<p>These lists come out every so often, and to be honest, I don't think they say much. Basically they look at the U.S. News and Wold Report and pick colleges out of the Top 50 (in universities and LAC lists)... and which ones they choose mean fairly little. Because, to be honest, any college in the Top 50 is a pretty good school and could probably find justification to be named a "new Ivy." But why do you have to be classified a new Ivy? These schools don't need such a classification to be awesome schools - and smart applicants will see that, even without these lists.</p>
<p>NYU and CMU MOST deserve the Ivies list.</p>
<p>They are both well rounded schools with the best business next to Wharton, engineering, science, drama/music that both compete with Juilliard, and other majors that are in the top of their field.</p>
<p>Asides from being well rounded, NYU was the #1 dream school and CMU received a 20% increase in applications. </p>
<p>OBVIOUSLY THESE SCHOOLS DESERVE THE BEST IVIES LIST as many students are picking them over other top schools. With more top students and a well rounded education I can think of no better criteria for a "new" Ivy.</p>
<p>Very frustrating thread. Because of omission.</p>
<p>The authors chose to list the most established "academic powerhouse" schools of a "generation ago" as their "such as" schools. Who were they, a generation ago? The Ivys and Stanford, the University of Chicago, MIT and Caltech. A generation ago, one could argue that Duke, Northwestern, Hopkins and probably Georgetown were the "new ivy's." These schools have since become well established as top academic schools. If one is going to pick the "new ivy's" of our generation, you would not include these schools.</p>
<p>Berkeley, I would argue, was omitted as one of the most established "academic powerhouse" schools of a "generation ago" because it is a public school and from an attendance standpoint has never been quite as selective as the privates. So the authors "omitted" Berkeley probably from this impact standpoint for the statement they were writing. For the Newsweek piece, Berkeley clearly cannot be a "new ivy" but don't tell me it is not better than North Carolina. And if Michigan and North Carolina are "new ivys" than Berkeley clearly should be an "old ivy."</p>
<p>But again, the phrase "such as" is not meant to be all-inclusive. Where would we be if the statement were, "academic powerhouses SUCH AS Yale, Cornell, Penn, Columbia, Brown, the University of Chicago, and Caltech?" Would we be saying the big losers were Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford? I'm sure, after reading this thread, some of us would.</p>
<p>I think if the authors had chosen to really wrote down their train of thinking (and not to omit anything) the passage would have read:</p>
<p>"A generation ago, elite schools were a clearly defined group: the eight schools in the Ivy League, along with such academic powerhouses as Stanford, the University of Chicago, MIT, Caltech and Berkeley." The up and coming "new ivys" of a generation ago, were Duke, Northwestern, Hopkins and Georgetown. Today these schools are well established as academic powerhouses and we have a new generation of "new ivys."</p>
<p>The same argument could be had about Wellesley, Carleton and Haverford as the "new ivys" of a "generation ago" but are clearly established as top LACs today.</p>
<p>Or again,"such as" and "like" are not meant to be all-inclusive.</p>
<p>The Big Losers in all of this? The American public who need everything spelled out in "exact" lists without omissions because they cannot read between the lines. If you went to a school such as Stanford, Princeton, Yale and MIT, and it happened to be Harvard, I wouldn't feel bad that it wasn't included in the list of Stanford, Princeton, Yale and MIT. But then again, if this statement was from Newsweek, than someone would be wondering why was Harvard omitted and that it may not be as good a school as they thought and what then is really wrong with Harvard and it is a big loser.</p>
<p>Werner, if you look back through this thread, I have made many posts trying to clarify the same points you are making. About 90% of the posters failed to grasp the nuances of the article. Their failure to read "between the lines" and pick up on things like "such as" has me shaking my head. All I can assume is that the schools today are so focused on making students feel good, showing them how to make money on Wall Street, and how to put on a condom that they have skipped the part about reading carefully and critically, and seeing things that AREN'T ON THE SURFACE. The poster named Eli had a beautifully written an insightful post...and of course he is old school.</p>
<p>EXCELLENT ARTICLE ON RANKINGS FROM NY TIMES</p>
<p>David Leonhardt
Rank Colleges, but Rank Them Right </p>
<p>Published: August 16, 2006
EARLY this morning, U.S. News & World Report will send e-mail messages to hundreds of college administrators, giving them an advance peek at the magazine’s annual college ranking. They will find out whether Princeton will be at the top of the list for the seventh straight year, whether Emory can break into the top 15 and where their own university ranks. The administrators must agree to keep the information to themselves until Friday at midnight, when the list goes live on the U.S. News Web site, but the e-mail message gives them a couple of days to prepare a response.</p>
