<p>What makes the “Ivies” special is the combination of </p>
<ul>
<li>top-notch faculties across the board (or mostly)</li>
<li>primarily liberal arts / general education focus </li>
<li>attracting smart, ambitious, achieving students </li>
<li>history/tradition</li>
<li>prestige</li>
<li>alumni networks / connection to power elites</li>
<li>massive resources in terms of endowment, physical plant, financial aid</li>
</ul>
<p>No other universities (including Stanford, MIT, Chicago, Duke) can match the whole package at HYP. But lots of them have lots to offer in each of the categories, and depending on the category many of them have more to offer than many of the Ivies. It certainly isn’t the case that a rational student would prefer any of the Ivies to any non-Ivy, even if you exclude Stanford and MIT from consideration. (They make that proposition self-evident, but they aren’t any easier to get into than HYP.)</p>
<p>WindCloudUltra’s list is pretty good. Other private schools that belong on it are Washington University in St. Louis, Tufts, Brandeis, Caltech, Johns Hopkins, Vanderbilt, Georgetown, maybe USC and Notre Dame. Public universities would include UVa, UNC, also McGill and Toronto in Canada. (My older child’s BFF turned down Penn for McGill on economic grounds, had a great social and educational experience there, and is now weighing offers from the three tippy-top PhD programs in her field.) And lots of public universities now have very attractive honors programs, and Ivy-like strengths in particular departments. Also, lots of Ivy-quality candidates choose top LACs as their alternative. The HYPS equivalent is sometimes called SWAP – Swarthmore, Williams, Amherst, Pomona. Admission is very tough there – but on a Duke level, not a Harvard level. Other worthies include (but are not limited to) Wesleyan, Middlebury, Reed, Claremont-McKenna and Harvey Mudd, Carleton, Wellesley, Bowdoin, Oberlin, Grinnell, Haverford, Vassar . . . and the list goes on.</p>
<p>Every single place WCU and I have listed is a college that a student who would love Harvard could love. None offers the sheer range and volume of opportunity Harvard does (except for maybe Berkeley), but one student can’t even begin to take advantage of all that, and all of them offer plenty of dazzling choices, the chance to be world-class in something. None can quite match Harvard in the way that every other student you meet could knock your socks off with how great they are, but all of them have a critical mass of knock-your-socks-off types, and if you find your way into the right rooms you can have all the impressive peers you could ever hope for. Ivy admissions are not so perfect that they don’t leave hundreds, thousands of sensational kids to populate other colleges. You may have to work a little harder, take a little more responsibility for shaping your own experience, but that’s not such a bad thing.</p>