How would you rank the Ivies?

College Search & Selection
41

<p>SAT scores of freshman matriculants is certainly interesting, but if I were a HS student I might be more interested in what colleges would do for me, given my SAT score, such that a normalized measure of GRE (or MCAT or LSAT or ???) minus SAT might show the average statistical improvement one might expect from various colleges, considering that grad schools and employers are interested in what you know upon graduation from college, and don't care what your SAT score was at entrance.</p>

<p>collegehelp, can you put this data together during your next coffee break? Thanks! ;)</p>

42

<p>Does anyone have the number of applicants to Cornell University that are offered the "guaranteed transfer option"? And, is this option available/offered to students applying to each of the different colleges/schools within Cornell, or just to marginally qualified applicants to certain Cornell schools/colleges? Thanks!</p>

43

<p>Not only is Cornell A&S math SATs the same as Brown, it is only 10 points lower than Columbia and Penn and only 20 points lower than Dartmouth.</p>

<p>vossron, that would be an interesting statistic indeed.</p>

44

<p>Also, does anyone know of any other college or university besides Cornell University that offers "guaranteed transfer options"? I have heard of some schools, such as the UCs, that reserve spots for California community college/junior college transfers, but am not familiar with any other program like Cornell University's guaranteed transfer option. Thanks!</p>

45

<p>Not really a ranking...just my preferences.</p>

<p>Princeton
Yale
Harvard
Penn
Dartmouth
Brown
Columbia
Cornell</p>

46

<p>Here's an interesting way to look at it. Using the ISI web of knowledge, sort the ivies by number of Highly Cited researchers (isihighlycited.com). People keep track of how many times an author is cited by other authors (a really interesting social network, actually). The highly cited researchers hold the top 1% of all citations.</p>

<p>Harvard 84
Princeton 68
Cornell 53
UPenn 53
Columbia 40
Yale 35
Brown 16
Dartmouth 4</p>

<p>I don't know how much worth this holds, but it is somewhat surprising (UPenn ahead of yale?)</p>

47

<p>^
Adjusting for size of faculty...</p>

<p>Princeton .061
Harvard .035
Brown .023
Cornell .020
Penn .013
Yale .011
Columbia .011
Dartmouth .006</p>

48

<p>ok here's my rankings:</p>

<p>Yale
Princeton
Harvard
Dartmouth
Brown
Columbia
Cornell
Penn</p>

49

<p>
[quote]
You can't separate engineering from the rest of the school. If you separated out the math/ engineering scores at any Ivy they would be much higher than the rest of the school.

[/quote]
The point of this thread is simply to rank the Ivies in any way posters see fit. Who says you can't create a ranking based on engineering test scores?</p>

<p>Where are the useful rankings of Ivies??? Who has the best food? Who has the best dorms? Who has the best sports teams? Come on, people! :D</p>

50

<p>My understanding of slipper1234's post was that breaking out a university's SAT scores for just the school/college of engineering at a large university is relevant for a comparison of engineering schools & not for an evaluative comparison of the school as a whole versus other schools both with & without engineering schools. Seems reasonable to me. For example, it would not be a fair or even useful comparison to compare the mid-range SAT scores of Penn's Wharton School to NYU, Michigan or Virginia. But a comparison of the SAT scores for Wharton, Ross, Stern & Darden is a fair & useful contrast.</p>