<p>By now, 23 years after U.S. News got into this game, the responses have become pretty predictable. Disappointed college officials dismiss the ranking as being beneath the lofty aims of a university, while administrators pleased with their status order new marketing materials bragging about it — and then tell anyone who asks that, obviously, they realize the ranking is beneath the lofty aims of a university. </p>
<p>There are indeed some silly aspects to the U.S. News franchise and its many imitators. The largest part of a university’s U.S. News score, for instance, is based on a survey of presidents, provosts and admissions deans, most of whom have never sat in a class at the colleges they’re judging.</p>
<p>That’s made it easy to dismiss all the efforts to rate colleges as the product of a status-obsessed society with a need to turn everything, even learning, into a competition. As Richard R. Beeman, a historian and former dean at the University of Pennsylvania, has argued, “The very idea that universities with very different institutional cultures and program priorities can be compared, and that the resulting rankings can be useful to students, is highly problematic.”</p>
<p>Of course, the same argument could be made about students. They come from different cultures, they learn in different ways and no one-dimensional scoring system can ever fully capture how well they have mastered a subject. Yet colleges go on giving grades, drawing fine lines that determine who is summa cum laude and bestowing graduation prizes — all for good reason.</p>
<p>HUMAN beings do a better job of just about anything when their performance is evaluated and they are held accountable for it. You can’t manage what you don’t measure, as the management adage says, and because higher education is by all accounts critical to the country’s economic future, it sure seems to be deserving of rigorous measurement. </p>
<p>So do we spend too much time worrying about college rankings? Or not nearly enough?</p>
<p>Not so long ago, college administrators could respond that they seemed to be doing just fine. American universities have long attracted talented students from other continents, and this country’s population was once the most educated in the world. </p>
<p>But it isn’t anymore. Today the United States ranks ninth among industrialized nations in higher-education attainment, in large measure because only 53 percent of students who enter college emerge with a bachelor’s degree, according to census data. And those who don’t finish pay an enormous price. For every $1 earned by a college graduate, someone leaving before obtaining a four-year degree earns only 67 cents. </p>
<p>Last week, in a report to the Education Department, a group called the Commission on the Future of Higher Education bluntly pointed out the economic dangers of these trends. “What we have learned over the last year makes clear that American higher education has become what, in the business world, would be called a mature enterprise: increasingly risk-averse, at times self-satisfied, and unduly expensive,” it said. “To meet the challenges of the 21st century, higher education must change from a system primarily based on reputation to one based on performance.” </p>
<p>The report comes with a handful of recommendations — simplify financial aid, give more of it to low-income students, control university costs — but says they all depend on universities becoming more accountable. Tellingly, only one of the commission’s 19 members, who included executives from Boeing, I.B.M. and Microsoft and former university presidents, refused to sign the report: David Ward, president of the nation’s largest association of colleges and universities, the American Council on Education. But that’s to be expected. Many students don’t enjoy being graded, either. The task of grading colleges will fall to the federal government, which gives enough money to universities to demand accountability, and to private groups outside higher education.</p>
<p>“The degree of defensiveness that colleges have is unreasonable,” said Michael S. McPherson, a former president of Macalester College in Minnesota who now runs the Spencer Foundation in Chicago. “It’s just the usual resistance to having someone interfere with their own marketing efforts.”</p>
<p>The commission urged the Education Department to create an easily navigable Web site that allows comparisons of colleges based on their actual cost (not just list price), admissions data and meaningful graduation rates. (Right now, the statistics don’t distinguish between students who transfer and true dropouts.) Eventually, it said, the site should include data on “learning outcomes.”</p>
<p>Measuring how well students learn is incredibly difficult, but there are some worthy efforts being made. Researchers at Indiana University ask students around the country how they spend their time and how engaged they are in their education, while another group is measuring whether students become better writers and problem solvers during their college years. </p>
<p>As Mr. McPherson points out, all the yardsticks for universities have their drawbacks. Yet parents and students are clearly desperate for information. Without it, they turn to U.S. News, causing applications to jump at colleges that move up the ranking, even though some colleges that are highly ranked may not actually excel at making students smarter than they were upon arrival. To take one small example that’s highlighted in the current issue of Washington Monthly, Emory has an unimpressive graduation rate given the affluence and S.A.T. scores of its incoming freshmen.</p>
