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<p>So I take it that you weren’t one of those Cornell students who were friendly, down-to-earth, respectful of others, and not an elitist?</p>
<p>I know that I will spend the rest of my life being thankful that I chose otherwise – yes, I had the choice and chose otherwise. I loved where I went to school and I didn’t run the risk that I would ever have to suffer you and your distorted version of “down-to-earth friendliness and respectful non-elitism.”</p>
<p>–K9Leader</p>
<p>PizzaGirl:
Mine was William & Mary instead of Penn. And I don’t want this to be taken as a slight on Penn – I still think it is a great school. My son even considered it before deciding to go to . . . William & Mary.
–K9Leader</p>
<p>The reality is that there are going to be some snobby people at the ivies, and there will be some very down to earth people at the ivies as well. In fact, i guess this trait is not exclusive to only ivies, but this applies to any other top schools, such as Duke, Stanford, Northwestern, U of Chicago, Georgetown, MIT, etc. But, I guess what collegehelp was saying, although I wouldn’t necessarily agree, is that the ivies might have an aura for sophistication, tradition, and other unique atmospheres due to these schools’ ages, buildings, locations, lack of focus on sports, tradition, etc.</p>
<p>The Ivies really are the best. They offer a wonderful environment for learning. There is a different feeling at the Ivies. If you visit, you will probably sense it. So, I would encourage the OP to visit. </p>
<p>And, yes, if you decide to attend an Ivy you won’t second-guess yourself. There is something to be said for that. </p>
<p>Speaking out truthfully about the desireability of an Ivy education is labeled elitist by those who can’t discern the difference. It isn’t elitist, it is a matter of appreciating the nuances of a superior education.</p>
<p>Yes, I’s say the aura stems from history, tradition, excellence, culture, attitude…a host of things. But, it stems from things that are substantial as well as intangible. And, the aura at a school has an effect on its students over time. Students absorb the “personality” of a school.</p>
<p>You shouldn’t underestimate the importance of intangibles.</p>
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<p>Is this a statement that someone admitted to (for example) Stanford and Dartmouth should in all cases prefer Dartmouth? Or that some admitted to MIT and Cornell should in all cases prefer Cornell? </p>
<p>I try to avoid ambiguity (or incredible statement) by saying that the exact list of eight colleges that constitute the sports conference known as the Ivy League are all indisputably fine colleges, and that there are other colleges (which mostly are in the formal “Ivy plus” group) that can truly be called “Ivy peer” colleges. For some applicants seeking some learning opportunities, some colleges not in the Ivy League are plainly better than some colleges not in the Ivy League. MIT would be an example of one such college, and Caltech is another, and Stanford is a third.</p>
<p>^ colleges like Stanford, MIT, Duke do not need to qualify themselves, their repute and quality are indisputable…strapping on terms like “ivy plus” or “ivy peer” or insisting that ppl mention them when they talk about ivies only serve to reinforce the idea that they are NOT ivies and that academic excellence is exclusive to the ivies</p>
<p>i find it strange that ppl construe statements like “Finally, if you actually attend an Ivy League school, you won’t have to spend the rest of your life wishing you had and trying to rationalize your choice to do otherwise.” and “ivies are the best” negatively and brand posters the elitist…these are merely views of posters who take pride in their colleges, just like Mr Hawkette, and as long as its not at the expense of denigrating other colleges (i.e. making stupid statements like other colleges suck, or ivies own everything else big time), i see no reason y such posts shud be construed in a negative light…it seems that many CCers have a serious allergy to ivy</p>
<p>The Ivies really are the best. They offer a wonderful environment for learning. There is a different feeling at the Ivies. If you visit, you will probably sense it. So, I would encourage the OP to visit. >></p>
<p>How is the feeling at the Ivies (and again I think it’s really weird to group, say, Dartmouth and Columbia together when their only shared experiences are excellent academics and an athletic conference) appreciably different from the other elite schools?</p>
<p>“The Ivies really are the best. They offer a wonderful environment for learning. There is a different feeling at the Ivies. If you visit, you will probably sense it. So, I would encourage the OP to visit.”</p>
<p>For absolutely everything? So, if I’m interested in journalism, I should go to an Ivy over Northwestern? If I’m interested in engineering, I should go to any old Ivy over MIT or Caltech? If I don’t want to be in the northeast for whatever reason, I should just get over it?</p>
<p>The Ivy League is not a division by itself; it is a mostly random subset of the top tier.</p>
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<p>I don’t take this viewpoint as negative as much as simply outdated. A nostalgic look into the past, perhaps, to a time when this was true. It simply no longer is. MIT, Stanford, Caltech, Chicago, NW are equal to some if not all of “The Ivies” and depending on the program, Duke, WashU, Rice, Vandy, Georgetown, Emory are peer institutions as well. Not to mention the research university powerhouses Berkeley, Michigan, UCLA — historic excellence and pride oozes from these institutions as well every bit as much as it does from some of the Ivies. </p>
<p>There has been a trickle down of student and faculty talent for years now that has nonIvy colleges on equal footing with Ivies, particularly the non-HYP universities. The concentration of high-level talent is simply not unique to the Ivies any longer and hasn’t been for some time. The euphoric feeling of having the privilege to learn amongst the best and brightest is available at many other institutions, not only at the Ivies.</p>
<p>Collegehelp, how toolish of you . . .</p>
<p>I think we’re done here.</p>
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<p>It’s an athletic league, no more. And it is in a division by itself. No other league features such high quality athletic competition with such little sacrifice in academic standards for athletes.</p>
