Schools that are considered to be on Ivy League level for undergrad?

College Search & Selection
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<p>So, the schools can indeed report to collegeboard ahead of time, but many choose not to make it public on their own websites? I always thought they would come out with the new class at the end of the year, but apparently they don’t have to do that as Vanderbilt posted its numbers early. That’s why I was looking at 2016 numbers (I knew I was). I assumed that 2017 numbers had not been submitted yet because I don’t know when CDS is due. But I remember collegeboard being weird in the past. As for Emory, the scores were actually like that for a while in the CDS, they just reported the admitted student numbers to the rankings agencies. I noticed a discrepancy between what they were calling the “freshman class profile” on the admissions website vs. what the CDS said before they even came out with that misreporting issue. Emory never had higher than normal numbers. The admits were around what the enrollees at the other places look like, but of course 30-40 points is shaved off the admit numbers come enrollment time (some places shave off even more than this from one end or the other. But then again, they are admitting really high in the first place). </p>

<p>Also, for Chicago, I think those are admit numbers. Chicago looks more like Vanderbilt, Princeton, and WashU stats wise for enrolled students I think. </p>

<p>As for your response. I just now wonder why it takes longer for some schools to go public with it. I guess they figure that CB will take care of it. </p>

<p>Weird that Chicago, Emory, and Columbia seem rather “secretive” about enrolled students (I guess Emory gives an academic profile with an “average” SAT and GPA, but that’s it. That average seems skewed left. I suppose they don’t really care though, because they are at least more transparent than in the past about who is admitted (based on the data they display on in a document on the admissions website). </p>

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<p>Chicago per US News had an enrolled SAT range of 1420-1570 last year (class of 2016). I think 1440-1590 is accurate for this year’s freshman. It’s unsurprising given how much they are mass marketing to high scorers now (+ use of merit scholarships)</p>

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<p>Wow, that’s pretty damned close to a perfect student body. What do you think Vanderbilt does? Appears their marketing great as well (and their financial aid is excellent). However, I will say that I think that the students that Chicago is getting is more befitted to their environment, just as those at Harvard, MIT, Caltech, Princeton, or Yale are. As in, you have intense students in a very intense academic environment, so the stress on ridiculously high scorers makes a little more sense there than some other places. Makes me question, does a place like Vanderbilt and Washington University get exactly the same types of students you see at those schools simply because the scores say so (they certainly cross-admit many of the same students, but are the same types of students with the same attitudes yielding, or are the cultures at each school conducive to some types over others). The ongoing differences in atmosphere of the schools say otherwise. Perhaps Vanderbilt and Washington University are getting the “well-rounded” (as if those don’t exist at the other schools) students who test extremely well whereas Harvard (and the others) will continue to pull all of the crazy Intel finalists and Olympiad winners who also test well(as expected). </p>

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<p>Vandy, Wustl, Chicago follow the same model :absolute mass marketing coupled with merit scholarships. </p>

<p>Chicago is pulling out all stops now that it’s applications dropped 9% this year (including joining the UCA application). Perhaps applicants are catching on that they are targeting everyone. </p>

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<p>It’s applications dropped? Interesting…</p>

<p>I wonder if it’s worth Emory pulling the same students to pull out of its rut. Or if it’s just worth working on the academics and then ramping up marketing efforts (this way, you definitely have something to offer a better student body that may want to be challenged at higher than normal levels or something. I think the academics are as good as Vanderbilt, but I still think they could be better, at least before we go ham and jack up our stats. Emory is not “fun” like Vandy, Duke, or ND, so I feel we have to have somewhat exceptional academics or else higher caliber students will be unsatisfied. It’s not like they can just run off to a vibrant social life if they get kind of bored with academics). It will probably be a while before there is any noticeable recovery, though the admissions office was clever by letting scholars applicants nominate themselves. The amount of crazy scholarship applicants with very high stats increased a lot (though apps. stayed flat), so maybe we can keep the app. numbers the same, while boosting stats a little anyway. </p>

