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<p>I "that old bigot...were alive today", we should assume he would not be buried alive, shouldn't we? ;)</p>
<p>That's a well-known Yogi Berra-ism.</p>
<p>If you're looking for a prestige graduate experience, there is nothing better than a Rhodes. It easily trumps any American degree. Of course, most people who get a Rhodes return to the states for more schooling, where they will not only have a choice of programs but get a "wow" reaction by having gone to Oxford.</p>
<p>In general, these threads indicate a naivete about what school is all about, in that there is an assumption that there is a big difference between the students at HYP and the students at "second tier" universities like Penn or Cornell. The top 10-20% of students at any of the top twenty schools are significantly better than the average students at the best school, and it is these top students who win all of the awards and top-notch graduate school placements. Further, there is often a condensation of talent at places outside of HYP. For example, over the past 8 years, teams from Duke and Harvard have placed 7 times in the top three of the Putnam Math Competition, while Princeton and MIT have placed five times each. Cal Tech hasn't placed in the top 3 in over 20 years, though they have placed fourth or fifthfive times during this span. I think everyone would agree that the average student at Caltech is a better mathematician than the average student at Duke (or at Harvard or Princeton, for that matter), but Duke has been recruiting elite undergraduate mathematicians the way its basketball team recruits players. (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lowell_Putnam_Mathematical_Competition%5B/url%5D">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lowell_Putnam_Mathematical_Competition</a>. This sort of recruitment leads to Putnam vitories, as well as large numbers of Rhodes scholarships and entries into Yale Law School and Harvard Medical School (and also, perhaps, a US News rating that annoys some of us).</p>
<p>My biggest concern is that people seem to think that college admissions guarantees some sort of success and that students at rival and very similar schools are somehow less elite. No telling what they think of students at state schools (where there are also large numbers of very able, disciplined, and thoughtful people against whom you'll be competing at every stage of your career).</p>
<p>so what is with the dropoff at Harvard this year? Someone die? I know the Red Sox and White Sox won the world series but I didn't think hell had actually frozen over. SO , seriously, que pasa?</p>
<p>It's the math. If only 32 people can win it, and there are--let's say--200 people who apply who are essentially equally outstanding, and 20 of those outstanding people go to Harvard, then there will be years in which 4 of the 20 win and years in which 0 of the 20 will win. Of course, the 200 aren't equivalent, but if the application process were repeated or if the selection committee were slightly tweaked, the 32 chosen would be significantly changedd with each repeat.</p>
<p>It's like college admissions. If there are, let's say, 20,000 top-notch college applicants in a given year (and 1000 super top notch applicants), then no school will recruit most of either of these groups. The super top notch group does tend to aggregate in the top schools (and is the reason that some colleges have created academic scholarships--not to recruit from the 20,000--most already do that--but to recruit from the 1000 (e.g., Duke wins Putnams and Rhodes not generally from its typical undergrad but from the ranks of its AB Duke scholarship winners--that group of 20/30 per year is culled from among the very best applicants anywhere and provided full tuition, room, and board). </p>
<p>Of course, that implies that you can predict who is going to jump best through the next hoop, and that is very hard to do. Look at the hullabaloo over the admissions developments at HYP over the past century. Their explicit anti-Semitism and anti-intellectualism may sound quaint, but much of the emphasis on 'the well-rounded student' stems from early efforts to maintain the Protestant flavor of those schools....</p>
<p>how do you become a Rhodes Scholar?</p>
<p>go to their website you need to apply and be approved by your college. What are other extremely prestigous awards given that are similar to Rhodes?</p>
<p>The nearest direct equivalents to the Rhodes are the Marshall</a> Scholarships. They are worth a similar amount to a Rhodes Scholarship and are available for up to 40 US students (they have to be US citizens) to study at any university in the UK. The majority seem to end up in Oxford, Cambridge or London. They are funded by the UK government and were set up after the war in gratitude for the Marshall Aid Programme.</p>
<p>There are also the new Gates</a> Scholarships to study at Cambridge. Like the Rhodes they are more international in their scope.</p>
<p>In response to the earlier mention of the MacArthur Awards, found these stats elsewhere, thought they might be helpful:</p>
<p>McArthur Fellowship "genius awards". </p>
<hr>
<p>WINNERS </p>
<p>Schools with the most MacArthur Fellowship winners, 2000-2004: </p>
<p> 7: Princeton </p>
<p> 5: Yale University </p>
<p> 4: Brown University, Cornell University, Harvard College </p>
<p> 3: University of California at Berkeley </p>
<p> Exception: Five "genius grant" winners listed no college. </p>
<p>Source: Knight Ridder </p>
<p>Tribune News</p>
<p>"Harvard and Radcliffe fully combined operations in 1977, the same year that an Act of Parliament changed the will of Cecil Rhodes to extend the selection criteria for Rhodes Scholarships to include women."</p>
<p>That's terrible. Cecil Rhodes may have been sexist, but the government shouldn't be able to change his will. If someone wants to make his or her will sexist, they should have the right to do that.</p>
<p>According to the UK's unwritten constitution Parliament is supreme and can ultimately do whatever it wants. There have historically been no limits to its power, although this has changed somewhat recently due to the impact of the European Union treaties and the European Convention on Human Rights which now means that the courts can strike down legislation is certain circumstances.</p>
<p>Given that Parliament can - and has - effectively declared people "illegal" and condemned them to death by mean of an Act of Attainder, altering a will by statute seems small beer. In this particular case I imagine it wasn't a high-handed imposition by the Government but rather a response to a request from the Rhodes Trustees.</p>