<p>It's not Ipod, dangit. It's iPod</p>
<p>-Your friendly neighborhood Apple intern</p>
<p>haha, thanks for that JohnnyK. but really it is iPod, and I get slightly annoyed when people say Ipod too.</p>
<p>Anyway, after reading all the rambling and nonsensical jabbering (and the facebook debacle), I've come to the conclusion that the Ivy CAS' can't be ranked easily, nor are they the same in each person's eyes. People who want to go to a school with a large undergrad focus wouldn't like certain Ivies, but that doesn't mean that said Ivy isn't overall very sound in the quality of education at its CAS. It just doesn't have the perfect fit for said person.</p>
<p>So the title of this thread is "Rank the Ivy CAS's". Go ahead. Rank them. But remember, just because someone disagrees with you doesn't mean they're wrong. In fact, it doesn't mean that anyone is wrong, because there is no right or wrong answer. These ranks that are engendered on a person by person basis, are just that... on a person by person basis. For example, I may like the fact that Penn offers 81 different foreign languages. Or that Penn has a Biological Basis of Behavior major (really a mixture of Biology, Neuroscience, and Psychology). So, that would put Penn above some of these other schools in MY opinion. It may not be of any importance to you, but it is to me, and therefore, your ranking will be different. From reading on their very own websites (which means I might have overlooked something, as it is 4am), Princeton, Yale and Cornell don't even have anything remotely resembling a Neuroscience major. And that says nothing bad about them, it just says that I don't belong there.</p>
<p>Just want to note that Cornell is actually one of the Ivies most focused on undergraduates with about 70% undergraduates. It is big (13,000 plus undergrads) but undergraduates are the focus.</p>
<p>Can percentages alone really show focus?</p>
<p>That would suggest that, say, with 6800 undergrads and 15800 grads, Columbia hates its undergrads...I know they have maddening bureaucracy but I was always under the impression that Columbia College was superb. If nothing else I've always admired them for sticking with a Core curriculum</p>
<p>JohnnyK-
Yes, percent undergrad enrollment can show relative focus on undergraduates in terms of faculty attention and access to resources. The ratio of undergraduate students to the faculty FTE devoted to undergraduates might be another measure but I've never seen that statistic published.</p>
<p>Well, no elite university is going to have faculty who are exclusively devoted to undergrads, since the faculty have to do research and teach grad students and post docs. One can get an idea of relative effort to undergrads by looking at faculty teaching loads and class size. Unfortunately, it is difficult, to say the least, to get teaching load information. However, the common data set reports class size. </p>
<p>A university could have a high ratio of faculty to students, but still have large average class sizes if the teaching loads are light. One might argue that this frees up the other faculty to supervise student research, but it does not tell you how many students actually do this, or how many want to.</p>
<p>That metric also assumes that the presence of graduate students is inherently bad, and that all colleges should be LAC's with no grad students at all. Of course the presence of graduate programs makes more advanced courses and experiences for those undergraduates who want them. The absence of graduate programs, or having only small ones, thus can limit the options for undergrads in their later years of college.</p>
<p>Ipod isn't as bad as I-POD</p>