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<p>Given you have JHU’s admissions dean, I think Emory will take the same honest approach as JHU.</p>

<p>Gradual organic growth of student quality and selectivity without mass spamming of admissions materials and no volatility in application numbers.</p>

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<p>Yeah. That makes sense. I feel like we need to work on academic and intellectual diversity first before boosting stats though (or somehow combine). It’s quite embarrassing for example that we have like 3-400 neuroscience and 500 biology majors, and then offer a computational neuroscience class this spring, and only a single student enrolls. It tells me that whatever marketing we do is reaching only certain types of students even though we offer great things to many other types (and those things should be marketed). It’s weird that we have a computational neuroscience undergraduate training fellowship and yet this year only 1 person is in a course on it :frowning: . Obviously, prospective students nor students in the majors know about it. Too much “soft” marketing by Emory (I don’t advocate for mass marketing so much as marketing the right things aggressively).</p>

<p>Oh well, conversation not for this thread. </p>

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<p>I posted a list of 48 above (schools other than the Ivies that meet 100% of determined financial need).
Later I posted a list of 20 (schools other than the Ivies that meet full need AND have 75th percentile SAT M+CR scores of 1500 or more.) ~75 would include all the other schools everyone tossed out in this discussion, for whatever reason.</p>

<p>If you think 33 is a better number, or 11, by what criteria do you build that list? </p>

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<p>Someone said that about 75 schools would look similar, it’s a decent size to me. I think around the 75 that you said was suggested between all of us is more reasonable. If you want to winnow it down to about 33, that’s fine, but I don’t think it’s really true. For some reason, I just find this reliance upon really high standardized test scores to not be that great and the demonstrated need thing is weird too. I know Duke says it does it, but yet I have heard of students getting some pretty sketch fin. aid packages from Duke (one of my friends admitted there unfortunately came to Emory simply because it offered more money., Luckily she was in two undergraduate majors that may be similar quality to theirs, but still she said she really liked Duke, so it would have been nice if she could go). I personally don’t know how you would build such a list. Do most of the better LACs not meet 100% need? Also, what if you don’t specifically say 100% need will be met: <a href=“http://financialaid.duke.edu/undergraduate-applicants”>http://financialaid.duke.edu/undergraduate-applicants&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>I went and compared this to Emory’s, and it appears for sure that ours is perhaps better (as in a greater share of students are more likely to get small loans because while people between 50k-100k will accrue upwards to 20k of loans at Duke, they’re capped at 15k at Emory. I would also imagine a similar sliding scale between >50k<100k where those near the lower part who fall just outside of Loan Replacement program would probably not accrue 15k, but they would essentially be given LR ) yet nowhere does it explicitly say that we meet 100% need. Perhaps Emory wasn’t included because of the SAT cut-offf (that would make sense)? Because I know you said that those schools included “included” and then started naming a few. However, I just wonder if you have to explicitly say that you meet 100% need to qualify. </p>

<p>Oh and tk: I wasn’t criticizing the number. Either you or someone made it out to seem as if it was extremely short because of the amount of US colleges/universities (however, we know that these things seem easy to start now-a-days, no offense), so I think it’s an extremely good or promising number for someone looking for that sort of school. While I would not agree with narrowing it, I suppose one could get weird and do undergraduate student body size cut-offs, but as we know, even the Ivies vary there, plus it doesn’t impede a great education to be very large (Michigan, Wisconsin, USC, UCLA, Georgia Tech, Berkeley, Virginia, and Chapel Hill come to my mind for some reason). </p>

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<p>Colleges determine the amount of financial aid an applicant needs - hence varying fin aid packages as alluded to by Bernie12 above. Other schools “not meeting 100%” aid could easily lower their estimates of applicant aid and claim 100%, so I’m not sure the list of 20 is the proper metric as well. </p>