<p>When U.S. News started its ranking back in the 1980’s, universities released even less information about themselves than they do today. But the attention that the project received forced colleges to become a little more open. Imagine, then, what might happen if a big foundation or another magazine — or U.S. News — announced that it would rank schools based on how well they did on measures like the Indiana survey.</p>
<p>The elite universities would surely skip it, confident that they had nothing to gain, but there is a much larger group of colleges that can’t rest on a brand name. The ones that did well would be rewarded with applications from just the sort of students universities supposedly want — ones who are willing to keep an open mind and be persuaded by evidence.</p>
<p>collegeparent - I really can't see how Duke, Northwestern, and JHU could be considered losers here. They've already got excellent national reputations and are generally considered a tier above the schools included on the list.</p>
<p>I'm a little less sure about Georgetown, since I live near DC and have always had a bit of a skewed perception of its reputation. Considering they included schools like UVA, I think Gtown would have been an appropriate addition to the list. But it's surely no skin off anyone's back. Gtown, and all the other "excludees," will be just fine. :)</p>
<p>Why does everyone in here only talk about where A students in high school go to? In academics as in sports, as in life, there is such a thing as a late bloomer. I feel the Ivies and other elites sift these types out, to the benefit of lesser ranked schools.</p>
<p>collegeparent, I would agree with your assessment except wouldn't differentiate so extremely that BC is on "But we already knew that about them schools", while Vanderbilt is on the "Big Time Winners". These two seem pretty comparable to me or maybe even give the edge to Vanderbilt. You were the one to bring up the Brody ranking, where Vanderbilt is #39, while BC is not on there at all. Similarly, Haverford and W&L (other schools some posters claim the authors implicitly include in the ambiguous "such as" and were there all along) aren't on the Brody rankings either.</p>
<p>It will be interesting to see how Colgate and Skidmore do in growth in apps next year vs Vassar and Hamilton. Similarly, Bowdoin and Colby vs Bates and Davidson vs W&L. Unfortunately, creation of these types of lists seem to become self-fulfilling prophesies because of how they are followed.</p>
<p>The Newsweek article should have had the title 'A List of Other Pretty Decent Schools in Case You Can't Get Admitted to an Ivy League School or Another Top Academic School Since Getting Admitted to an Ivy League School Requires Not Only Top Grades and Test Scores, but That You Have a Hook in Your Admission Essay or Your Dad Went There or You Ran the 800 Meters in 1:50'. But that was too long for a title - sounds like an economics journal title. So they called them 'New Ivies', which was even stupider than having a title that would take up half the issue. Michigan could be a new Ivy if they had 20,000 fewer students. Geesh - they let these people write articles. Next thing you know, Bill O'Reilly will have his own talk show...</p>
<p>There are still only a handful of truly elite schools in the US regardless of this article.</p>
<p>The definition of elite can be debated so many different ways. When I was growing up, I considered any school that wasn't Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Brown, Stanford, Duke, MIT, CalTech, Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore not be a tier 1 school, but now see the folly in this. On xoxo, they consider anything that isn't Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, CalTech not tier 1. To me now, why should there be a definition for an elite school and why does there need to be an absolute cutoff anyway?</p>
<p>I'm not bothered by the fact that Georgetown is not on there. The only rankings I care about now concern NCAA Basketball 2006-2007. Hoya Saxa.</p>
<p>And the rest of the title should have been 'And Did I Mention You Probably Can't Afford an Ivy League School, Anyway, Despite 'Need-Based Aid' and Even if You Could You'd Be Better Off Going to Grad School There Since That's a Better Investment So Here Are Some Alternatives, Some of Which Are Similarly Marginal Investments'. But let's just call it the New Ivies. As tlaktan says, Basketball Rankings are more important - Go Illini!</p>
<p>"When I was growing up, I considered any school that wasn't Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Brown, Stanford, Duke, MIT, CalTech, Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore"</p>
<p>... Brown?</p>
<p>Brown had much more stature a couple decades ago.</p>
<p>^^^I don't know about that. My public hs classmates from a couple of decades ago (class of '83 to be exact) got into Brown by the droves.</p>
<p>I meant relatively. Kids that were more comfortable in Providence in the 70s and 80s are opting for schools in cities that have since become much safer than they were then (think Penn, Columbia, NYU), and this has made Brown less competitive vis-a-vis such schools. The LACs are facing similar issues.</p>
<p>Why isn't William & Mary on the list???</p>
<p>William and Mary has been attracting top students for over 300 years, so it couldn't really be a "New" anything. It's been an Ivy alternative for generations, especially in the South.</p>