Ivy League vs Northwestern

College Search & Selection
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@swagnation234 Recruited Athlete ?

Answer would really depend on your prospective major. Example : If economics I would pick Northwestern over majority of the Ivy’s.

So many variables, have you been accepted at these schools ? Location should come into play as well.

Edit: Would you pay $20k or $5k for Penn?

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So going to school for free at one of the world’s best colleges vs having to pay thousands at a school that is marginally, if at all, better?

This isn’t even a question.

OF COURSE, if you REALLY like the Ivy League school better, talk with your parents. However, for me this decision would be a no brainer.

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yeah at @PurpleTitan , This smells a little fishy…

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Are you suggesting that kids who are interested in “Ivy League” schools tend to be lazy ???

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I sometimes wonder how well those posters who use “Ivy” as a term for Ivy+ or elite privates do in admissions to Ivy+ schools compared to people who are accurate in their usage (as the OP was).

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@swagnation234

Among those 4 schools, the significant majority of students are going to choose Penn or Columbia (spit about 50%/50%). A few will choose Dartmouth and only occasionally will someone choose Northwestern.

The choice between Columbia and Penn may depend on a student’s preference for Columbia’s impressive, but rigid, core curriculum vs. Penn’s much more flexible, customizable curriculum. Dartmouth is a lot smaller and in a remote area no where near a major city, and beer pong is required.

The typical Northwestern student has academics and test scores that are comparable to the other three schools, but is often missing that something extra that would be needed for admission to the Ivies.

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@Much2learn: I don’t know what you’re basing your assessment on, but that “something extra” that you think is there, if it exists, doesn’t seem to lead to a different distribution of alumni achievements (when comparing NU with the lower Ivies).

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MODERATOR’S NOTE
The 2 person conversation about what is the Ivy League serves nothing to answer the original poster’s question. Move on please. The point/counterpoints have been left, but the last 6 “beating a dead horse” posts have been deleted.

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The missing something is an elevated sense of pretension and snobbery.

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@Much2learn So we are just introducing baseless “intangibles” into discussion now? lol

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“The missing something is an elevated sense of pretension and snobbery.”

The missing something is not a “baseless intangible” it is whatever it takes to get accepted by Penn or Columbia admissions. A lot of students from our high school with strong grades and test scores but lacking impressive ECs end up at Northwestern after getting rejected at Ivies. Maybe it was a state or national award, or a research project. Most often demonstrating a propensity to get involved and achieve something significant.

Again, theses are not big differences, and the specific major and fit may be important factors.

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@Much2learn: Ah, now I know the problem. You are drawing unfounded conclusions from a small regional sample size of anecdotal evidence. Penn (metro), Northwestern (metro), Cornell (specific in-state feeder HS’s), WashU (metro), Duke (state), UChicago (city), and even Harvard (city) have home city/state/metro biases. Penn and many others give a strong lift to legacies who apply ED (or just legacies; or just ED apps) as well. Under holistic admissions, there’s no level playing field anywhere. Go to the Philly burbs, and you’ll likely discover that not every Penn admit has impressive EC’s or done something significant. But you saw the little bit that you saw and then extrapolated that out.

The fact remains that when it comes to alumni achievements, NU is right there with the lower Ivies, so either the student bodies are comparable or whatever extra stuff adcoms select for don’t actually matter in the real world.

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So this really comes down to your own personal preferences. Despite what some of the people on this thread would have you believe, Penn and Columbia are indeed usually considered a notch above Northwestern and Dartmouth. But contrary to what a lot of 17 year olds think, that notch won’t really mean all that much at the end of your time there. Here’s where it will matter:

  1. If you MIGHT want to go into business, there is no better school to attend than Penn. Because of Penn's one university policy, students across Penn's four undergraduate colleges (The College, Wharton, Nursing, and Engineering) all have access to the same exact career services and thus have access to all of the best recruiters and opportunities in business. Top employers come to Penn as a consequence of Penn's preeminent business school and they end up recruiting at all four of Penn's undergrad schools. And it doesn't hurt that you can take classes, join clubs, and do research across Penn's four undergraduate schools and its numerous graduate and professional schools, allowing you to add experience at Wharton or Penn Law to your resume, bolstering your chances even more. This is important because some firms only recruit at Penn, Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford. (http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/brown-and-cornell-are-second-tier/27565) The research from that study actually came from a scholar at Northwestern ironically enough. Thus, attending Penn gives you access to recruiters that won't even look at a northwestern grad. And I can speak from personal experience on this matter- because I was a student in Penn's College of arts & sciences who was recruited to work at an organization that only recruited in a meaningful way at Harvard, Penn, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, and Princeton (there are others here to be sure, just not in any significant numbers).

