The Ivy League has done a great job, but there is great quality around the country

College Search & Selection
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<p>Combining eight stellar academic schools into a single athletic conference was either a stroke of genius or just fortunate timing to be so constructed to take advantage of the rising visibility of college sports over the past half-century (the Ivy League was formed in 1954). Either way, the benefits to the Ivy colleges have been incalculable both in terms of the national prominence and the accompanying prestige that the term “Ivy League” connotes. </p>

<p>Today the premier colleges in the land are HYP (and probably Stanford and MIT and maybe Duke). The benefits of the Ivy League, however, may be greatest for the non-HYP Ivies. Dartmouth, Columbia, U Penn, Brown and Cornell are all terrific academic institutions, but how much of their reputation and their attraction is derived from their affiliation with HYP and the Ivy League name? Put any of these colleges in a different athletic conference and consider how differently they might be perceived by the public and by academics who grade, via PA scores. I was talking with a friend recently about this and she suggested the following is probably a better reflection of the quality of the Ivy League schools once you strip away the Ivy label:</p>

<p>Dartmouth = Rice
Columbia = Wash U
U Penn = Emory
Brown = Georgetown
Cornell = USC</p>

<p>Many Ivy defenders will undoubtedly balk at these comparisons, but are these colleges really so qualitatively and quantitatively different in their sizes, in their student quality, in the quality of the undergraduate education that they provide, etc? </p>

<p>The point is not to knock the Ivy colleges-they are ALL terrific colleges-but rather to illuminate the quality of other great schools around the country. They don’t have the Ivy athletic conference label, but other than that, they have compelling undergraduate offerings.</p>

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<p>I agree and would furthermore argue that there are many other great schools out there. No one type of school is a good fit for everyone (despite the claims of some here <a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=399133%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=399133&lt;/a> that Princeton and Brown provide the "perfect balance"). There is no single perfect!!</p>

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<p>I am not an Ivy defender, but you are missing a key ingredient: location, location, location. USC is in SouthCentral LA, and Cornell is "four hours from anywhere." Rice is in Houston, albeit a beautiful residential section, whereas Dartmouth is in the backwoods of New Hampshire. Columbia's main attraction is not an athletic conference but the fact that it is located in a certain city. Penn-Emory, huh?.</p>

<p>Part of what makes an "undergraduate education" and the colleges themselves is the local environment, which your "friend" just misses.</p>

<p>btw: I don't get the similarities at all between Brown and GT.</p>

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<p>Agreed on location, but personally I prefer Ithaca over Southern California -- which further illustrates my point that there is no single perfect university.</p>

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<p>The Ivy League is not just an athletic conference. These schools participate in a number of inter-faculty events. Before the worldwide web, they made research results and raw data available to each other. They still do. So does the Big 10. Don't make the mistake of thinking that conferences are athletic, only. Some have very little cooperation outside sports, but others have a great deal of cooperation.</p>

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<p>I actually think that your point IS to knock the Ivies, which is something that you spend a lot of time doing and pretending you don't hawkette (and now it's your cue to make a statement about how people who went to Ivies are thin-skinned, have a chip on their shoulders and view everything through the prism of their own biased Ivy-League rose colored glasses).</p>

<p>I see no need to make such silly comparisons. I don't think it is helpful and I don't see that many similarities between the schools you are describing. I think that if people are interested in excellent city schools, one possible list would include Georgetown, Rice, Harvard, U Penn, Brown, USC, Columbia, Emory, U Chicago, Wash U., Tufts and a host of others. If people are interested in smallish to medium liberal arts schools with a pronounced undergraduate focus, a list might include Rice, Dartmouth, Princeton, Brown, Yale, Williams, Amherst, Pomona and a number of others. If people are interested in great sports schools, you would have USC, Duke, University of Michigan, Notre Dame and Stanford on the list.</p>

<p>I could go on and on, but there's really no point. As I think we all agree, there are any number of excellent schools out there. I don't think that most people reading College Confidential are so myopic that they think that the Ivies have a monopoly on great teachers, great students and an excellent education. I would hope that parents and students are making their college decisions on which school is the best fit for them, not which school has more supposed "prestige", but I tend to resent your simplistic scenarios and comparisons and your attempts to knock the Ivies.</p>

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<p>^^^ Great post midatlmom, but even though many of us agree with you, the opportunity for some people to put down the Ivy League in favor of other schools will always be seized upon by more people, and more people will believe the myths and rumors that the Ivy League is the be all and end all.</p>