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<p>Unfortunately, the common thread that binds these schools are admissions statistics and rankings. US News owns a controversial foothold on this designation. wustl, penn, and columbia have had huge increases in admissions selectivity since the 90s, have these schools had a proportional increase in educational quality to back up their ranking increases? Probably not.</p>

<p>Schools close to the ivies have acceptance rates <20%, SATs from 1300-1500 or higher on either end. Unfortunately, education quality can vary tremendously. Engineering doesn’t even exist at Chicago and is poor at Dartmouth, Wustl, and a slew of other “top” schools. </p>

<p>If you want to get even more granular, choose schools that do not offer merit aid (an objective financial aid metric shared by the ivies).</p>

<p>This would eliminate Duke, Vandy, JHU, Chicago, Rice from the usual suspects list.</p>

<p>The list would then be the following:</p>

<p>Ivies,
Stanford,
MIT,
Caltech,
Northwestern</p>

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<p>The OP asked where one can get an “ivy league education”. Aside from making the education affordable if you’re getting aid, the real impact of need-based aid is in creating a slightly more economically diverse student body. Offering merit aid hardly seems like something that’s going to impact the “ivy-ness” of a school. Schools with honors colleges with those same admissions stats (low acceptance rate, high scores) are Ivy analogues even when the school as a whole wouldn’t qualify (e.g. UT’s Plan II, UCSB’s College of Creative Studies). Or how about Deep Springs College? </p>

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<p>^Then the list is literally hundreds of schools. </p>

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<p>The thing about places like Columbia is that it was technically already more solid than normal educationally, so I feel the selectivity may have more or less caught up with it whereas, some places the selectivity has, on paper, surpassed the caliber of the academics at the place. Thus you are likely to hear students in the 75% at these schools, which is now extremely high, complain that, say, their math class, which they chose to be far above freshman math or even multivariable, to still be underwhelming, whereas a math genius or serious math student at places like Harvard have math courses specifically dedicated to freshmen that may rival the most advanced courses, if not graduate level, at other schools (even selective ones). The most notorious examples being math 55 and 25 (I think this is the one right below it). Basically, some schools have adjusted well to the caliber of their students so as to have a greater variety of challenging options available to them starting their first year without them having to simply look for the most doable advanced course in the dept. However, I suppose this only matters to schools who actually value challenging students at a high level in the class room (you won’t reform anything if the school prides itself on social vibrance and the “balance” that apparently does not exist at other schools unless the administration and faculty at such a place has a serious vision). </p>

<p>Some may very well be more comfortable with a “reasonable” level of challenge for many students and then focusing on maintaining a very high quality of life depending on the types of students they draw (as in, the reason students came). Some schools like Duke have gotten the quality of life thing down and appear to have moved on to challenging its brighter students at a higher level. Some schools seem as if they have yet to make this move (Chicago is fine though, because like Harvard, Yale, and those schools, things are nicely tiered for freshman in depts. where it’s needed). Looks like many places are still most likely figuring out what to do with the talent they are getting in terms of classroom instruction (or perhaps some of these places get students not anticipating much of a challenge or at least not asking for it. They probably just want good teaching and high quality of life more so than anything else. When a class is challenging to the point of remote discomfort, it may frustrate student bodies at certain schools and be seen as a :necessary evil of attending as opposed to a welcomed component of the environment). Schools, unless they are really driven by specific values, likely have educational environments that reflect what the students are comfortable with, which explains the variation and stagnation of some schools educational “quality”. Unless the new bright students complain, nothing will happen. I mean, they probably chose them based upon the status quo anyway, as almost everyone does. Like if someone was considering Vandy vs. Chicago, and then they listen to all the students that say “Vandy because Chicago is where fun goes to die and is overly intense” and matriculate Vandy, that tells you the values of those students and if that perception attracts students to Vandy, why change it? Lines become more blurred when you perhaps compare a student seriously debating between Chicago and Hopkins or something. I suppose one could surreptitiously change the academic rigor or culture of a school overtime (as some have) as seniors leave, because freshman simply won’t know any better. They’ll just get there and find that the in-class environment is much more demanding than they anticipated based upon word of mouth from older students, and there will be nothing they can really do about it other than get used to it. </p>

