<p>Wow, this has become a pretty interesting, and actually USEFUL, conversation. :)</p>
<p>I’m now utterly confused. Was Brown the “4th most popular Ivy” when I applied? Has it been so since 1976? At my high school, which was a private prep/boarding school in the Boston area, this was certainly NOT the case. Penn/Columbia were considered “#4”, and Brown/Dartmouth fought it out for “not last place”.</p>
<p>Muerte - from what I know, various elite prep schools sometimes vary in their preferences for various elite colleges. For example, Collegiate school,one of the best prep schools in NYC, seems to have a strong preference for Brown:</p>
<p>[Collegiate</a> School ~ College Guidance](<a href=“http://www.collegiateschool.org/podium/default.aspx?t=114062]Collegiate”>http://www.collegiateschool.org/podium/default.aspx?t=114062)</p>
<p>On the other hand, Hopkins school, another top prep school in CT, seems to show no such preference for Brown or Dartmouth, and UPenn and Columbia tend to be more popular:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.hopkins.edu/academics/college/matriculation.asp[/url]”>http://www.hopkins.edu/academics/college/matriculation.asp</a></p>
<p>Again, top students from a Collegiate and Hopkins have a LOT of options. So the preferences at elite schools can just vary over time, and can be influenced by the types of kids that go to each of these schools, where the counselors have more pull, etc. So, just like many other prep schools, the preferences from your prep school may have been somewhat particular and somewhat idiosyncratic, and not representative of the general preference for Brown. </p>
<p>Generally, though, I think in terms of allure, the NYT article is right. If you go beyond the small circle of elite prep schools, Brown seems to be the ivy with the most cache in the minds of 18 year olds, and seems to appeal to their desires the most (and may have even hired an ad agency to do just this). </p>
<p>Again, if you go beyond the New England prep world, Brown would probably be the 4th most popular ivy, and the preferences ranking seems to indicate this too. Again, as we’ve discussed before, the preferences ranking probably doesn’t indicate prestige or rank, but rather, just what schools have the various factors that appeal the most to a range of 18 yr old kids. </p>
<p>From what I’ve found, Brown is very, very popular, and is perhaps only matched by Columbia for the non-HYP ivies. Of course, Columbia has location going for it, but in terms of matching up with what elite students want, Brown seems to have it.</p>
<p>On the other hand, Cue7, at the prestigious Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles, only home-town USC has been a more popular destination than Penn over the past 5 years:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.hw.com/students/usdeans/College/Profile.pdf[/url]”>http://www.hw.com/students/usdeans/College/Profile.pdf</a> (see page 4)</p>
<p>As I said before, I’d be really hesitant to draw any specific conclusions about the current relative national popularity of schools–and especially Penn–based on the decade-old sampling data that underlies the Revealed Preference Ranking. It’s been quite a momentous decade for Penn’s prestige and image, and when 10-year-old sampling data is involved, I think that all bets are off.</p>
<p>i really feel like we can wrap up this thread. it’s not bad to refuse Penn for Columbia, nor to refuse Columbia for Penn. they’re not just peers, they’re practically fraternal twins.</p>
<p>At my favorite Philadelphia-area private schools, I believe Brown is significantly more popular than Columbia or Dartmouth. (You can’t compare any of them to Penn here.) In my kids’ cohorts, in one class Brown got 16 ED apps (and Columbia 3 or 4, Dartmouth a couple); in one case, the kid with the best grades in the class (and a Presidential Scholar semifinalist = 1600 SATs) chose Brown over Stanford and Columbia. Dartmouth is sort of a niche product with huge appeal to some kids and none to others; Brown, in some circles (not all of them), is more popular than Princeton, and is really in a category of its own right behind HYP.</p>
<p>The onset of Brown’s meteoric popularity rise boiled down to two names: John Kennedy, Jr. and Amy Carter. You can’t underestimate the PR impact of having those two attend at around the same time.</p>
<p>Columbia = NYC and artistic/financial glamour. Georgetown = DC and federal government glamour. Both worth a lot of yield points. Cornell = all of the inconvenience and isolation of Dartmouth, with none of the intimacy, and tons of kids from Long Island. Cornell is ridiculously undervalued here.</p>
<p>45 percenter - my point is that the revealed preferences study, whether from 10 years ago or if conducted today, don’t really show much at all. They may show which schools are popular for 18 yr olds, but they’re not necessarily indicative of prestige or standing or anything like that. All they really show is that we don’t really know WHY students pick one school over another similarly situated school. </p>
<p>Between schools that aren’t similarly situated, like, say Lehigh and Penn, then sure, we can attribute penn winning the cross-admit battle as being a sign that is has a higher standing than lehigh. Between Penn and Columbia, though, if there are disparities in the cross-admit battle (as there was in the last study done), this has nothing to do with prestige or academic standing. We just don’t know why one may be more popular than the other, and it may have nothing to do with prestige. (Other factors such as location can be critical.)</p>
<p>^ Fully agree, Cue7.</p>
<p>And JHS, Brown was already the hottest non-HYP Ivy when you and I were undergrads (which I’m pretty sure was at the same time), years before JFK, Jr. and Amy Carter got there, although I’m sure their later presence didn’t hurt. As documented in the February 1, 1976 NY Times Magazine article to which I linked in post #37, above, Brown’s meteoric rise in popularity really occurred in the late '60s/early '70s.</p>
<p>I was always under the impression Brown became hot under the tenure of Vartan Gregorian</p>