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<p>Sure, these schools may be similar in terms of selectivity but, as usual, people on CC overvalue selectivity. Outside of class size and quality of student body, these schools are NOTHING alike (location, culture, strength of programs, research capabilities, etc.). I've read a few of your posts, hawkette. They seem to always center on selectivity (higher selectivity=better; if a school's selectivity isn't as high as its PA indicates, the PA score must be flawed). You ignore much of what is intrinsic to the school itself.</p>

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<p>Strangely enough midatlmom, there are people myopic enough to think that. Alot of people up here apply for only ivies and leave schools like Duke and Stanford as safeties. As delusional as those people are, I think a post like this is good, and yes alot of the ivies do get far more credit than what they deserve.</p>

<p>For example, columbia, all of you rave about the city, but if you lived here you would realize its just like anything else, and hell columbia is outside of harlem. I've got friends over there and its literally in the heart of harlem, so I'm not quite sure why everyone has this rosy view of columbia, though the campus is nice.</p>

<p>Cornell, is in the middle of nowhere, and the academics in many of its programs aren't nearly on par with some of its more well known programs (engineering etc), but I found they achieve a ranking extremely high for only having a good amount of strength in one area. Thats not to say other programs are bad, but I don't think that all of the programs are on the caliber you would like to believe.</p>

<p>As for the others, I can academically they aren't necessarily bad matches, the academics at those schools certainly are respectable.</p>

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<p>Harlem is the least of Columbia's problems...</p>

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<p>"Cornell, is in the middle of nowhere"
And this is somehow correlated to academic strength???</p>

<p>"and the academics in many of its programs aren't nearly on par with some of its more well known programs (engineering etc)"
So which programs aren't as strong? The humanities are among the best, the sciences are top of the line, AAP, ILR, and Hotel are all considered the best in their field, and the ag school has what many consider the premier agricultural sciences program in the nation. Most programs rank in the top-15 ... right on par with where Cornell is ranked nationally. </p>

<p>"but I found they achieve a ranking extremely high for only having a good amount of strength in one area."
Right, that dang location should push Cornell back to 25-30. You're clueless.</p>

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<p>i'm sorry, but i just have to say that Penn is a better school than Emory, with or without the ivy label- Emory is a great school, but after doing my research, they are on different levels academically</p>

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<p>I would put it like this, simplistically:</p>

<p>Harvard - Stanford
Yale -
Princeton - Duke
Columbia - Chicago
Cornell - MIT/Georgetown
Penn - Northwestern
Dartmouth - Rice
Brown - USC</p>

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<p>hhmm... i wouldnt compare USC with brown because firstly USC's undergrad student population is almost four times that of Brown's. Secondly brown has very few professional masters or graduate programmes but does USC has alot. infact i think USC is more internationally recognised for its graduate programmes
And i agree with bluebayou and brownieboy.....You cant compare Penn and Emory. i'd probably pair penn with U chicago or Northwestern</p>

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<p>just to reply to hyakku--</p>

<p>If you were to look at the Gourman rankings of undergraduate departments(and I recognize that many people have issues with them), Cornell is very highly ranked in numerous areas including English (#6), environmental science (#3), chemistry (#11), physics (#3), political science (#10), history (#11) and computer science (#4) and that's only the ones I looked up. I actually think that Cornell is somewhat undervalued as a school because it's less selective than some of the other well-known schools.</p>

<p>Obviously, people might not be interested in Cornell because of its somewhat remote location and/or its size, but those are different issues unrelated to academics</p>

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<p>midatlmom,
If one reads CC much, then it becomes pretty obvious, pretty quickly that the Ivy League and the prestige associated with these fine schools cast a long shadow on people's national perceptions of colleges. Unquestionably, many high schoolers and their families have a bias toward these fine schools which has been created via the major media players in the East. Nothing wrong with that except that it ignores/gives scant attention to the many other great schools around the country. The result is an (IMO) inaccurate portrayal of the quality differences that really exist among these colleges at the UNDERGRADUATE level. So, if by pointing out that there is great quality as well at other schools is interpreted by you as an attack on the Ivy League colleges, then so be it. I don't feel that way, but I do feel strongly that there are lots of terrific schools that deserve better treatment generally and particularly on CC (heck, USC isn't even listed as a Top University by CC).</p>