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<p>I think there is a fundamental flaw in equating an “Ivy League education” with test scores of incoming students and the ability to provide FA. That says NOTHING about the ability to teach and the quality of education undergrads get. Neither do course syllabi, though that’s probably a closer analogue. </p>

<p>The best measure would probably be exit exams, combined with some measure of what the students came in with, but we don’t have that tool, although grad and professional school placements might be a place to start.</p>

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<p>Harvard has a rather large number of possible math courses for entering frosh, ranging from Ma-Mb (like high school calculus AB with review of precalculus topics) to 55a-55b (the third honors level of the usual sophomore level courses 21a-21b).</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.math.harvard.edu/pamphlets/courses.html”>http://www.math.harvard.edu/pamphlets/courses.html&lt;/a&gt;
<a href=“http://www.math.harvard.edu/courses/index.html”>http://www.math.harvard.edu/courses/index.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>Yes, I’m aware of that, and that’s part of what I was saying. 25 and 55 are just the most extreme examples where they at least try to serve the very best among them (as in, the course will even challenge IMO winners) who may be very experienced. Many institutions (even ones approaching or that have reached Harvard like selectivity, like Vanderbilt) have no such mechanism specifically targeted toward freshmen to do this (they of course have your standard "take organic chemistry as a freshman option, but it’s apparently known to be relatively light compared to the sophomore class whereas I remember my class was actually a bit harder as is the freshman course at say, Yale). At some point, there should indeed be “honors” courses unless certain schools genuinely believe that all incoming students would be challenged by their current freshmen offerings (I.E., “our intro. courses are already honors level”. The reality is…maybe compared to some state schools). Also, again, it appears the “baselines” (in science, math, and quantitative fields) for introductory courses geared toward those actually going into the field or something associated with it at certain very selective and well-established schools are just much higher to begin with. Like, for example introductory biology at Vanderbilt (bsci 110 I guess) will not compare favorably to the analogous course at Harvard, and this can be shown over and over again in each department that are quantitative or STEM related. And then on top of that, Harvard and places like it offer additional options (as in, specifically for freshmen) for those who freshman are indeed above those already challenging baseline courses in math, life, and physical sciences, and economics I believe. Furthermore, I believe such “honors” courses are reasonably well populated (though a majority are in the “baseline” intermediate level course). I mean, places like Berkeley already get the hint and Berkeley is not as selective as many of these places, but does recognize the variance and differing demands within the student body such that it does manage to educate many at a high level regardless of talent level. </p>

<p>@MrMom62: Universities, even elite ones don’t seem to like assessments…I can only imagine why. Perhaps many of them will be exposed as schools that rely on the brilliance of the students to rack up credentials (such as prestigious scholarships and grad/prof. school placement) more than the education provided (you may actually end up finding that some selective schools are not having students show as much learning gains as one would anticipate based upon the rank, whereas some would perform fine). Also, just like NCLB, the school/dept. would control the level of the exams. Given this, you may have some just give students a low level exam in the first place and then claim that they did well (or have subjective assessments such as writing samples being assessed: I’ve seen this version in our UG neuroscience department where they basically used the writing intensive senior seminar to assess the competence of its majors. Problem is…the papers were graded by the faculty members in the dept. who then went on to say that the course and dept. was a success because the quality of the writing improved by the end of the course. Sounds like bologna to me! Especially considering that there are several sections of the seminar, each with different topics and instructors. There is no control). Some schools can’t even do assessments for internal purposes. I can’t imagine them being successful with creating assessments or agreeing to participate in assessments where the results would be revealed to external sources (and worse, the public! If this happens, I’m sure names of institutions would have to be kept confidential). </p>