<p>"Speaking out truthfully about the desireability of an Ivy education is labeled elitist by those who can’t discern the difference. It isn’t elitist, it is a matter of appreciating the nuances of a superior education.</p>
<p>Yes, I’s say the aura stems from history, tradition, excellence, culture, attitude…a host of things. But, it stems from things that are substantial as well as intangible. And, the aura at a school has an effect on its students over time. Students absorb the “personality” of a school."</p>
<p>So what makes the personalities of the Ivies uniformly better than the schools that Hawkette has referenced - essentially the other schools with similarly high academics? And why do you think those 8 schools have more similar personalities than the others? Like I said, if you took off the athletic division labels and just threw the top 20 or so schools into a pile and asked people to cluster them based on which ones were most similar / offered more similar experiences to one another, I *don’t think you’d wind up with the current Ivy League. I wouldn’t classify Brown and Dartmouth as offering similar experiences, for one, any more than I’d classify NU and MIT as offering similar experiences. However, none of these are *inferior experiences, just qualitatively different.</p>
<p>In fact, let’s do that. If you were taking the top 20 or so universities, removing athletic labels … the academics are all top-notch, so it’s just not a differentiator. How would you group them on the basis of similar campus feels / personality / experience? We know how you’d do it, Hawkette :-). Would be interested to hear how others would. Not RANK them, but GROUP them.</p>
<p>As regular participants on CC know, I tend to group colleges by their desirability to learners who may pursue mathematics or computer science as fields of study. I know a lot of young people in my town through my math-coaching activities, and several of them aspire to enroll at one college or another of the set </p>
<p>{Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, Caltech, U of Chicago, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon} </p>
<p>Many of those same students would also apply to less reachy colleges (or colleges with fewer graduate programs on campus) such as </p>
<p>{Harvey Mudd, Duke, Rice, Cornell, Brown, Michigan, UCLA, other state flagship universities} </p>
<p>Even showing just two “tiers,” as here, is highly debatable. I don’t claim these lists are exhaustive. I know of a math champion from my state who applied to and was admitted to Yale SCEA (eventually choosing to enroll at Williams), but that pattern of preference is not typical. There are a lot of good colleges with strong mathematics or computer science programs, and many of the students who have such study desires differ in other characteristics such that they don’t all prefer the same colleges. </p>
<p>As I wrote above, all eight of the differing colleges that happen to be in the Ivy League athletic conference are fine colleges, and it’s hard to go wrong by enrolling at any of them. On the other hand, their commonality consists mostly of being in the same athletic conference (and thus in the same region of the country) and several other colleges not in that athletic conference offer as much OR MORE than some of the Ivy League colleges do to particular students with particular interests.</p>
<p>The Ivies are more than an athletic conference. They share a common academic and social identity. I think you all know this.</p>
<p>The Ivies still have much more appeal today than the next 8 or 10 universities. It isn’t merely an historical fact. I think they collectively attract about 30% more applications per opening than the next 8 or 10 schools. There is a reason for this.</p>
<p>I am not trying to make anybody feel bad about their school. But, it isn’t right to mislead prospective students into thinking that the Ivies are less than what they really are.</p>
<p>So, I encourage you all to feel good about your school but give the Ivies the credit they deserve.</p>
<p>“The Ivies are more than an athletic conference. They share a common academic and social identity. I think you all know this.”</p>
<p>That doesn’t answer the question. What commonality – ASIDE from being in the same athletic conference, ASIDE from both being in the Northeast – makes (say) the Penn experience more similar to the Dartmouth experience than to the NU experience? Personally, if I were looking at those three schools, Penn and NU seem a heck of a lot more similar to one another in terms of student body and general campus experience and feel than do Penn and Dartmouth. Which is not dissing any of these schools whatsoever – but it’s silly then to claim that Penn and Dartmouth have some magical commonality of experience.</p>
<p>“The Ivies still have much more appeal today than the next 8 or 10 universities. It isn’t merely an historical fact. I think they collectively attract about 30% more applications per opening than the next 8 or 10 schools.”</p>
<p>That may be (I don’t know the stats, so I’ll trust you on this one). However, that doesn’t support your thesis that the 8 individual Ivies have a unique Ivy culture that is a) shared by all of them and b) dissimilar to all other elite schools.</p>
<p>It’s the Northeast location, and the growing sense of Ivy group consciousness.</p>
<p>The Ivies have a special bond with each other, as peers and competitors…perhaps as frenemaies.</p>
<p>Witness Ivy CrossCampus, IvyGateBlog, Ivy Council, etc.</p>
<p>It’s definitely not a shared culture (except for self-absorption). But it is a shared identity</p>
<p>Thanks - that’s a helpful delineation (shared identity vs shared culture).
Why do you think there is growing “Ivy group consciousness”?</p>
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<p>The revealed preferences working paper explicitly says otherwise, as you well know. What data set are you appealing to as a basis for your claim? </p>
<p>P.S. I’m not trying to make anyone feel bad about their alma mater either. But the OP expresses an interest, which perhaps need a bit more defining, in a certain category of colleges, and I’m trying to find out if the interest is truly in one athletic conference, or in colleges that are highly selective by high school grades or test scores, or in colleges that offer certain hard-to-find major subjects, or what.</p>