<p>This thread is such a mess.</p>
<p>To the OP: YES. Hopkins is as good as any of the non-HYP ivies in many ways. Not all schools at the top are perfectly balanced, but the fact that they surpass each other in various fronts helps make them that much more roundly equal.
For example, I could easily say that a student who wanted to study Biology, BME, Neuroscience, and/or wanted to get research experience and/or work with the top doctors/scientists will find no better school to pick than Johns Hopkins. The same can be said for aspiring writers, IR people, etc.
On the other hand, if business and economics is your thing, perhaps Dartmouth or UPenn would be a better option, though, once again, their econ departments aren’t exactly steps ahead of JHU’s (more like inches), while of course, their networking would be better.
Overall, all things considered, these schools are equal. You will not get a marked advantage over someone else in another peer school JUST because you went to the school. I have plenty of friends who went to Harvard even, and aren’t doing as well as I am, even though we have similarly high GPAs.
There are a LOT of cross admits between schools of this caliber and in the end, its up to the student to decide which schools they want to go to based on factors like location, faculty, financial aid, etc. The fact that JHU has a higher acceptance rate than Dartmouth or UPenn or Brown doesn’t make it a worse school, it just means its appeal is not as strong as that of the other three (as noticed by comparing yields, and due in large part to myths and/or Baltimore stereotyping), but even then, the difference is negligible as student statistical quality is similar or the same. For YEARS UChicago had an acceptance rate hovering from 70% to 45%, and yet everyone knew it was just as good as any of the other elite schools.</p>
<p>I will say, however, that amongst the non-hyp ivies, and factoring in schools like Duke, Georgetown, etc, JHU has one of the strongest faculties across the board, whether in english, IR, or the sciences. I would say judging on faculty alone, it is comparable to Columbia, UChicago and Cornell as being marginally higher than the other non-hypsmc (and berkeley) schools, though of course, the faculties at the other schools are great as well.</p>
<p>the “resources” thing really just depends on how you slice it. It might mean the school has less to spend on financial aid and recruiting, but JHU makes up a lot for this difference in operating expenses with federal research dollars to build labs, interest faculty etc (instead of depending on endowment). It’s annual expenses can rival or surpass just about any other school out there, and students get a lot of the benefits that come with these expenditures. Also, if you were smart, you would know that endowment doesn’t mean much because most of it is legally tied down and unusable regardless. I really didn’t know about this stark difference until I had the chance to work in a lab at another prestigious university and noticed how much less advanced it was compared to the lab I dissected drosophila in at the JHU undergrad campus.</p>
<p>and sorry for hurting any poor aspiring dartmouth or upenny high-schoolers feelings, but this is the truth, and you’ll realize this when you start competing for positions in grad schools and no one bats an eye that you graduated from so-and-so school because there are a hundred other equally qualified people from schools that are considered just as good if not better.</p>