<p>Dartmouth and Brown were easily one of the most coveted Ivies at my New England high school (one of the top prep schools in the country). Personally I’ve never understood the appeal of Columbia, NYC seems like a terrible place to go to college.</p>
<p>“all have roughly the same wealth and “prestige”: Columbia, Duke, Chicago, Penn, Dartmouth, and Brown”</p>
<p>In terms of per-capita:
MIT 770000 (for comparison)</p>
<p>Dartmouth 508000</p>
<p>UChicago 365000
Duke 364000</p>
<p>Penn 280000
Brown 243000
Columbia 215000</p>
<p>For prestige (as measured by admission rates), the Ivies have the advantage over any school except Stanford and the tech schools (MIT and Caltech).</p>
<p>
Nope. Brown was already the hot non-HYP Ivy–as the February 1976 NY Times Magazine article (and my own personal memory :)) indicates–by the mid-70s, when Vartan was Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (now SAS), and then Provost, at Penn. Gregorian left Penn in 1981 when he wasn’t chosen to succeed Martin Meyerson as President contrary to his–and many others’–expectations.</p>
<p>And he didn’t become President of Brown until 1989, long after its ascendance into hotness.</p>
<p>Well, my memory does not accord with yours, 45. At my high school, Dartmouth was clearly the standout non-HYP Ivy. Brown – like Penn (sorry), Columbia, and, yes, Stanford – was a place where smart B+ students went. Dartmouth got its share of A students, people who could go anywhere.</p>
<p>JHS, is that a case of your particular high school’s preference, or do you get the sense this was a more overarching theme during your high school days? </p>
<p>From what I can tell, the HYP ivies have always had a high degree of allure, and the various non-HYP ivies have shifted quite a bit in their popularity - perhaps during your HS days Dartmouth was in vogue, and a bit later, Brown rose.</p>
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<p>JHS, it’s not just my memory. The February 1, 1976 NY Times Magazine article, to which I linked above, confirms it:</p>
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<p>[THE</a> MISSING MIDDLE; ON CAMPUS Students are clamoring to go to Brown–o… - Free Preview - The New York Times](<a href=“http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F10C15FC3D5B177B8EDDA80894DA405B868BF1D3]THE”>http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F10C15FC3D5B177B8EDDA80894DA405B868BF1D3)</p>
<p>What better arbiter of such things than the NY Times Magazine? ;)</p>
<p>I actually have a vivid memory of when I first saw that article. It was at a dorm brunch that very Sunday in the Quad at Penn. Back then, the Quad was not just the preserve of freshmen, with quite a few upperclassmen also living in my dorm in the Upper Quad. Every Sunday it would be the responsibility of a different set of roommates or pair of students to prepare brunch for the entire dorm, which would be held in one of the larger rooms. There were several regular readers of the Sunday Times in the dorm (as there are no doubt many at Penn, today), and that article was a hot topic of conversation at the brunch on the Sunday when it first appeared. None of us doubted that Brown was, in fact, the hot school at the time, and I knew several people at Penn with friends or siblings at Brown.</p>
<p>In fact, it was BECAUSE Brown was already such a hot school that the likes of JFK, Jr., Amy Carter, the daughter of the Shah of Iran, and other high-profile celebrity children enrolled there in the '70s and '80s.</p>
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<p>Does that mean that no one from Philadelphia wants to go to Penn? Weird how regional these tastes are!</p>
<p>To the OP: keep in mind that the person who’s advocating the most for Penn in this thread is a Columbia (transfer) reject…</p>
<p>Muerte - no I think JHS meant the opposite. In Philly, student preferences are probably heavily skewed toward UPenn, primarily because of Penn’s home field advantage and its traditionally strong reputation with area schools. Also, if I’m not mistaken, UPenn is one of the few schools that has sort of a linkage program with its city - meaning, I believe Penn tries to take a certain number of kids (maybe a couple hundred) from the city of Philadelphia itself.</p>
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<p>Plenty of students at Penn come from the Philly area. My cousins live there and their high schools send a lot of their best to Penn. It’s just that Penn is so close to home that it loses its mythical allure. Some of the superstars don’t want to go where a lot of their classmates, including a fair number of mediocre faculty kids/legacies/donors, are already going. But to say that no one from Philly wants to go to Penn is false.</p>
<p>Tons of people in Philadelphia would want to go to Penn if only their grades would allow them - academics in public schools of Philadelphia are generally not so good. A number of people go to other schools because they can’t wait to leave Philly, but a big portion definitely do not mind staying in Philly for an Ivy. Around 30/120 students of my graduating class attends Penn every year, and we’re a high school in Philly. I know a number of friends from other schools in Philly who would’ve loved to apply to Penn if only their grades/SATs weren’t so low. Also note that Drexel, USP, and Temple all have a huge Philadelphian population. </p>
<p>muerteapablo: I think when JHS said that the amount of Philly area people applying to Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth, etc can’t be compared to Penn, he just meant that Philly people who apply to other Ivies/prestigiousschools also apply to Penn as a no brainer. (By “no brainer” I don’t mean it’s easy to get in, I mean that it’s almost automatic for qualified Philly students to apply to Penn.)</p>
<p>And Cue7 you are right, Penn does have some sort of deal with the city to take in a number of Philadelphia students. I already vaguely knew of this before, but my Penn interviewer reinforced it when he said Philadelphia students get an edge in being accepted to Penn, assuming they are qualified.</p>