51

<p>Princeton
Harvard
Yale
Columbia
UPenn
Dartmouth
Cornell
Brown</p>

52

<p>From The Princeton Review (NOT AFFILIATED WITH PRINCETON UNIVERSITY)</p>

<p>Best Campus Food</p>

<h1>11 Cornell University</h1>

<p>Best Career/Job Placement Services</p>

<h1>12 Yale University</h1>

<h1>14 Cornell University</h1>

<p>Best Classroom Experience</p>

<h1>14 Princeton University</h1>

<p>Best College Library</p>

<h1>1 Harvard College</h1>

<h1>2 Princeton University</h1>

<h1>5 Cornell University</h1>

<h1>10 Columbia University</h1>

<p>Best College Newspaper</p>

<h1>1 Yale University</h1>

<h1>4 Harvard College</h1>

<h1>14 University Of Pennsylvania</h1>

<p>Best College Radio Station</p>

<h1>7 Brown University</h1>

<p>Best College Theater</p>

<h1>1 Yale University</h1>

<h1>15 Brown University</h1>

<p>Best Quality Of Life</p>

<h1>3 Princeton University</h1>

<p>Birkenstock-Wearing, Tree-Hugging, Clove-Smoking Vegetarians</p>

<h1>18 Brown University</h1>

<p>Dorms Like Palaces</p>

<h1>10 Harvard College</h1>

<p>Great College Towns</p>

<h1>6 Columbia University</h1>

<p>Happiest Students</p>

<h1>2 Brown University</h1>

<h1>3 Princeton University</h1>

<h1>11 Yale University</h1>

<p>Lots Of Race/Class Interaction</p>

<h1>17 Yale University</h1>

<h1>19 Brown University</h1>

<p>Most Beautiful Campus </p>

<h1>1 Princeton University</h1>

<p>Most Politically Active Students</p>

<h1>3 Princeton University</h1>

<h1>7 Harvard College</h1>

<p>School Runs Like Butter</p>

<h1>2 Princeton University</h1>

<h1>19 Yale University</h1>

<p>Students Dissatisfied With Financial Aid</p>

<h1>18 Dartmouth College</h1>

<p>Students Happy With Financial Aid</p>

<h1>1 Princeton University</h1>

<h1>4 Harvard College</h1>

<p>Students Study The Most</p>

<h1>7 Harvard College</h1>

<h1>20 Princeton University</h1>

<p>Top 10 Best Value Private Colleges</p>

<h1>2 Harvard College</h1>

<h1>3 Princeton University</h1>

<h1>5 Yale University</h1>

<p>Town-Gown Relations Are Strained</p>

<h1>20 University Of Pennsylvania</h1>

<p>Colleges With A Conscience:
Harvard College
Princeton University
Dartmouth College
Brown University
University Of Pennsylvania</p>

<p>Most Connected Campus:
Cornell University
University Of Pennsylvania</p>

53

<p>
[quote]
Great College Towns</p>

<h1>6 Columbia University

[/quote]
</h1>

<p>The Upper West Side is hardly a "college town".</p>

54

<p>New York City in general, perhaps?</p>

<p>Though, UPenn should be up there too, then.</p>

<p>Well, I like Philly. I say this as a New Yorker.</p>

55

<p>Regarding GTs -- </p>

<p>The choice of the term "marginally qualified" to describe guaranteed transfers to Cornell is unfortunate because there is nothing marginally qualified about such students. In an environment where chance or luck so often comes into play during admissions, and most of the top fifty or so selective schools freely admits that it could fill a similar looking class with the students it rejected, the obsession with the soi-disant <em>prestige</em> associated with what are often random admissions decisions strikes me as a bit off base.</p>

<p>But in my experience these transfer students were no different from the rest of the students at Cornell. In fact, one of the guaranteed transfers in my college at Cornell went on to become a Rhodes Scholar. I suppose she was a marginally qualified Rhodes Scholar as well.</p>

<p>But Cornell likes transfers due to two reasons:</p>

<p>1) There is not enough freshmen housing for some extremely qualified applicants that Cornell would like to admit, and so the GT is offered.
2) Cornell has always stood for a very democratic and egalitarian educational philosophy, and it sees transfer students as part of this tradition: The thought is that the abillity of an under-performing high school student to prove herself in college should get the opportunity to study at a place like Cornell as well. </p>

<p>There are no published statistics on the number of GTs versus non GTs, and the practices probably change year to year depending on anticipated enrollment levels due to people studying abroad, graduating early, or drop outs. I know that in some years the Arts college offers GTs, and in other years it doesn't. If I would have to speculate, I would say the 80% of the GTs are to the contract colleges though. There also used to be a 'January admission' program much like at Middlebury, but I think it's been since phased out.</p>

