<p>cornell is the easiest id say</p>
<p>To Get into:</p>
<ol>
<li>Harvard</li>
<li>Princeton</li>
<li>Columbia</li>
<li>Yale</li>
<li>Brown</li>
<li>Dartmouth</li>
<li>UPenn</li>
<li>Cornell</li>
</ol>
<p>How I rank the best ivies:</p>
<ol>
<li>Harvard</li>
<li>Yale</li>
<li>Columbia</li>
<li>UPenn</li>
<li>Princeton</li>
<li>Brown</li>
<li>Dartmouth</li>
<li>Cornell</li>
</ol>
<p>That goes without saying non ivies like Stanford, Duke, MIT, and Caltech are all above Cornell and Dartmouth for sure.</p>
<p>This is all fascinating, I'm sure, but why would you care which school, any school, is the hardest to get into? How would that factor into a choice?
A better question, IMHO, is which school I would love to attend and is it too hard for me to get into it.
If you want to go to say, WUSL, Rice or Tulane, why would it matter how hard it will be to get into one of the Ivy League schools, worry about how hard it would be for you to get into the school for you.
If you are #1 in your class, have a 1600 sat, 2400 sat2 and have served humanity none of them will be all that hard to get into, you'll just need a modicum of luck.</p>
<p>The best ivy is the one that meets your needs and you would be happy in attending. When D visted all the ivies, spent the night, sat in on classes and saw the difference in the cultures she eliminated 7 so the best on for her was the one (and only one) she applied to and eventually got accepted at. Suffice it to say she is a very happy camper there. </p>
<p>People turn down HYP for other schools that better meets their needs. People also transfer out of HYP because they find that it was not all what they thought it would be for them.</p>
<p>I care about "how hard" ranking beacuse the best chance for an IVY is to go ED or EA at one school. It looks like Harvard and Yale, even if you go EA, is a longshot, unless you are like top 1000 in the country, and so applying there is throwing away your best shot. So I need a strategy!</p>
<p>mensa160,</p>
<p>You're gonna hate yourself if you just go to the hardest school for you to get into. Your best shot at the best school for you will probably not be one of the ivies; the odds are against it. They are only 8 out of about 50 great schools you should be thinking about.
Sybbie is absolutely right. Visit the schools, attend a class, meet the students. Talk on cc is cheap; action is required of the student who wants to dedicate four years of their life to a particular place of higher learning. If you cannot visit the Ivy you want to apply to, I would say, you may need to rethink applying to an Ivy (or any school for that matter).
Here's a stategy, decide which school you think you would like to go to, check your stats, find out if you are in the range, if you are apply and pray--and don't waste your luck on lottery tickets!</p>
<p>btw mensa are you a member of mensa, i joined out of curiousity but havent done anything...all i receive are these monthly newsletters blah waste of time and money (even though i was planning to attend the meetings...but just dont have time)</p>
<p>Harvard is the most overrated college, IMHO.</p>
<p>inebriated2005, how did you come up with your rankings for "how i rank the best ivies"? i'm sooo curious...what was your basis? did you personally attend each of the schools you mentioned, and thus can comment on the quality of each academic program? if not, i'm really confused... how can you be so "sure" that those non-ivies you mentioned are "all above Cornell and Dartmouth?" </p>
<p>by "best," i think you really meant to say "most prestigious in my opinion."</p>
<p>This is the dumbest, shallowest, and most pointless post I've ever seen. And, considering this website, that says a lot. It seems as if you just want to be able to say, "Yeah, I go to an Ivy," as if the label will endow you with some special power or influence over lesser, non-Ivy league beings. It doesn't. Your "strategy" fundamentally suggests that your highest priority in searching for a college is the athletic conference to which it belongs. You might as well choose schools at random to which to apply.</p>
<p>Mensa, why are you so hung up on "Ivy"?</p>
<p>
[quote]
Mensa, why are you so hung up on "Ivy"?
