<p>I say (for undergrad): Yale/Princeton, Penn/Cornell/Columbia, Dartmouth, Harvard, Brown. Harvard shafts undergrads and Brown isn't a real school. Princeton and Yale are great schools with strong undergrad focuses. Penn and Cornell have the most to offer of any Ivy and add many dimensions to your education. Columbia is great with its Core and accessibility to the capital of the World. </p>
<p>Tradition says: HYP/Wharton, Columbia, Brown/Dartmouth, Penn/Cornell. This is a prestige ranking. Penn and Cornell have higher acceptance rates which hurt its prestige. HYP are HYP. The other 3 are very good schools, but are more selective than Cornell and Penn, so they're considered "more prestigious."</p>
<p>Hmmm...Brown isn't a real school? (Big sigh here..) I will not even bother with the rest of your ASSholy ASSumptions, "from person to person". It is just not worth it.</p>
<p>The Brown thing is a joke and my personal rankings are my biased uneducated opinions. Deal with it. </p>
<p>The traditional rankings are pretty accurate though in terms of Ivy prestige. Maybe I should have separated H and Wharton from P and Y, but really, you can't argue with that ranking (except maybe mixing up the middle 3).</p>
What the deuce? Columbia and Dartmouth both are ranked #9.</p>
<p>Penn also participates in some questionable yield "protection" activities such as filling half of the class with ED admits, admitting only students who have demonstrated STRONG interest, AND founding "honors" programs (BFS, JWS, LSM, Huntsman, M&T, University Scholars, etc.) left, right, and center to attract top candidates from its peer schools (past evidence has shown that most students still opt for HYP over penn even when they are offered a spot in such honors sections). Penn realizes that the only real unique aspect of the undergrad experience it could offer is the Wharton school, and is sucking all the blood it could out of the poor thing- all three joint-degree programs at penn is paired with Wharton. </p>
<p>Even with all this said and done, Penn cannot even beat Dartmouth at winning its crossadmits despite the fact that it has a 17% higher published yield than the latter.</p>
<p>Also, the link Dionysus gave shows that Penn vs Dartmouth for Yield D gets 54% of crossadmits. IMO, that's pretty close to even. Compared to HYPSM which each get nearly 90% of crossadmits with Penn, it's pretty different. Brown is the next closest with 77% of crossadmits with Penn, and Columbia with 59%. Aside from HYPSM and Brown, Penn does fairly well with crossadmits compared to other top schools.</p>
<p>according to the link venkat posted, penn used to be the underdog but has made the greatest leap. so it shows that penn has been improving while dartmouth has remained stagnant and well below penn's rating.</p>
<p>Looking at the whole trend, Penn made one giant jump. USNWR tries to maintain some consistency, so thats why HP have been #1 and Y 3. One year Caltech became #1 from #9 (I agree with that year the most personally) which is a much bigger deal than Penn jumping from 13 to 7 (especially since we maintain our top 10 status).</p>
<p>prestige is mostly determined by perceived difficulty to get in. for most of the people in the real world (outside of school) dartmouth wins hands down.</p>
<p>penn was at the bottom of the ivy pecking order for decades and hasn't really shaken that reputation despite the climb in USNWR during recent years.</p>
<p>penn also suffers from having an enormous student body and relatively small endowment. the endowment/student ratio is the lowest in the ivy league. by contrast dartmouth has a very robust endowment for a small student body.</p>
<p>Using cross admit numbers is ridculous here. Dartmouth has probably the most self-selecting applicant pool of any ivy, because it is HANOVER, NH. You have to really want to be there to even apply in the first place. Penn on the other hand, is in an urban area and receives many 'shotgun' approach applicants, and yet still maintains good yield and only loses to dartmouth in that older cross-admit chart by a measley 4%.</p>
<p>FWIW, when they use to break down admission statistics by the individual undergraduate schools within Penn, Wharton's yield was always extremely high--in the Harvard/Yale range.</p>
<p>dcircle...endowment means next to nothing, since spending money is not taken out of the endowment. It comes out of the operating budget, of which Penn has the largest of any school in the Ivy League, > $4 billion per year.</p>
<p>And anyway, in the last year and a half, Penn's endowment has grown by about $1.5 billion, and just recently crossed the $6 billion mark.</p>
<p>Quake, any school can claim to have an operating budget of the size of its endowment and then some, but that doesn't mean it will dig into it to feed the students. I do agree though that if anything, Penn is a powerhouse in fundraising. </p>
<p>Phillysaser, Dartmouth only requires a general essay while Penn asks for a why penn in addition to that. If anything it would be more of a hassle to apply to Penn. It is not that rare for students to apply to all of the Ivies to see which ones they could get in anymore- no one takes school selection seriously until after he or she gets in.</p>