<p>Pineapple, Dartmouth is probably more similar to Amherst than Brown.</p>
<p>Anywhoo…Brown, Penn, Columbia, and Dartmouth are all about the same. They fluctuate year to year but all are pretty much exactly in the same range.</p>
<p>Haha, “balls hard.”</p>
<p>That sounds disgusting.</p>
<p>Can i just leave something in here real quick? Everyone has different perceptions of which colleges are better, and that’s not just talk that ppl say to assuage their feelings or whatnot. I’m not an expert on anything, but different schools and different regions of the country and different people just like different colleges. All my friends are absolutely cookoo about certain schools like georgetown or penn. remember that penn still has a bit of lingering reputation from being the “easy, overly preprofessional, nonintellectual ivy” from most of the twentieth century. i know for a fact that they’ve shed this stereotype and are nothing like this, but lots of ppl still look at it that way. and people from different regions in america look at the ivies totally differently. all these opinions are influenced by the people around you, how they talk, and then you pass it on, without doing any real research. in the past, from what i’ve heard, new yorkers thought yale was #1 while southerners considered that honor to princeton, etc, and it went on for the entire ivy league. how can anyone justify the position of what people all over the nation think of where ivy league schools fall when they really only have the opinions of people they meet? i know for a fact that each of the ivy league schools are respected the in general same, just depends on who you talk to. penn is still known to have a preprofessional feel, which appeals to different people, and brown is still known to have a very intellectual feel. i say everyone should just please settle down and stop comparing colleges based on what they hear, especially ESPECIALLY on CC. brown was perfect for me, because I new exactly what i felt about colleges, and i turned down yale, columbia and penn for it. The new curriculum and the feel of brown was perfect for me, but for other people it’s totally different. i hope we can just stop comparing, it’s silly to me</p>
<p>cheers ^_^</p>
<p>“It’s incredible that you truly don’t understand the amount of influence US News has on the bodies and minds of this generation. When Chicago moved from #17 to #9, they saw a jump in applicants; from 9,000 to 11,000.”</p>
<p>We do. And that’s why USNews is, for a lack of a better word, ■■■■■■■■. It uses circular data like selectivity – the more selective it is the higher the ranking. The higher the ranking, the more selective it becomes. Make sense to you? It shouldn’t. </p>
<p>P.S., Jason, you’d make a funny looking girl. The goatee would just be awkward.</p>
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<p>I missed that gem. Honestly, welcome to the GRE analytical writing section which would basically ask students to point out the obvious and ridiculous flaws in this statement.</p>
<p>If I weren’t going to class right now I could literally list 10 things likely responsible for that change resulting in cutting up the importance of USNews down to about 2-4% as opposed to 22% increase.</p>
<p>In fact, let’s look at applicants recently to UChicago:
2008: 8,757 2009: 9,039 2010: 9,542 2011:10,384 2012:12,385</p>
<p>Let’s look at Brown over a similar period while its rank on USNews declined…</p>
<p>2008: 15,286 2009:16,911 2010:18,316 2011:19,059 2012: 20,633</p>
<p>What does this tell us? I’ll leave that to you. Let’s see if you can properly analyze this data since we’re apparently playing the, “I can twist facts without evidence or even following basic logic better than you can!” game.</p>
<p>For those keeping count, only last year was our increase less percentage wise (from my quick glancing estimation) and one has to begin to ask if Brown has reached near the ceiling of the number of qualified applicants it can attract. We’re still bringing in 75% more applications than UChicago’s rising star and our increases have kept up with the competition as we practically inverted USNews position.</p>
<p>There’s truth there. I guess Brown bucks the US News trend? Or there isn’t one to begin with?</p>
<p>Brown’s the underdog of the Ivies. It’s like Scrubs: If you know of it you either love it or hate it. So the type of people who dig Brown for the most part go because they fell in love with it!</p>
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<p>My guess would be it works out something like this:</p>
<p>About 10-15% of their 20% growth is due to the far larger applicant pool applying to college in general in the US, and most especially to top schools where more students are informed and concerned with getting into top schools the result being the average number of schools each student applies to has increased quite a bit in the last 5-10 years.</p>
<p>Another 5-7% comes from a concerted effort on the part of UChicago that started in the late 90s and is continuing veraciously today to improve UChicago’s image amongst undergraduate applicants. UChicago was in near crisis, practically unable to create a freshman class that held the standards they wanted in the 90s and had to do a lot of work fixing their image and advertising and a lot of their rise is due to a delayed effect. Most other schools were doing very well through the late 90s and into the 2000s but UChicago was working to buck a downward trend and is now seeing the delayed effects they would have seen had their image not need so much repairing.</p>
