<p>
</p>
<p>This rings true for undergraduate education.
There’s a ‘halo effect’ at places like Harvard & Berkeley
whereby their stellar graduate programs affect peoples’
perceptions of the university as a whole. </p>
<p>It’s also true that this is an inane thread.
It can be closed now ;)</p>
<p>PS: Why do people now insist on saying “UPenn” instead of “Penn”? For generations Penn was called Penn and only fools confused it with PSU.</p>
<ol>
<li>Yale</li>
<li>Harvard</li>
<li>Princeton</li>
<li>Penn</li>
<li>Columbia</li>
<li>Dartmouth</li>
<li>Cornell</li>
<li>Brown</li>
</ol>
<p>Why is everyone ranking Penn so high?</p>
<ol>
<li>Harvard</li>
<li>Princeton</li>
<li>Yale</li>
<li>Columbia
5/6. Dartmouth/Brown</li>
<li>Penn</li>
<li>Cornell</li>
</ol>
<p>Thanks for the “Penns” … much better 
</p>
<p>I just realized, a bit OT but who cares, people now also say “UChicago” instead of “Chicago” and “UCBerkeley” instead of just “Berkeley” as they used to. NOT an improvement! </p>
<p>No one who knows anything will ever misconstrue “Penn”, “Chicago”, or “Berkeley”. That is all ;)</p>
<p>^agreed…it’s almost embarrassing that students at penn, chicago, and berkely are using slight derivations in the name to garner more respect…for crying out loud penn and chicago are top five schools. </p>
<ol>
<li>Princeton</li>
<li>Harvard</li>
<li>Yale</li>
<li>Penn</li>
<li>Dartmouth</li>
<li>Columbia</li>
<li>Cornell</li>
<li>Brown</li>
</ol>
<p>For undergraduate education…</p>
<ol>
<li>Princeton</li>
<li>Yale</li>
<li>Harvard</li>
<li>Columbia</li>
<li>Dartmouth</li>
<li>Brown</li>
<li>Penn</li>
<li>Cornell</li>
</ol>
<p>Here’s a fairly impressive guy who went to Penn. One wonders what he could have been had he got into HYP…</p>
<p>Elon Musk (born June 28, 1971) is a South African-born American business magnate, engineer and inventor. He is best known for co-founding SpaceX, Tesla Motors and X.com, which later became Paypal after acquiring the service. He is currently the CEO and Chief Designer of SpaceX, CEO and Product Architect of Tesla Motors and Chairman of SolarCity. While at those companies, Musk co-designed the first viable electric car of the modern era[5], the Tesla Roadster, a private successor to the Space Shuttle, Falcon 9/Dragon, and the world’s largest Internet payment system, PayPal.</p>
<p>Net worth:
$2 billion (2012)</p>
<p>There are many successful people who did not attend Ivy Leagues schools at all, let alone HYPSM…In fact, most Fortune 500 CEOs, top NASA scientists, etc did not attend “top” colleges. I had several friends who attended Harvard and looked at their 25th Reunion literature which publishes what classmates are doing…many Harvard grads have run of the mill jobs…they are not all “highly successful”</p>
<p>penn is ranked as #3 for having graduated the most CEOs of fortune 500 companies. Harvard is ranked #1.</p>
<ol>
<li> Harvard</li>
<li> Princeton</li>
<li> Penn</li>
<li> Yale</li>
<li> Columbia</li>
<li> Dartmouth</li>
<li> Brown</li>
<li> Cornell</li>
</ol>
<p>For undergrad:</p>
<ol>
<li>Princeton (biased)</li>
<li>Yale</li>
<li>Harvard</li>
<li>Dartmouth</li>
<li>Columbia</li>
<li>Brown</li>
<li>Penn</li>
<li>Cornell</li>
</ol>
<p>I found it interesting that high school students posting on these kind of fourms are truly mis-informed. Many are doing their ranking solely by admission rates but not looking at school size at all. Now if they took that into the factors:</p>
<p>2012 Admit Rate Freshmen Enrollment
<p>Assume Cornell just shrink their freshmen class size next year to be the size of Dartmouth (while it is 3:1), with similar number of applicants
next year Cornell’s admission rate will be 16.2%/3 =5.4%.</p>
<p>Reduce to the size of Brown and Cornell’s admission rate will be 16.2%/2.06 = 7.8%.