[/quote]
TheDad, first, I respect your wise observations here and elswhere on this board.To answewr: Prestige is a big part. The other big part is the liberal arts tradition. The Ivies and the seven sisters invented it and it's totally still there. I have a ways to go, but I'd like some day to be a learned person and not a technocrat.</p>
<p>Okay, Mensa...I'm with you on the liberal arts tradition. But please note there's a difference between prestige and pursuit of prestige. (My D is at Smith, which is not shabby, but she turned down Wellesley, which is generally regarded as a solid notch higher on the prestige scale.) </p>
<p>Among schools in the Ivy League, for undergrad education I have a very high regard for Yale and a high regard for Brown. If my D had been admitted to Harvard it would have been quite difficult but I would have told her that I thought she'd get a better undergrad experience at Smith...save Harvard for grad school. I will have a couple of parents whom I respect highly on my neck but I don't think that the undergrad education at Columbia or Cornell is anything that I'd take over Amherst, Swat, Middlebury, Smith, Wellesley. About Penn...I don't know enough to comment.</p>
<p>As someone who started D's search/selection with a bias in favor of large universities, I'll ask you this question: have you spent time on various campuses? Their feel and affects are not interchangeable and you'll be spending four years of your life...more than 20 percent at your current age, about 1/3 of the time you've really been conscious, in that environment. Columbia had been my D's #1 on paper and after visiting she decided not to even apply. You may not have the same reaction but you simply don't know what you're letting yourself in for...or what you're excluding yourself from...until you've visited some schools. I can assure you that there are tons of learned people who are very successful and highly respected who never set foot onto an Ivy campus as a student.</p>
<p>Btw, for that liberal arts tradition, including small intensive classes: last semester there were something like 11 students in D's "Discrete Mathematics" class, only 5 in "Number Theory" this term. There are about 30 in "Linear Algebra" but that's a class that a lot of Econ majors, Engineering majors, etc. take. There are around 17-20 in her Latin class. Gov 100 was one of the largest classes on campus, something like 200, but it's a gateway class and popular elective. She had a seminar class with 16. Yada yada.</p>
<p>Are you telling me the only schools in the country that offer the liberal arts tradition are the Ivies?</p>
<p>Cornell is so much better than the other ivy schools in engineering, and their science programs (bio especially) are better than most as well (save harvard).</p>
<p>"Are you telling me the only schools in the country that offer the liberal arts tradition are the Ivies?"</p>
<p>No, but they do set the standard for the world.</p>
<p>.</p>
<p>Cornell is almost always considered the easiest to get into and usually the least prestigious. Its not because it is a bad school, though, in fact, it is also considered to be the hardest of the ivies, but the question is about hardest to get into. I am also infamous for calling Cornell the bastard ivy because it never really seems to belong to me (founded in 1800s, lack of prestige, larger size school). </p>
<p>As for tlqk question, from everything I have seen and heard (numbers and opinions) Dartmouth is above Brown and Penn. As for between Brown and Penn I don't really know.</p>
<p>BTW here is my list:</p>
<p>Harvard/Yale/Princeton
Columbia/Dartmouth
Penn/Brown
Cornell</p>
<p>I find it easier to put some together because it is hard to tell, but I have always had those distinct 4 levels of ivy in my mind when considering them.</p>
<p>beatty i came up with the rankings like any other person in this whole entire post lol</p>
<p>Princeton and Yale OVER Harvard as far as difficulty to get into. Cornell is definitely one of the top 5 academic schools, even though its the easiest to get into our of the ivies.</p>
<p>The Princeton Review's Rankings of the Toughest Colleges to Get Into (top 5).</p>
<ol>
<li>Massachusetts Institute of Technology<br></li>
</ol>
<p>2 Princeton University </p>
<p>3 California Institute of Technology </p>
<p>4 Yale University </p>
<p>5 Harvard College</p>