The would be Colgate,Bucknell,Lafayette,Lehigh. Any suggestions?
<p>Colgate & Bucknell - getting more selective each year, I think.</p>
<p>Bucknell Class of '09 avg. SAT - 1353; admission rate this year under 33%.</p>
<p>To the Patriot League add American, Holy Cross, Army and Navy. They are all pretty selective and of course two of the above are military. As far as selective Colgate is probably the most difficult to gain admissions to.</p>
<p>Lehigh and Colgate are the two most selective of the two.
Lehigh is more engineeringish, while Colgate is more social science. Lehigh's admission standards are brought down alot by alumni connections and rich white kids with connections...and also because the college tends to be less selective than its business and engineering counterparts.</p>
<p>Is Bucknell a good school?</p>
<p>Yes, it's a great school, AP 87 - what do you plan to major in?</p>
<p>Biology is my major.... Spanish is my minor</p>
<p>Colgate class of 2009 (from the website):</p>
<p>Average GPA of 3.70 and an average combined SAT of 1391.</p>
<p>SAT middle 50% 660-740v 670-740m</p>
<p>ACT middle 50% 30-33</p>
<p>average G.P.A. 3.7 out of 4.0</p>
<p>class rank (available for 36% 80% in top 10%; 94% in top 20%</p>
<p>of admitted students)</p>
<p>public/private high schools 70%; 30%</p>
<p>Why are the Patriot League schools being grouped together in terms of admission selectivity? It's a NCAA sports league.</p>
<p>The same reason why Ivy League schools are grouped together. Although technically these are sports leagues, I think we can all agree that their defining characteristic is not atheletics.</p>
<p>Patriot League and Ivy League share extremely similar characteristics, including size, location, and styles of education. The Patriot League varies as much as the Ivy league (lehigh vs lafayette is a lot like comparing Cornell to Brown). I think of the Patriot league as a less selective extension of the Ivy League, since they play each other in sports and are in the same region.</p>
<p>I don't see what the schools in the Patriot League have in common except they play sports together and are more or less in the same geographic area. American, Lafayette and Lehigh are universities. Bucknell, Colgate and Holy Cross are LAC's. West Point and the Naval Academy are service academies. All are excellent schools but their selectivities (and USNWR rankings) vary a bit.</p>
<p>I agree that the Ivies don't have too much in common either except for prestige, and they are a brand-name in the public consciousness.</p>
<p>dufus - must a school offer a doctoral degree to be classified as a university, or does a masters program also make the cut? I'm confused.</p>
<p>LAC = only undergraduate degrees</p>
<p>Thanks, Kcirsch - I was wondering because both Colgate and Bucknell offer a variety of master degrees.</p>
<p>Some LAC's offer doctorates. Just flipping thru the Barron's guide for some randomly selected colleges, Middlebury and Wesleyan offer some doctoral degrees. Also, some universities like Emory, although they offer doctorates, put the emphasis on undergraduate education.</p>
<p>Large universities are usually composed of smaller colleges. They offer a full range of undergrad, master and doctor degrees in a broad range of areas. They have a lot of resources and facilities, and class sizes can be large, especially in freshman year. LAC's generally have under 5000 students and their mission is learning for the sake of learning. They focus on undergraduates and give a lot of attention to the individual students. Professors will give the class their home phone number and invite students to dinner. They tend to occupy niches where the LAC will specialized in a few areas. It could be humanities or it could be science. The middle ground is midsized/small universities. These are universities that have some of the characteristics of LAC's. The Ivies, WUSTL, Emory, and a lot of other colleges fall in this category. The line between each group isn't a solid one. A college like Wesleyan could be considered a LAC or small university. (USNWR calls it a LAC.) The midsized universities may or not put the emphasis on undergraduate education. Harvard doesn't, but Princeton does.</p>
<p>Just to correct some stuff that dufus said.
Lafayette is a college, a LAC plus engineering
Bucknell is a university. It is like a LAC, also has a strong engineering program.
Colgate is also a university in name. It sometimes refers to itself as a LAU. At the NCAA hockey tournament, they painted "Colgate College" on the boards and had to repaint it at the last minute. Its masters program is very limited. </p>
<p>Georgetown and Fordham are also members of the league for some sports.</p>
<p>They are compared because it is a easy way to talk about a group of similar schools. They are a group of schools that are of a similar size (the range is something like 2000 to 5000) that are in the same basic area. They are also all non-urban schools. They were all non-scholarship schools at the beginning. American, the most different school, did not join until 2001, 15 years into the league.<br>
Anyway, when most people think of the Patriot League, they think of the schools who have been full members since the beginning, Bucknell, Colgate, Holy Cross, Lafayette, and Lehigh (Army and Navy are also long time members but most think of their D-1A football affiliations). These schools have more in common than the ivies do, and people don't seem to have a problem grouping them together.</p>
<p>Lafayette, Bucknell, and Colgate are all listed as LAC in the USNWR rankings. I said that "The line between each group isn't a solid one. A college like Wesleyan could be considered a LAC or small university. (USNWR calls it a LAC.)"</p>
<p>Obviously, there is no definitive line where you are one or the other. Some colleges embrace the LAC label and market themselves that way in order to emphasize their faculty/student ratios, their commitment to undergrad education, and their close relationships between faculty and students. Other colleges such as large LAC's, want to be called universities so as to market themselves as having a broader range of majors and greater facilities. I'm reminded that Drexel University changed their name from Drexel Inst of Technology to Drexel University in the 1970's because they wanted to market themselves as being more than just an eng school. </p>
<p>My main point was that it is hard to make the Patriot League into some type of little Ivy designation when AU, West Point, and the Naval Acad are in there.</p>
<p>Maybe the strongest argument for a "little Ivy designation" is that is what the league is. period. If you know the history of the league at all, you know that it was founded in the 80's with the strong support of the ivy league schools as a similar league that they could play games against. They got schools that were very similar and had traditions of playing against ivy schools to be members of the league. Remember, at the founding of the Ivy league, Colgate had a stronger tradition of playing against Ivy members than some of the members. </p>
<p>If the Ivy league considers the Patriot League a version of itself, how is anyone else to argue with them. </p>
<p>Another example, West Point has more in common with Lafayette than Dartmouth has in common with Cornell or Brown.</p>
<p>Also American has to be considered differently. The only reason it is in the league is that they needed another member and wanted a school that would improve the school's basketball image. If the Ivy league added another school 3/4 of the way through its history, it may not fit as well too.</p>
<p>When the Ivy League was proposed as an athletic conference in the 1930s and finally realized as such in 1954, there were originally 10 schools, the current 8 plus the two service academies, Annapolis & West Point. When Annapolis & West Point left shortly thereafter, the Ivy League looked quickly for two replacements, relatively smaller schools but with solid athletic teams: Colgate & Georgetown. Whether it's apocryphal or not, Georgetown is rumored to have balked at giving up its Jesuit status and declined, leaving Colgate as the 9th Ivy. When no other school was approached, Colgate was left as a perennial member of most of the Ivy colleges' athletic schedules but without formal membership. Contrary to another supposition, Tufts never was approached nor did it ask to be a part of the Ivy League. Colgate partnered with two of the original Ivy members as well as another perennial member of the Ivy athletic schedule, Holy Cross, to form the Patriot League in the mid-1980s. The three Pennsylvania schools -- Lehigh, Lafayette and Bucknell -- were extended invitations as was Georgetown and the Patriot League was inaugurated. All 16 of the schools in both athletic leagues are highly respected academic institutions.</p>