<p>I am just curious of the real basis of being ticked off if a school is called a Public Ivy. Is it because it is Public, and thus not in your definition as an Ivy? I.E. UVA, UMICH and UNCCH,. </p>
<p>Who cares what it is called. I do call UVA, UM and UNC as public Ivies because they are PUBLIC schools they do have different reqs, but the quality of the student is as high in caliber as an Ivy. Public universities are required to use IS and OOS as a factor in the school profile, private universities do not have this issue. Yet, at the end of the day the student stats are very close if not equal regarding acceptances.</p>
<p>I did chuckle about Rutgers because I was born and raised in NJ, and my family is still there, nobody from NJ would ever place Rutgers on par with UVA, UNCCH or UMich. Same with PSU.</p>
<p>If it makes you feel better start the trend and drop IVY all together, call them Tier 1, 2, 3. Most people who have children in college understand what you will mean by Tier 1.</p>
<p>The little three (as in little ivy) is a traditional (as in at least 100 years old) term for Williams, Amherst and Wesleyan. You may not like it, but it’s not of recent coinage.</p>
<p>They are also traditional football rivals, and the first game of college football was between Williams and Amherst, and at least one College Day (highlighting one football game each season) was broadcast from Williams.</p>
<p>And as an academic term I think some might find it useful. Williams was second only to Harvard in MA. It was opened in 1793.</p>
<p>“Yet, at the end of the day the student stats are very close if not equal regarding acceptances”</p>
<p>From everything I’m reading here and elsewhere, stats just get your application read at a true Ivy. What you have done beyond that (or what your parents have or haven’t done LOL), is what gets you accepted.</p>
<p>B&P I agree in part and until this generation came along I think that was the general thinking that if you had the money you went to a private college if you didn’t you went to your state school. While privates took pride in the caliber of their students so did schools like UofM and others and it’s still that way. You can look at the stats until you are blue in the face but there are many, many schools that have the same caliber of student. Two tenths of a GPA or a 100 pt. difference on the SAT or a 1 pt. difference on the ACT is hair splitting. </p>
<p>It is only recently that anyone paid much attention to distinctions and it is abit of a silly preoccupation as many of the young kids posting here will discover in a few years. If you work for a global company and get shipped to Asia your degree from UofM is going to mean much more to your Asian business associates than a degree from twenty other schools that are “ranked” higher in the US. It all depends on where you are going in life and no eighteen year old knows and no parent can predict the outcome. If people want to talk about public Ivies because of a long standing tradition of academic standards or because it is one of the oldest colleges in the US or because it has a huge preponderance of private high school educated students so what? I bet as a “group” we can’t even define what a public Ivy is or means.</p>
<p>What many of you are not getting is that “public Ivy” is a patronizing term because it denotes “Ivy” is the standard of excellence. If, in fact, the term could be expanded to mean generally all elite schools, then that’s fine. However, if the “Ivy” schools in question are only the 8 schools officially designated as such, you’re implying that only those 8 are the standard of excellence. For example, thinking of MIT as “near-Ivy” is ridiculous because everybody knows it’s better than actual Ivies. Or Stanford, Northwestern, or Duke for that matter. What the OP is saying is she doesn’t need you to label top public schools as “public Ivies” for their prestige to be validated.</p>
<p>Language is a social construction, it evolves and takes on different meaning over time. No one cares that Ivy League refers to a sports designation because over time it has morphed into a term to reflect “high calibre” educational institutions (rightly or wrongly). So “ivy” is short hand for “high calibre” and from there we get terms like lower ivy, public ivy and so on. </p>
<p>I find it more annoying that people get fixated on the use of a term, as if language is cut in stone and does not evolve. It always does. And the ‘meaning’ for a word or phrase is valid simply by it being widely shared and understood by others.</p>
<p>^^^No silly! Kudzu is Southern. So you’d have to have the Kudzu League consist of Southern schools. How about Vanderbilt, Emory & Duke for a start ;)?</p>
<p>RobD-
I suggested Kudzu b/c the list of “ivy-almosts” is growing like a weed… like kudzu. But I am leaning more towards the poison ivy league name/idea more :)</p>
<p>Someone, (I think it was frazzled1) liked the “window decal envy” league name, but I think that follow-up comment got lost with trimming of the flame war attack earlier today.</p>
<p>Correct me if I’m wrong, bit I think the term “ivy league” pre-dates the founding of the athletic conference of the same name. It referred to an image of colleges with traditional values and curricula, usually in the Northeast, and often with an all-male student body. It applied to Williams and Bowdoin as much as Harvard and Princeton. Then SOME of the ivy league (lower case) schools capitalized it and formally adopted it as the name of a sports league. If there are any pretentious pretenders here, it’s the 8 that have come to think they have exclusive rights to the term.</p>
<p>My D did really well on a test to get into honors placement in high school and the GC told us, “She could go to any Ivy, like Duke.” We rolled our eyes. How do you guys feel about “Harvard of the West” and “Harvard of the South”? Many, many years ago, I was in the Stanford book store and they had a crimson t-shirt with the Harvard seal on hte front with the words, “Harvard, the Stanford of the East.” I howled.</p>