<p>There are a LOT of threads about this on College Confidential. As usual, my contribution to the thread will be to define what schools we are talking about with an external link: </p>
<p>Ivy</a> League - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia </p>
<p>P.S. The annoying problem of replies posting out of order is back. I did NOT open this thread, but replied to Mondo's thread-opening post.</p>
<p>The Ivies are not the eight best schools in the USA.
They are among the top twenty for sure, but not the eight best schools.
This doesn’t do good things for Stanford or Duke- Ivy-caliber schools which don’t happen to be called Ivies.
I wish people would stop with the whole “Ivy League” thing.
Agreed?</p>
<p>^ Well, for me, the top 8 would be:</p>
<p>Harvard
Princeton
Yale
Stanford
MIT
Duke/Columbia
Columbia/Duke
Penn (Wharton)</p>
<p>So, IMO, 5 of the Ivies deserve their spots. Dartmouth, Brown, and Cornell are certainly a bit below…</p>
<p>I’m sick and tired of everyone attempting to “objectively” rank colleges numerically.</p>
<p>^ I’m not ranking them in terms of actual academic merit, because I don’t know enough statistics, but I would say that that is a fair representation of PRESTIGE rankings to the average, knowledgeable high schooler.</p>
<p>I’d rather go to Washu or Emory.</p>
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</p>
<p>Well, I’m very glad we have that settled. Next?</p>
<p>(Sorry. Fish in a barrel, I know.)</p>
<p>I think the current “Ivy league” should allow more institutions to join. It could become a movement whereby colleges (at least those with lower acceptance rates) would allow college academics to be more important than sports. I think it might be a possible thing for a few schools.</p>
<p>[Ivy</a> Plus site:.edu - Google Search](<a href=“Google Search”>Google Search)</p>
<p>Alot of people on CC have questions about this subject, so why don’t we start a discusion 
It is better to butt heads on one thread then having it scatter around, right.</p>
<p>How would you rank it?
From my perspective:</p>
<p>Yale
Princeton
Harvard
Columbia
Penn
Cornell
Dartmouth
Brown</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/cornell-university/581958-upenn-vs-cornell.html?highlight=penn+workload[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/cornell-university/581958-upenn-vs-cornell.html?highlight=penn+workload</a>
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/cornell-university/584839-workload-cornell-vs-other-ivy-leagues.html?highlight=penn+workload[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/cornell-university/584839-workload-cornell-vs-other-ivy-leagues.html?highlight=penn+workload</a>
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/567116-ed-upenn-cas-vs-dartmouth-vs-cornell.html?highlight=penn+workload[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/567116-ed-upenn-cas-vs-dartmouth-vs-cornell.html?highlight=penn+workload</a>
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/95198-top-15-most-prestigious-universities.html?highlight=penn+workload[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/95198-top-15-most-prestigious-universities.html?highlight=penn+workload</a></p>
<p>Princeton
Harvard
Columbia
Yale
Brown
Penn
Cornell
Dartmouth</p>
<p>This hasn’t been discussed 1,098,112,341 times …</p>
<p>Not that it actually MEANS anything, but:</p>
<p>Harvard/Yale/Princeton
Dartmouth/Columbia
Brown
UPenn
Cornell</p>
<p>Any ranking of the Ivy League schools should be done by major and suitability for a particular student. If ranked by major, I bet that Cornell University would be at the top of the chart.
An interesting exercise might be to expand the Ivy League based on academic merit & prestige. Certainly schools such as MIT, Stanford, Duke, Chicago, Northwestern & Berkeley would be strong candidates.</p>
<p>Cut me a break. If you can get in any of the Ivy’s–congratulations. If not, it does not necessarily mean anything.</p>
<p>Folks-- I am an educator, adviser and professor with 19 years experience. It is up to the individual. If you are motivated and smart, you can succeed. You can be brilliant, but unmotivated and have the path to CEO of GE fall in your lap, and you will most likely fail.</p>
<p>If all you guys are as smart as you say and attend/will be attending “prestigious” Universities, you would know that you CAN’T numerically rank schools. Use your head.</p>
<p>THe Ivy league name has a certain cachet that is equated with prestige. It is an immediate identifier of intelligence for a student going to one of those schools, whether accurate or not. The Ivies are almost always considered among the top 15 schools in the nation so I think it is nothing wrong to give them credit for their excellence. </p>
<p>For rankings by prestige:
Harvard
(Stanford)
Yale
Princeton
(MIT)
Columbia
Penn
(Duke)
Dartmouth
Brown
Cornell</p>
<p>And depending on who you are people throw in Chicago, Northwestern, Wash U, and Hopkins around in there as well. The ivy league is made up of excellent universities that contain some of the best and brightest students in the nation. So don’t be jealous about the label, since it does nothing to demean that stature of Stanford or Mit Or duke students, but just appreciate it for what it is–an indicator of academic excellence (even if it didn’t originate as such).</p>
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</p>
<p>Why cornell, really why not brown?
Please fill me in!
How is “I went to brown” more worth saying then “I went to Cornell”???</p>
<p>I knew, even before viewing this topic, that it would degenerate into a ranking contest.</p>
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<p>I may go back to my former policy of moderating these threads more vigorously to corral them together into one thread.</p>