Reduce to the size of Columbia 16.2%/2.36 = 6.9%
Reduce to the size of Princeton 16.2%/2.54 = 6.38%
Reduce to the size of Yale 16.2%/2.54 = 6.38%</p>
<p>If you take freshmen class size into consideration, your ranking based on admission rates will change dramatically. (try calculating for Penn and you will see the same pattern)</p>
<p>These schools are all amazing schools and they are about equal academically, but they are different in their strength.</p>
<p>The University of Michigan has 39,500 applicants. The acceptance rate is 41%. Assume Michigan just shrink their freshmen class size next year to be the size of Dartmouth (while it is 14:1), with similar number of applicants next year Michigan’s admission rate will be 41%/14 =2.93%</p>
<p>Does this mean Michigan is more selective than every Ivy League university?</p>
<p>Somewhere there may be a flaw in this logic. Does the size of the alumni body influence the number of applicants? Does the number of students attending a university influence students from their high school to apply? Does the publicity of major sports influence applicants?</p>
<p>Hopefully, this thread will die a natural death.</p>
<p>Ranking the “ivies” without consideration of other (equivalent and sometimes better) colleges and universities is like ranking best Detroit cars to the exclusion of aston martin, ferrari, etc. Here is a more imaginative ranking (Princeton #2 after Williams College): [America’s</a> Top Colleges - Forbes](<a href=“http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelnoer/2011/08/03/americas-top-colleges/]America’s”>America's Top Colleges)</p>
<p>^forbes does not base their rankings solely off academics but rather many other factors such as financial aid, data from ratemyprofessor, and payscale. Both payscale and ratemyprofessor are “data” collected from student surveys and hence should not be considered objective data but rather personal opinions. </p>
<p>That being said the forbes list cannot conclude that Princeton is ACADEMICALLY superior to any of the ivys. Princeton may have the best financial aid package (and hence such a high ranking) though which is irrelevant in regards to academic strength.</p>
<p>Yale is third among HYP?
I thought it was second… I dunno. I know a lot of people who got accepted to Harvard and Princeton, but rejected from Yale so…</p>
<p>Again, ranking “ivies” (an athletic league) as though nothing else exists is fatuous. As an educator (and product of two ivies, including the big “H”), I would rank a few of the ivies (perhaps 3) in the top 10 undergraduate colleges in the U.S., but some of the others perhaps in the top 25. Sorry, but several unnamed ivies are not in the same undergraduate academic league as Swarthmore, Amherst, U. Chicago, Stanford, etc.</p>
<p>PtonAlumnus
You probably made a mistake by using number of applicants, I was using number of freshman enrolled. For U. of Michigan the number of freshman enrolled is 5,211. (see section C1)
<a href=“Office of Budget and Planning”>Office of Budget and Planning;
<p>Using Dartmouth’s size to calculate, U Mich will have 41%/
(5211/1100) = 8.65%
Not bad at all and U of Michigan is always regarded as a great school.</p>
<p>^from personal experience michigan is not that hard to get into. It is regarded as a good school but, no matter how you play with the numbers, it is not as selective as an ivy or JHU, Duke, chicago, stanford, MIT, cal tech…</p>
<p>^ agreed.</p>
<p>Top schools still have basically lower “adjusted” admit rates than U. of Michigan.</p>
<p>School |2012 Adm Rate | Freshman Class Size | Based on size 1100 | Adjusted Adm Rate
Harvard: 5.9% ~1700 (1.55:1) 3.81%
Yale: 6.8% ~1300 (1.18:1) 5.76%
Princeton: 7.9% ~1300 (1.18:1) 5.76%
Columbia: 7.4% ~1400 (1.27:1) 5.83%
Dartmouth: 9.4% ~1100 (1:1) 9.4%
Brown: 9.6% ~1600 (1.45:1) 6.62%
Penn: 12.3% ~2500 (2.27:1) 5.42%
Cornell: 16.2% ~3300 (3:1) 5.40%</p>
<p>I don’t have other top schools info. on the list but top schools like JHU, Duke, chicago, stanford, MIT, … seems to have similar situation.</p>