<p>This leaves about 2-5% of the effect. There are many things other than US News that could have caused this 2-5%. Heck, the fact that they had about 1/2 the applicants Brown had at the start of this growth period suggests there’s simply more room to grow and the ceiling is further away. That could account for quite a bit of this “gap”. Could some of it be USNews? Could be. But then we hit this “self-fulfilling prophesy” zone. Students were finally being attracted to UChicago again, that boosts its prominence, which in turn helps to boost its attractiveness. How much of this was actually in these application numbers is hard to say.</p>
<p>Interestingly, are students who are unable to analyze why and how these changes occur and that, in fact, a ranking difference such as the one UChicago has seen has very little to do with actual quality or perception, the students who are intelligent enough to be desirable at UChicago?</p>
<p>I’d argue that the small group that may exists which may apply to UChicago due to its ranking change are not the kind of students who are likely to get into top institutions anyway and so, in the end, it may have almost NO effect on the actual make up of the student body-- just create more work for admissions counselors.</p>
<p>Bottom line-- rankings at this level of minutiae means jack. A system like this is not only not particularly useful due to its methodology and design but also due to the complexity of the question which is not reflected at all in the minimal reported data.</p>
<p>And like slipper said, after HYP all the other Ivies are pretty much on the same level of difficulty to get into-- it depends on year, what the school is looking for that’s a bit different, etc.</p>
<p>Hmm, except for Cornell. That’s a step below, I’d say. In general, those kids didn’t get into any other Ivies, and are bitter as hell about it.</p>
<p>Don’t forget some people get accepted by other elite schools and rejected by Cornell.</p>
<p>Quite right, but that’s more of a fluke than indicative of selectivity. Tufts and Wash u will occasionally do the same.</p>
<p>Not too many people get into Brown from my daughter’s West Coast private school. First, not too many apply (however, her year 25% were accepted, that would be 2 out of 8) Most are pushed by parents who want the kid at Stanford. Harvard takes some, but they are not usually the best students, they are usually scholar/athletes who will be on team in college, and are quite down the rung from the best pure intellects at the school. The most unusual, oddball brainac types do apply and get into U Chi. But often the top students, including the Val and Sal, do not apply to HYP. They often go for the liberal arts engineering schools or LAC’s, and, of course, Stanford.</p>
<p>admissions is not representative of quality of students – i got rejected at oberlin, tufts, and deferred (transfer deferral) at WashU, and accepted at Brown, Penn, Vassar, and Swarthmore</p>
<p>I never understand why that stuff happens. Honestly, I would love to sit in on the admissions office’s discussions.</p>
<p>actually …Dartmouth is easier to get into than brown</p>
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<p>Alright, I was just bored and skimming through. Some seem to have a beef with Cornell, as they keep bringing it up, so I’ll just point out that it has many of the best programs in the nation for a number of disciplines, and amongst the best in many others. </p>
<p>Do I need to point out that it’s repeatedly ranked higher than Brown in many different rankings? No, I didn’t think so because that would be as worthless and immature as using acceptance rates to value a school (ahem… UChicago with its really high rate). Brown and Cornell are so fundamentally different, they are impossible to compare.</p>
<p>For example, Cornell has the best architecture school in the country, yet architecture students have the lowest average SAT scores in the university. Are they less intelligent? No. They just require a different type of intelligence. </p>
<p>Cornell should be respected for this progressive educational model that recognizes different types of intelligences for niche programs that attract specialized applicants, not repeatedly demeaned as if everyone at Cornell is inferior to everyone at Brown (or Harvard or Columbia or whatever school of the week is bashing it). </p>
<p>A lot of Cornell students went to the best program in their field in the world. I know I did. I’ve since studied at Harvard and realized very quickly I would have hated it and shortchanged my education. You should at least respect that. It’s this sort of elitist attitude from outsiders against students at places like Brown and Cornell that causes “bitterness”, not anything within. </p>
<p>I don’t want a debate. It’s just tiring seeing this perspective perpetuated without a second thought.</p>
<p>All of your points are valid, but in general the sentiment this conversation is correct.</p>
<p>excellent, applejack</p>
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<p>Well, perception and reality are two different things.</p>
<p>^agreeeeed.</p>