Here is an interesting ranking of the ivies that I stumbled upon.
The author looked at USNews, Forbes and Niche rankings and averaged out the positions of each ivy. He reasoned his choice of rankings as follows: USNews focuses on reputation & inputs, Forbes focuses on outcomes, Niche focuses on quality of student life.
The ranking was he following (average rank in parentheses)
Princeton University (2.5)
Harvard University (3)
Yale University (3.75)
University of Pennsylvania (8.75)
Columbia University (9.5)
Brown University (11.5)
Dartmouth College (13)
Cornell University (22)
He also broke the ivies into tiers and included what are the ivy-equivalents, in his opinion, for each tier:
The ranking is interesting, but I dont think this method works for outside of the Ivy leagues. All three lists consider Ivies as highly ranked, and so averaging a rank works. UChicago, for example, is ranked 3 on USN where as on niche I believe it is ranked 20.
I slightly disagree with his tiers.
HYP are in the range of 2.5-3.75 in average ranking.
All the other Ivies besides Cornell are in the range of 8.75-13 in average ranking.
Cornell is at 22 average ranking.
@ANormalSeniorGuy yeah you could do it for the other schools too. you would just average out their rankings. it doesn’t matter if in one ranking a school is high and in another very low, it means it performs differently by the different standards of the other ranking. i feel that is the point of averaging out, minimizing the bias of just one ranking.
So I used the latest USNews, Forbes and Niche rankings for the above schools and I got:
(average rank in parentheses)
And among Ivy-equivalents, he inexplicably left out Rice and Georgetown (who I have as Ivy-equivalents) and ND (who I have as a near-Ivy). Yet if you look at average ranking, Rice, Georgetown, and ND are above or at the lowest Ivy (Cornell).
Here are the average rankings (using his methodology of giving USNews twice the weight) for all of the non-Ivy USNews top 30, separated in to privates and publics:
Here’s all separated by tiers (really, quarter-tiers, as I consider the bottom of the Ivy League and near-Ivies like UMich/Cal/UVa to be only half a tier apart; that would make HYPSM tier 0):
For Cornell, all is not the same. Meaning, Arts & Sciences has a greater reputation than ILR or Human Ecology and Ag.
As a Chemistry major, I got to study with a Nobel Prize winner in Quantum Mechanics which led to a lot of open doors. All the colleges at Cornell shouldn’t be considered the same in the rankings, they are not.
@prepparent: Eh. That’s true for many colleges. Ross isn’t the same as LSA at UMich. Wharton isn’t the same as Penn’s Nursing school. But nobody’s breaking down the schools within Unis.
This is all only for bragging rights anyway. People in the know know what to look for and are not as easily misled as the rankings-obsessed.
@PurpleTitan Penn Nursing is the best undergrad nursing school, so for its field was it is the same as Wharton. Of course it attracts a different and more self-selected group but at least from my time at Penn not too long ago I remember they were just as smart and driven. It is difficult to break everything into schools, by the same token we d have to break every department separately, after all Yale engineering is not the same as Yale political science and so on.
@keiekei the link was removed for some reason. prob because the source is a college counseling company and I guess it is against CC policy.
if you google “ivy league rankings: what do they really mean” it is the first search result
I think the Forbes ranking isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on (or the bandwidth/storage/pixels used…) because outcomes are, at top schools, basically self-selected – based on chosen major, vocational interest, and geographic area/cost of living.
Niche – It’s an incredibly shallow ranking, but if students like their schools, I suppose that points to the overall experience.
Somehow outcomes need to count for something. It is a metric that many prospective students and their parents care about. Yes for sure the prominence of certain majors in schools affects outcomes but still I feel it is something that needs to be also taken into consideration.