One interesting thing I discovered at many other selectives (not HYP and them) is that even if a student enroll in a graduate course (as in a pure graduate course or the graduate section of a mixed course), they are subjected to different requirements such as not having to do a presentation or opting out of a writing assignment. At Emory, if you enrolled in the graduate section, you were required to do the work at the same level of the graduate students and complete all the same assignments. I’m guessing a lot of the more “hardcore” things I’m seeing at Emory are kind of “remnants” of “old Emory” which had a quite stringent and rigorous set of general education requirements (kind of resembling a core but a “little” more flexibility)…and at this point in time, I guess it was going off the dreams of the president preceding the current one who envisioned Emory being more like Chicago than some other “work hard play hard” schools or even other D-3’s like WashU. Of course you can only do but so much when the curriculum and student body has such a “Big 3” pre-professional slant.
These are things I feel tippy tops never had to deal with as much…they had many people content with high paid jobs or even PhD’s after undergrad. Many other “new” schools outside of these are HUGE pre-professional factories, more so than HYP. UG business programs (often at the expense of particularly strong econ. departments) seem to be a correlate of elite schools that ultimately become pre-prof factories. It appears to make a huge difference in terms of the academic offerings and their level, especially outside of science. Like honestly, business school classes even at the top 10 or so programs seem to pale in comparison to the intensity (namely mathematical rigor) of economics courses at schools notarized for their econ. departments. Maybe an exception is Wharton and even then…I am willing to bet that even some of their better courses would not compare to more difficult economics courses at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, or Chicago though I suppose the workload in many Wharton courses may be more “meaningful”…I guess. But elite econ. departments are meant for math buffs I guess…and those types will find a way to make their theoretical knowledge practical if they really want to.