From the article: “They meet hundreds of applicants at career fairs. Rather than scrutinizing anyone’s resume it’s easier just to limit the pool to the top three or four universities. Do you really want to pore over the transcript of that kid from the University of Michigan? Wouldn’t it be easier just to call the Harvard grad? In essence, what they’re assuming is that the admissions offices at the super-elite schools have already picked the best of the best. Why second guess them?”

Also from the article-- “Here’s what a top consultant had to say about M.I.T.: You will find it when you go to like career fairs or something and you know someone will show up and say, you know, “Hey, I didn’t go to HBS [Harvard Business School] but, you know, I am an engineer at M.I.T. and I heard about this fair and I wanted to come meet you in New York.” God bless him for the effort but, you know, it’s just not going to work.”

For the most elite circles of business, pedigree matters (whether or not that’s fair), and Penn has the connections, regardless of whether you’re an engineer or a whartonite, etc., to connect you to the most exclusive opportunities. And Penn publishes comprehensive career services data to back that up-- you can easily compare it to any other school willing to make their data public.

  1. Networking- People on college confidential just love being reductionist about the ivy league. At the end of the day, it's not just a sports conference, it's a networking opportunity. While you're still an undergrad, you will have a lot of interaction with the other Ivies by virtue of the fact that we kind of do everything together. Sure, our sports teams play one another and that's fun. But our student councils meet to discuss how they can work together. There is an Ivy League Latino conference. There is an ivy league inter-faith conference. There is a conference of first generation college students in the Ivy League. And the list goes on... Our student newspapers report on significant events at the other 7 schools. We participate in coordinated community service events. We host debate tournaments that are only for other ivy leaguers. Our literary societies host one another for intellectual discussions. Our secret societies and senior societies host mixers with each other. We go to each other's parties and spring flings. Our girlfriends and boyfriends and brothers and sisters and gender nonconforming family and friends all go to other ivies and broaden our networks so that when we leave college, we don't just know the kids we graduated with but we have a dense network of other HIGHLY motivated, accomplished and successful peers. It means that I can walk into any room of elite professionals in an American city (and many international ones) and be confident that I'll find someone there who went to Dartmouth or Princeton with whom I can bond over our shared ivy experience. It also means that any time I need an introduction to another professional, I am never more than one degree of separation from the person I'd like to meet because the network is so tight. And we don't stop building it after we graduate. Instead, the Ivy alumni clubs all have club houses within a few blocks of each other in Manhattan and they hold Inter-club events all the time (they do this in all of America's major cities as well and many international ones too- especially London). There are ivy-only career fairs and ivy only social mixers. There are even ivy-only speed dating opportunities. Your affiliation with the Ivy League opens doors that just can't be opened elsewhere. Going to any amazing college (like northwestern or georgetown) will open more doors than you can ever have time in your life to take advantage of; Going to an ivy opens those same doors and more.

In all honesty, an undergraduate education at Yale will be pretty similar in terms of quality to an undergraduate education at Vanderbilt. Your undergrad years and your success afterwards will genuinely be crafted almost exclusively by the effort you put into learning what you want to learn and doing what you want to do. But going to an Ivy (especially Penn, Princeton, Harvard, Columbia and Yale) will make your entrance into some of the most notoriously elitist and closed sectors of professional and social life that much easier. But if you don’t care about those things… well, then the significance of the ivy league ceases to matter when comparing them to Northwestern.

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I mostly agree with Alexandre’s assessment

Notch above: HYP, Columbia, Penn - Wharton
Same, but different: Dartmouth, Brown
Basically the same: Penn - Other, Northwestern, Cornell

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Northwestern is an academic powerhouse on par with (at least) Penn, Brown, Cornell and Dartmouth in terms of overall undergraduate academic strength – and in STEM they’re probably stronger than mighty Yale and Columbia (whose most impressive strengths lie elsewhere).

So yes, academically, Northwestern is quite comparable to the Ivies.

With that bit of Big Ten chest-thumping out of the way, I think that while it sounds like there will be about a $20k advantage for Northwestern over four years, if your family is comfortable paying the extra money for an Ivy – and if you feel that you are a better fit for one than you are for Northwestern – then by all means, choose the better fit. (that’s my standard advice when cost isn’t really a factor)

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Much2lean,

Whatever “intangible” you think Penn admits have seem to disappear in the college years; Penn students are no better than NU students in terms of winning external scholarships such as Fulbright or Goldwater. You have much to learn indeed.

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MODERATOR’S NOTE:
And for some reason, the side conversations that have nothing to do with the OP continue. Since the OP seems to have left the building, closing thread.