There is a certain weakness in the faculty within the area of theory (i.e., no Mearsheimer, Waltz, Wendt, Keohane, etc.) which leads to rather lower rankings among PhD programs, and the school is seen as more policy-oriented than most. Nonetheless, SFS puts most of the Ivies to shame.</p>
<p>Once you leave SFS, though, Georgetown’s reputation drops off. In political science, Georgetown is still clearly one of the best in the country, and ranks far ahead of most of the Ivies. In ScienceWatch’s survey of schools by papers produced in the field of political science in leading journals, Georgetown ranks #4, behind Harvard, Berkeley, and Columbia. [03.16.2008</a> - Political Science & Public Administration: Most Prolific U.S. Institutions, 2002-06 - ScienceWatch.com](<a href=“ScienceWatch.com - Clarivate”>ScienceWatch.com - Clarivate) Georgetown, it should be noted, has a much smaller department than any of these schools.</p>
<p>Moving further away, though, Georgetown’s reputation declines. It is certainly not a math or science powerhouse and really can’t compare to most Ivies in those areas. In the humanities, Georgetown does alright, but isn’t comparable to HYPS. There are, as mentioned above, some other bright spots notably in languages and theology (particularly Catholic theology). Georgetown is also probably the best school out there in the field of medical ethics and one of the better ones in ethics generally (once again, even more so for those coming from a Catholic approach).</p>
<p>Overall, I would say that Georgetown is one of the best if not the best school for international relations and political science (only Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and Columbia can compare meaningfully). In general, though, Georgetown ranks along with the second-tier Ivies and in some areas does worse than them.</p>
<p>@potatoes: I completely agree with all of what you wrote here.</p>
<p>When it comes down to SFS, Georgetown is the cream of the crop when it comes to foreign relations. It beats the Ivies in that respect, in my opinion. </p>
<p>As for other areas of Georgetown’s expertise, I imagine that it is not so well-ranked, but it is still a contender. A lower-ranked business school (in the top 25 undergrad in the nation) may have its turnaround with the new money injected into the program, including the new facilities. Georgetown is making improvements and it may see higher ranks in the years to come.</p>
<p>(Interestingly, it is tied second place with Ross, Sloan, and Tepper for the high average starting salaries: [The</a> Top Undergraduate Business Programs](<a href=“http://bwnt.businessweek.com/interactive_reports/undergrad_bschool_2009/index.asp?sortCol=median_starting_salary&sortOrder=2&pageNum=1&resultNum=51]The”>http://bwnt.businessweek.com/interactive_reports/undergrad_bschool_2009/index.asp?sortCol=median_starting_salary&sortOrder=2&pageNum=1&resultNum=51) Even though they may not be the most recruited, Georgetown business students may at least be well paid.)</p>
<p>As for general prestige, when you say you graduated from Georgetown, people will notice (especially in CD). It is among the best universities of the US, but it is impossible to specify its exact rank in my opinion. It’s somewhere among the second tier schools (lower Ivies, Stanford, Duke, Notre Dame, MIT, etc) in some respect. Obviously, certain schools (i.e., engineering at MIT) will far outstrip Georgetown in certain ranks, but as a whole, Georgetown is up there.</p>
<p>potatoes345 is exactly right. But that makes GTown a bit like a one-ride pony. You go there for IR or you default because you didn’t make it to your first choice.</p>