<p>What we do know is that there are 500-600 transfers to Cornell every year, and that each graduating class ends up being around 500 students larger than the entering class. Given Cornell's 14,000 undergraduates and its relationship to the State of New York, these don't seem like unreasonable numbers. For comparison, a school like Northwestern, which has roughly half the number of students, has over 200 transfers enroll every year.</p>

<p>And we also know that the majority of Cornell's transfers are actually into the Ag school, which has a long history of enrolling top performing rural or low-income students from community colleges across the state, particularly into economically important fields like animal science or crop management. And of the Ag transfers, I know that over half come from community colleges.</p>

<p>A bunch of other top private colleges participate in a community college transfer program with Cornell, including Amherst, Bucknell, USC, and Holyoke. Publics include Michigan, Berkeley, and UNC. I think Virginia has a similar program too, but academia has basically figured out that they have been accepting a lot of over-pampered rich kids at the expense of some really bright kids farther down the income spectrum, and community college transfer opportunities are a way to make amends.</p>

<p>Jack</a> Kent Cooke Foundation - Grant Recipients</p>

56

<p>Stats for all colleges of a multi-college university, where each college has separate admissions processes, need to be evaluated individually if one is trying to handicap admissions odds and peer group. An applicant to Penn's School of Nursing is not facing the same applicant pool competition as an applicant to Wharton. Agggregating the stats is not fully useful to an applicant to only a particular college of a multi-college university.</p>

<p>This comes up as an issue frequently for Cornell because most of the other universities it is frequently compared with do not have such a significant proportion of students in many diverse colleges, with separate admissions processes, and academic capabiltities. i.e, the degree of this circumstance is very pronounced at cornell. But the colleges Cornell has in common with these other schools have a different academic profile than some fictional amalgam of the university as a whole.
And students are admitted only by appication for admission to specific colleges, not some theoretical aggregate.</p>

<p>Since each college there has a separate admissions pool, and process, an individual college should be assessed on its own. Same for colleges of other multi-college universities, where individual colleges have substantially separate admissions pools and processes.</p>

<p>It used to be standard to report admissions stats for each college separately in these situations, , in the guide books. That this doesn't happen anymore is unfortunate. and misleading to applicants who do not apply to some fictional amalgam of the university's individual colleges, but only to specific colleges within the university.</p>

<p>But the big picture is: ranking "universities", where these are amalgams of numberous separate features, is a pointless exercise. An acutally useful ranking must have some purpose, and then some relevant criteria accordingly. Best for what? is the question. And that depends on an individual's priorities and preferences.</p>

<p>An aggregated ranking, with no specified criteria, is a pointless exercise.</p>

<p>I agree with coldwind that comparing arts & sciences colleges vs. other arts *& Sciences colleges only, without lumping in other colleges, is the only thing that makes sense; just as comparing engineering colleges to other engineering colleges makes sense, in their given hypothetical. And compare colleges of agriculture only to other colleges of agriculture. And colleges of Nursing to othe colleges of Nursing. As can be inferred from posts of coldwind and slipper1234 . I agree.</p>

<p>But in any event, entrance stats only tell so much about a college; what comes in, before the college does anything at all. That's not the sum value of a college, anyway. Talk about what can be studied there, courses available, other criteria re: value added for you, the student, once you get there. Given your own capabilities and objectives.</p>

57

<p>CayugaRed2005.</p>

<p>Stop trying to defend Cornell's presitge. Prestige is something that stands by itself. No matter how u want to look at it, Cornell is on the bottom of the Ivy League if you really wanna start getting into this.</p>

<p>CORNELL IS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE LEAGUE.</p>

58

<p>monydad: I think that we all understand that, but it is still ridiculous to compare SAT scores for Cornell's engineering students to non-engineering students at other schools. Plus the figures were neither accurate nor of the same year when comparing different universities.</p>

59

<ol>
<li>brown (there's no place like it)</li>
<li>princeton</li>
<li>harvard</li>
<li>yale</li>
<li>columbia</li>
<li>dartmouth</li>
<li>penn</li>
<li>cornell</li>
</ol>

60

<p>Engineering in general has high numbers. CR2005 is just trying to create a preceptiono of higher selectivity lulz insecure :P</p>