<p>No the gap is very, very small… they are all top universities. It is only on CC where people waste their time arguing that Harvard is better than Dartmouth, Duke, or Rice. Yes, there is a slight difference in prestige, but the actual education you will get at any of these top universities will be very similar.</p>
<p>^^are you saying that Penn isn’t prestigious? I definitely agree that many of the attacks on HYPSM in this thread are ridiculous and unfounded (like saying the teachers are terrible, the only reason someone would want to attend is b/c they are stuck up, etc.), but that doesn’t mean that the other (“lower”, as you would refer to them) ivies and other similar universities (Duke, Caltech, Chicago, etc.) aren’t great schools. I think the main factors that differentiates HYPSM and other schools are:
- Overall caliber of the student body - there are probably more (by a small margin, but still noticeable) unbelievably talented, amazing, bright individuals at these schools than at the other ivies (plus similar schools)
- Resources - it is a fact that these schools simply have a lot more money than other “peer” institutions.
- HYPSM have the best placement for (most) grad schools.</p>
<p>@ dan 92: I’m assuming you are directing your comments to iCalculus. But if not, I personally think Penn is prestigious and I have always considered it equal in prestige and education as HYPSM. </p>
<p>And, yes, I agree with you on the point all the lower Ivies and similar schools (i.e. Caltech, Duke, Rice, Vandy, Emory, WUSTL, Northwestern, Hopkins, Chicago, Notre Dame, CMU, UVA, etc.) are all great AMAZING schools that all have their unique quirks to them.</p>
<p>@slik nik - yes, I was commenting on iCalculus’ post. Sorry for the confusion - you snuck your post in right before I hit submit :)</p>
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<p>Actually, Berkeley is bashed in California. Asia overhypes Berkeley in its rankings. We Californians don’t overhype anything. Not even Stanford. When a person mentions he’s going to Stanford and another says he’s going to Duke or Dartmouth, they get the same “wows”. Now if a person says he’s going to HYP, he gets a big WOW. That’s a different story.</p>
<p>@JohnAdams: Thanks for the congrats. It was a tough decision between Caltech and Duke. I was so close to picking Duke, but eventually I picked Caltech because its closeby to my family.
They’re both prestigious and amazing in biomedical engineering/biotechnology.</p>
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<p>EXACTLY. I love this post. Finally a sensible post.</p>
<p>IBfootballer, well congratulations on choosing Tufts.</p>
<p>Tufts is a great school and one of these years might even crack the top 25 schools in the country (top 40 if you consider LAC’s also)</p>
<p>@JohnAdams12: how nice of you to congratulate someone and then mention their schools ranking. its maturity and humility at its finest.</p>
<p>It would be interesting to be a fly on the wall to see an employer look at a resume that contains an undergrad from Princeton (very nice!) and an MBA from Stanford (impressive!) and then discover that the person talks trash about “lower Ivies” and spends a lot of time trying to act as though small differences are really meaningful. What’s the whole point of attending elite, prestigious schools but not having any of the class that those schools exude rub off on you? Is arrogance “elite”? Is that actually an attractive quality either personally or professionally?</p>
<p>I’m really curious now. I’m especially in interested in JohnAdam’s input.</p>
<p>JohnAdams12: I honestly don’t know this…What are the major investment banks and consulting firms that don’t recruit at Northwestern?</p>
<p>You forgot Kellogg, but that’s ok – doesn’t really matter. It would be rather hard to attack kids for wanting to be doctors when I married one, and it would be rather hard to attack kids for wanting to be consultants when I am one. I have never attacked kids for wanting to be these things. I have little patience for the kinds of people who go around parsing tiny differences and proclaiming them to be meaningful. And I have little patience for the kinds of people who think that those handful of jobs are the primary or only measure of success. I have a richer definition of success than you do. You measure it by money and by the hushed intakes of breath you hope to get when you walk into a room and drop your alma mater’s name, because impressing other people is a core value of yours. I measure it by doing what you want to do and loving it, and by valuing education for its own sake, not because it will get you placement into Wall Street.</p>
<p>tk:</p>
<p>It will always be hard for a school with an undergraduate college of nursing to be ranked among the best three in the country. Eliminating that college would be a jerk move, but the students in it are probably never going top-three-in-the-country-worthy. I think it may have other less prestigious schools attached to it as well.</p>
<p>Edit: Although I would definitely rate it as the fourth-best Ivy as well.</p>
<p>I’m getting dizzy.</p>
<p>Upper lower, lower upper, sit, rise…Simon says stop.</p>
<p>I think this is why there really is (or should be) no distinction. They’re all Ivies. It’s like debating beluga vs. osetra vs. sterlet. At the end of the day, it’s all caviar.</p>
<p>You know that and I know it, chardo … It’s too bad that there really are grads …er, high school seniors … who think otherwise.</p>
<p>“My Speech and Debate coach who went to harvard says as a student she could not leave her blinds open in her windows because so many tourists would try to go up to the window and take pictures of her and her room thinking it was some magical paradise and she was some sort of deity.”</p>
<p>Extemp ---- Your speech & debate coach got into Harvard and she wasn’t smart enough to get a room above the ground floor?</p>
<p>Ok a two things here:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Caltech and the Wharton School at Penn I’d say are as close to HYPSM-lvl as a school can be</p></li>
<li><p>Who really cares tho?</p></li>
</ol>
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<p>I love Penn dearly (and hate Princeton strongly) but I don’t see this happening. Princeton is simply too entrenched. Human civilization will collapse before Penn can overtake Princeton in prestige (though it’s certainly not impossible that it can overtake it in actual academic and research quality)</p>
<p>Wharton is not a university, so it can’t be HYPSM level.</p>
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That’s a bit strong. After all, no one at one time thought Penn would make it up to #4 in the rankings yet it did. so who knows what will happen in the future.</p>