<p>Re the schools selected, you may be looking at the comparisons more literally than they were intended. The attempt was to make linkages involving schools of roughly similar undergraduate size and similar selectivity as measured by SAT scores. I agree that, in some cases, the locations are greatly dissimilar (eg, USC and Cornell). The point is that when people (high school and college students, parents, others) start thinking and posting about great colleges, the common framework is to accept the Ivies as great colleges and then most of the others (outside of Stanford, MIT, Caltech and maybe Duke) have to argue their way into the conversation (and in the case of Wash U, they'd have to beg, borrow and steal to be accepted as a peer by many Ivy fans). My framework is different and accepts a larger universe of "great" schools based on their academic worth and the quality of their overall undergraduate experience. Again, if you want to interpret that as Ivy-bashing, then so be it. But I think that some students and families are incorrectly limiting the choices of top colleges available to top high school students and reinforcing the too-narrow academic status quo that has existed for 50 years or more. The country has changed a lot over that time and the quality is spread out and much more evenly than is generally appreciated and reported, particularly on this forum.</p>

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<p>Here's how I would put it (with some CA emphasis):</p>

<p>Harvard=UCBerkeley</p>

<p>Yale=Stanford</p>

<p>Princeton=Rice</p>

<p>Columbia=UChicago</p>

<p>Dartmouth=Duke</p>

<p>Penn=Northwestern</p>

<p>Cornell=JHU</p>

<p>Brown=WashU</p>

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<p>jazzy:</p>

<p>Personally, I don't think there is any Ivy comparable to Berkeley. I suppose if you took pure research as the only criterion, you could make a case for that. I don't think it would be a strong case, but it would be a case.</p>

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<p>Columbia U=Wash U..lol COlumbia U=U Chicago, ok I agree, because Chicago is a world class Uni.</p>

<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_University%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_University&lt;/a> Borrowed from Wikipedia (a decen source of info):</p>

<p>Columbia University is home to the Pulitzer Prize, which, for over a century, has rewarded outstanding achievement in journalism, literature and music. The university holds the record of having graduated more Nobel Prize laureates in science than any other American college [2]. It has been the birthplace of FM radio, the first American university to offer anthropology and political science as academic disciplines, the first American school to grant the M.D. degree, and where the foundation of modern genetics was discovered. As the birthplace of the Manhattan Project, its Morningside Heights campus was the first North American site where the uranium atom was split. Literary and artistic movements as varied as the Harlem Renaissance, the Beat movement and post-colonialism all took shape within Columbia's gates in the 20th century.</p>

<p>Columbia faculty awarded the Nobel Prize in the last 10 years(1996-2006):[87]</p>

<p>Faculty Affiliation at Columbia Nobel Prize
1.Orhan Pamuk Dept.of Middle East Languages & Cultures Literature, 2006
2.Edmund Phelps Dept. of Economics Economics, 2006
3.Richard Axel Center for Neurobiology & Behavior,A.B.1967 Physiology/Medicine, 2004
4.Joseph Stiglitz Dept. of Economics Economics, 2001
5.Eric Kandel Center for Neurobiology & Behavior Physiology/Medicine, 2000
6.Robert Mundell Dept. of Economics Economics, 1999
7.Horst Stormer Dept. of Physics Physics, 1998
8.William Vickrey Dept. of Economics,M.A.1937,PhD1948 Economics, 1996 </p>

<p>Columbia affiliates awarded the Nobel Prize in the last 10 years(1996-2006):[87]</p>

<p>Name Affiliation at Columbia Nobel Prize
9.John Mather Goddard Institute for Space Studies Physics, 2006
10.Robert Grubbs PhD 1968 Chemistry, 2005
11.Linda Buck Research Scientist 1980-91 Physiology/Medicine, 2004
12.William Knowles PhD 1942 Chemistry, 2001
13.James Heckman Faculty 1970-74 Economics, 2000
14.Louis Ignarro B.S. 1962 Physiology/Medicine, 1998
15.Robert Merton B.S. 1966 Economics, 1997</p>

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<p>Harvard- Amherst
Yale- Vassar
Princeton- Williams
Penn- no good match
........Wharton- Babson
Dartmouth- Bowdoin
Cornell- Colgate
Brown- Wesleyan
Columbia- maybe Reed?</p>

<p>Not that these are much less selective, but I think they're a lot closer to the Ivies in feel than Georgetown, Emory, Berkeley, or WUStL. </p>

<p>
[quote]
Obviously, people might not be interested in Cornell because of its somewhat remote location

[/quote]

Oddly enough, that's one thing I really like about Cornell. I've never really liked big cities. :eek:</p>