<p>Seriously, take a look at that assessment report if you want: <a href=“http://www.oirpe.emory.edu/Assessment/2010-2011%20NBB%20Assessment%20Report.pdf”>http://www.oirpe.emory.edu/Assessment/2010-2011%20NBB%20Assessment%20Report.pdf&lt;/a&gt; . I think it’s kind of sketchy for many reasons. While I think our neuroscience is actually good (interesting course topics, great teachers and opps), I don’t know about learning gains and outcomes (I also have a suspicion that the placement of the wrong instructors in one of the core NBB courses, 301, has resulted in the course being watered down. It used to be “very” rigorous. Now you hear little such opinions from those who have taken it the past 3-4 years and an easier book is used. The caliber of students has not increased so that doesn’t explain it) and I certainly don’t believe those were the best practices in assessing the goals they set for themselves. I feel like I would have also given a voluntary exam to a selected (but somewhat random) set of students that tests their competence of the knowledge gained from 301 (which focused on the physics and biology behind neuro) while also maybe having them analyze a piece of primary lit/ data directly from it as part of an exam prompt (maybe a problem derived from the literature?) </p>

<p>Educational quality is very hard to gauge after a certain point, and while assessments are ideal (especially if to be made “public”), it’s not in the interest of what would be the participating institutions to do assessments for external judgement. Given this, we as well be better off relying on the rankings with a large degree of caution I suppose. It’s almost all we have :frowning: </p>

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<p>I think you speak the truth about elite schools fearing (I know you didn’t use that word) exit assessments.</p>

<p>If I wanted to make a prediction, I’d bet that the rise of online higher education will lead to the development of an independent credentialing system that may eventually become the “gold standard” in assessing all graduates. At the very least, it would set a floor that graduates would have to demonstrate they can get past, much like the bar and medical licensing exams.</p>

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<p>Probably true for Caltech.
<a href=“http://www.math.caltech.edu/~2013-14/1term/ma001a/#lect”>http://www.math.caltech.edu/~2013-14/1term/ma001a/#lect&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>Berkeley does have honors lower and upper division math courses, as well as honors lower division physics courses.
<a href=“http://math.berkeley.edu/courses/choosing/honors-courses”>http://math.berkeley.edu/courses/choosing/honors-courses&lt;/a&gt;
<a href=“Home | Physics”>Home | Physics;

<p>But honors math courses do not seem to be that unusual, even at state universities less selective than Berkeley.
<a href=“http://www.math.rutgers.edu/undergrad/Honors/honcourses.html”>http://www.math.rutgers.edu/undergrad/Honors/honcourses.html&lt;/a&gt;
<a href=“Courses | Department of Mathematics”>http://math.osu.edu/courses&lt;/a&gt;
<a href=“http://www.math.umn.edu/ugrad_honors/”>http://www.math.umn.edu/ugrad_honors/&lt;/a&gt;
<a href=“http://www.math.purdue.edu/academic/undergrad/faq/#honors”>http://www.math.purdue.edu/academic/undergrad/faq/#honors&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>Regarding exit assessments, there may be limited data available across different schools at the ETS by comparing GRE subject test scores versus the same students SAT subject test scores in related subject tests. I.e. the exit results can be compared against student quality at entrance. However, there are limitations and flaws, even if a study based on such scores were made:</p>

<ul>
<li>Multiple choice tests may not be the best way to assess learning in many subjects.</li>
<li>Only PhD program aspirants take GRE subject tests.</li>
<li>GRE subject tests appear to be getting less popular among PhD programs.</li>
<li>Relatively few undergraduate schools require or recommend SAT subject tests.</li>
<li>A student may apply to a PhD program in something not related to the SAT subject tests taken while applying to undergraduate schools.</li>
</ul>