<p>Based on what I've read here and on other college review sites, let's see if I got this right...</p>
<p>From most liberal to most conservative:
1. Brown
2. Yale
3. Cornell
4. Columbia
5. Harvard
6. Penn
7. Princeton
8. Dartmouth</p>
<p>Comments?</p>
<p>Harvard is as liberal as Brown, from what I’ve heard. And so is Yale. Dartmouth is the most conservative in the bunch. </p>
<p>Harvard, Yale, Brown
Columbia, Penn, Cornell
Dartmouth</p>
<p>I would put Columbia as extremely liberal, up there with Brown and Yale. So just a slight modification to the OP’s…</p>
<ol>
<li>Brown</li>
<li>Columbia</li>
<li>Yale</li>
<li>Cornell</li>
<li>Harvard</li>
<li>Penn</li>
<li>Princeton</li>
<li>Dartmouth</li>
</ol>
<p>The overall vibe at all the Ivys is pretty liberal, but each also has politically conseervative groups. Dartmouth, like the others, is generally liberal but is known for having a particularly vocal small conservative group that publishes its own sometimes inflammatory political newpaper.</p>
<p>A liberalizing of social - if not political - viewpoints is a typical correlate with higher levels of intelligence and education, so it would be surprising if the Ivies did not generate a good deal of liberal thought. I wouldn’t split hairs among which Ivies might exhibit that tendency more than others:</p>
<p>"(A) study, published in the March 2010 issue of the peer-reviewed scientific journal Social Psychology Quarterly, advances a new theory to explain why people form particular preferences and values. . . . “General intelligence, the ability to think and reason, endowed our ancestors with advantages in solving evolutionarily novel problems for which they did not have innate solutions,” says Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science. “As a result, more intelligent people are more likely to recognize and understand such novel entities and situations than less intelligent people, and some of these entities and situations are preferences, values, and lifestyles.”</p>
<p>"Kanazawa argues that humans are evolutionarily designed to be conservative, caring mostly about their family and friends, and being liberal, caring about an indefinite number of genetically unrelated strangers they never meet or interact with, is evolutionarily novel. So more intelligent children may be more likely to grow up to be liberals.</p>
<p>“Data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health support Kanazawa’s hypothesis. Young adults who subjectively identify themselves as “very liberal” have an average IQ of 106 during adolescence while those who identify themselves as “very conservative” have an average IQ of 95 during adolescence.”</p>
<p>Here’s my impressions based on what I heard from friends who attended for undergrad and/or grad school and being on some of their campuses for classes and visits for friends and conferences:</p>
<ol>
<li>Brown </li>
<li>Harvard</li>
<li>Cornell (Despite its seeming pre-professionalism, dozens of politically moderate Cornell alum friends and relatives said the campus is much more liberal than most people would think…though this was from the '90s so I don’t know if that still holds.)</li>
<li>Penn (Several Penn alums I’ve known said the political culture tends to the center…and most were Wharton kids who are politically conservative/libertarian themselves)</li>
<li>Columbia (Contrary to what some have said, Columbia IME tends to be middle of the road…lots of liberals but also lots of conservatives…especially a large group of libertarians.)</li>
<li>Yale (My Yale alum uncle and some high school friends said most students tended to be apolitical with the exceptions of the vocal political activists on both the right and the left. From all that, I’m thinking Yale is middle of the road like Penn and Columbia).</li>
<li>Dartmouth </li>
<li>Princeton</li>
</ol>
<p>so i think we can all agree that this is the general outline:</p>
<ol>
<li>Brown
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.</li>
<li>Princeton/Dartmouth</li>
<li>Princeton/Dartmouth</li>
</ol>
<p>I’d say:</p>
<p>1) Brown
2) Yale
3) Cornell = Columbia = Harvard
6) Penn
7) Dartmouth
8) Princeton</p>
<p>You guys are foolish people. So foolish that I can’t even begin to comprehend your foolishness.</p>
<p>Student body is pretty much THE SAME in all these schools. If I magically switched the student body between Columbia and UPenn, no one would notice.</p>
<p>The reason why Dartmouth has such a vocal conservative group is because its small. They do have a say. I’m sure the same people exist in Harvard. They can’t be vocal because they’re an extreme minority.</p>
<p>I hate useless threads. Then again I should hate myself for ever commenting here. Can’t students think of better things to do in spare time?</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>No, I do not agree to that outline at all. I have one daughter who went to Harvard and another who went to Dartmouth. And I can see no significant difference politically between the two schools. Both are very liberal.</p>
<p>You’d have to slice the baloney pretty thin to draw much of a liberal/conservative distinction between the eight Ivy schools. A more accurate would be:</p>
<ol>
<li> All eight Ivy League Schools
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.</li>
</ol>
<p>^^i don’t understand your logic here: you seem to be saying dartmouth is seen as more conservative because the conservatives are louder because at other schools they’re a minority. if conservatives are less of a minority at dartmouth, how does that not make dartmouth a more conservative school?</p>
<p>Brown
Columbia
Harvard, Yale, Cornell,
UPenn (Wharton isn’t as conservative as some bschools, but it’s conservative)
Princeton
Dartmouth</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>Because Dartmouth’s alleged conservatism is a lot more apparent than it is real. Conservatives are not less of a minority at Dartmouth. They are a small minority at both Harvard and Dartmouth. Any political conservative is going to be pretty disappointed with Dartmouth if they enroll there with the expectation that they are going to be attending a relatively conservative school.</p>
<p>About 5 years ago Dartmouth’s loud and deliberately-provocative conservative group got more publicity for itself than did the conservative group at Harvard, even though both groups are pretty conservative. And both schools, overall, are hugely predominantly liberal. Two or three loudmouths on either side of the political spectrum cannot define the whole political vibe of a campus of thousands of students. And in the last 2 or 3 years Dartmouth’s conservatives have generated a lot less publicity for themselves - probably because one or two key leaders graduated and their replacements are more low key, like the conservatives at Harvard.</p>
<p>At least on average, social liberalism is really well correlated with income/education, so you’ll find that all of the Ivies are socially liberal. On the other hand, there are a lot of well educated libertarians at places like U Chicago. </p>
<p>So really, you won’t find many conservatives at these schools, but you’ll find a real libertarian minority.</p>
<p>This thread seems to be mixing up social/cultural liberalism with political/economic liberalism. I believe the consensus is that all of the Ivy League schools are liberal on social/cultural issues. However, I thought the OP was asking more about the positions of the students on political/economic issues, e.g. tax policy, privatization, SS and Medicare, the right to healthcare, corporate personhood, Citizens United ruling, MIC and national security state, environmental protection, etc…</p>