I have noticed that in the northeast, the private universities dominate completely and the state schools are decent but not excellent (SUNYs). On the other hand, in the Midwest and west, it seems that the public schools are much better (Umich, UIUC, UW, UCs). What is the reason for this? Is it funding? Or is it based on who was there first (ivies were founded before publics in the east)
Privates in the NE dominate what exactly?
I do not entirely agree with your Midwest generalization. What about the University of Chicago, Northwestern, Notre Dame, WU/StL, Vanderbilt (if you consider Nashville to be in the Midwest), and the many excellent LACs (Kenyon, Oberlin, and dozens more)?
No, the top privates are seen as better than the top flagship publics. It’s the same deal in California, Texas, and possibly Illinois, all of which have good to great flagships AND an outstanding private. I know few Californians who would argue that Berkeley is a better school than Stanford even though both are seen as outstanding. It’s just that in the Midwest and much of the West there’s a relative dearth of privates whose academic quality truly compares to the top two publics in each state. For instance, in Oklahoma, only the University of Tulsa can make a plausible case to be better than OU or OSU, and even then, that may only be true for a few engineering fields.
To the extent your premise is true, yes, these are basically differences of history and geography.
All the “Colonial Colleges” (including the 8 Ivies minus Cornell) were founded about 100 years or more before the Morrill Land-Grant Acts, which created agricultural colleges throughout the USA. Many land-grant ag schools evolved into today’s state universities (although some of these, too, were founded prior to the Civil War.)
America’s first colleges (including the surviving Colonial Colleges) were founded largely to educate young men for the law or the ministry. They (and the women’s colleges that came later) also amounted to “finishing schools” to prepare affluent students for disciplined, socially acceptable uses of leisure time. The land grant colleges were founded during and after the Civil War, at the height of America’s second indutrial revolution. Their mission focus was more on the training of managers and technicians to run and improve factories, farms, and civil engineering projects.
If you went state by state, I think you’d see the top school being public, rather than private in most states. Let me start (I’m sure I’ll make numerous mistakes - obviously subjective). AL - public; Alaska - public, Arizona - public, Arkansas - public, CA - private (but so very, very limited at Stanford; then the UCs are tremendous), CO - I suppose Airforce is very public; CT - private; DE - public…
I disagree with your thesis. I think a school like SUNY Binghamton can hold its own academically with other well known public schools. IMO the other schools you noted are more well known nationally due to a combination of their size and big time sports programs.
A lot of the top privates in the U.S. just happen to be in the northeast. This includes both colleges and universities. For universities, this would include all eight Ivy league schools, Johns Hopkins, Georgetown, MIT, and Carnegie Mellon. That’s almost half of the U.S. News top 25! And I haven’t even gotten around to including the various private LACs on the east coast like Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, Middlebury, etc.
So the Northeast has a lot of very high quality privates. Outside of the northeast, that’s not really the case. California has three exceptional private universities: Stanford, Caltech, and USC. Stanford has a small incoming class, and Caltech has an extremely small incoming class. And both of these universities draw from a national pool of applicants. California’s a very large state with a big population. So it invested in a lot of public universities to educate its residents. And of those public universities, it invested in the UC system which was meant to educate some of its best students. And that system has educated many prominent people within the state. So it’s very well regarded.
You see similar things in the Midwest. There are a few top privates (Chicago, Northwestern, Notre Dame, etc.) But many more public schools which are well regarded in those states. These include: IU-B, UIUC, Michigan, Perdue, tOSU, etc. And again, like in California, it’s just not possible for those few top private universities to educate most of the people in those states.
The pattern I see for these top schools is that they tend to be where the top students tend to gravitate to. Either in their own region, or in their own state. The northeast probably has enough top privates to educate many of its top students. But outside of that region, I would say that the others don’t really.