Cornell isn’t the bottom Ivy…Dartmouth is. Feel better? 
@monydad
According to my daughter, STEM classes in general are hard. But it varies. My daughter is a STEM major at CAS. A lot of her classes are cross listed under COE. Her first semester, Freshmen, she took 2 CS classes. She coasted with A on both. Second semester, she struggled with a Math class and a more advanced CS class.
For the most part, “fuzzy” classes are easier, relative to STEM.
I think that rigor is good.
I also admire Cornell for its stated (/founding…) purpose: to be a place where anyone can study anything. That’s a cool goal.
I don’t think Cornell sucks at anything that really matters. Students get a great education, the food is apparently pretty good (ya gotta eat…), there seems to be a nice balance of academic competition and collaboration, the school has plenty of resources and activities for students, and post-grad results are generally good. To boot, due to its strong research output and other grad-related accolades – and its Ivy pedigree – Cornell enjoys a very strong international rep.
It might not be Party Central like Penn or Dartmouth and all the students might not be as carefree and happy as the kids at Brown, and the name might not carry quite as much weight as HYP or the other Ivy C – it hasn’t been around half as long as those four titans – but Cornell is a magnificent school.
Cornell does get an unfair bad rep amongst the ivies I feel. While its departments on the whole are not as strong as HYP, Penn, Columbia, they are better than Brown and Dartmouth. The bad rep stems from the fact that it is a bigger school than the rest of the ivies, it is thought of as the easiest to get in for undergrad, it is the youngest of the ivies and it has partnerships with state schools.
But in terms of actual rigor, it is probably the most rigorous ivy after Princeton.
Besides, the prestige differences amongst the ivies have not any practical implications for the real world, and after HYP the differences become much smaller.
If ever there were a definition of splitting hairs …
Asking which Ivy is easiest to get into is like asking which NBA team is easiest to be drafted onto.
I love your attitude @Ivygirl18. Cornell is an amazing school and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
There is a reason that Cornell applications are rising faster over time, than all of the other Ivies. Now it has a 12% admission rate, which is amazing for a school with almost 15,000 undergrads. If they want the lowest admission rate in the Ivy League, all they have to do is cut the incoming class to 1,500 students and they would have it.
That whole “lesser Ivy” think is idiotic. When are they going to begin calling Princeton and Yale, “Lesser HYPSM’s”? That would make just as much sense. Interestingly, I have never heard this “Lesser Ivy” garbage from grads or students at the other Ivies. It usually comes from someone who has no idea what they are talking about.
No joke, I had one HS student tell me he didn’t like Cornell because he didn’t like the name. He said it sounded like “corn” and made him think he’d be going to college on a farm (?!) I couldn’t believe it but such are the things that matter to students. So much for the rankings…
@Much2learn I think the “lesser Ivy” thing is mostly an obsession of high school students and their parents. I haven’t heard students at other Ivy League colleges refer to Cornell that way. Then again, I always laugh when students say they are applying to “HYP”, as if those three universities are at all alike. Instead, all it shows is that they are basing their decision on “branding”.
I went to Harvard having been rejected by Columbia. I’ve had relatives attend Columbia, Barnard, and Brown. I cannot honestly say that my experience or education was in any way better than theirs. I also remain convinced that admission rates have zero to do with how good a given university is. I frankly find focusing on such “statistics” a bit silly…a way of reassuring ourselves that WE are really smart.
My non STEM kid was going to apply to Brown, but her private college counselor (an Asian) said to her, “Of all the schools you could go to, why would you want to go to a school called Brown?” 
She ended up at Cornell.
I think both of my kids have equivalent intelligence (based on their SAT scores and how they did in high school). They both graduated from Cornell. The older one was a math major and younger one was a philosophy and independent study major. The younger one had near perfect GPA and the older one’s GPA was .2 lower. I think STEM/Engineering courses are harder at Cornell, just like any where else.
@oldfort Did either of your children have difficulty finding employment upon graduation? I am choosing Cornell over state schools that offered generous merit aid to me. I will be incurring some debt at Cornell but feel it will be worth the investment. Thank you!
Depends on what field you’re going into.
Name matters a lot if you’re going into finance, but doesn’t matter at all if you’re applying to medical school.
My older daughter did go into finance. She did on campus recruiting and was able to get multiple offers. My younger daughter plans on going to law school in the near future and she was able to get a job at an US Attorney’s office for 2 years through alumni connection. Both of my nephews also went Cornell and they were also able to find summer internships and jobs upon graduation.
jfx246 is right about medical school. It doesn’t matter as much where you went to school when it comes to medical school application. The only issue is sometimes people change their mind about medical school.
@oldfort @jfx246 I’m going into physics/astronomy/math. Cornell’s partnership with NASA and the NY space consortium was a big draw. Not looking to go to Med school.
@STEM2021 Same here, replacing math with CS (choosing Cornell over Berkeley because L&S doesn’t guarantee majors). I went to a reception held by Cornell alumni in my local area and the said there was an incredible amount of opportunity for internships, especially over the summer. Apparently, you can get credits (around 3) for summer research in some instances.
I was also drawn by Cornell’s partnership with NASA. One of the alumni there said that some students there were picked up by Google and other large companies for experience. Because there are so many alumni, there are so many instant connections.
I’m an engineer and will graduate in May and I’ve received a few decent job offers.
I have no idea if I made the best choice, I simply made a choice.
Like everyone else, I applied to all the usual schools . A few acceptances, a couple of rejects and a couple of waitlists. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the schools that accepted or rejected… it truly was a lottery.
But speaking for myself, Cornell was hard. I came from a small town (and a small school).
It was pretty tough adjusting to the land of “A” students. Like all the top schools everyone that gets in is pretty sharp and that means they do pretty good on the tests. I thought I was great in math & physics but I was served humble pie in my freshman classes. Calc was really tough and physics III was really rough too. I assume all the top schools push the challenge. Is one more prestigious than another?.. I don’t know. Is there an order to the top schools? I don’t know. I’m just glad it will be done in a month. The people I’ve met are really nice and I’m glad I have them as friends. And there was no shortage of job offers.
@PAYNE101 Thanks for sharing! I’m definitely ready to be relentlessly outcompeted by other Cornellians because it’s a top school, as you said. I come from a suburban public school that’s relatively large but not extremely competitive.
Do you think there’s anything else we need to know before going there, academically or otherwise?
For the person that said Cornell sounded like “a farm”…actually it feels like a farm. And, FWIW, I think that Stanford (nickname “the Farm”) feels a lot like Cornell even though the climate, etc are different. Another school where I have spent a bit of time that feels very much like Cornell (Cornell west?) is UC Davis. YMMV… glad to know people are still having fun in Mary Donlon Hall, but I think all the old folks know that they tore down the truly social dorms when they removed the U Halls…
@pineappledragon just know that all freshmen have to take two writing seminars their first year. My S is finishing his first year as a statistics major, took his two writing seminars and did fine. Presenting is part of the seminars as well. He came from a large suburban highly competitive HS (the salutatorian is going to Harvard; was accepted to multiple Ivies), so he was pretty prepared academically but his two calc classes kicked his butt. I recommended to my S to get help immediately. I think he could have taken the calc classes in later years but he wanted to get them out of the way. Hope you can learn from this and all the best to you. Just know there are lots of resources available for help and the professors and TAs are available/easily accessible
Advice…hmmm
- first semester is sneaky hard… starts off easy and then really ramps up by November.
- if you can get a library job then get one …Mann was a great place to work & study & get some money.
- Get hockey season tickets (there is a lot of school spirit & it’s fun). And Princeton/Harvard tickets have good resale
- don’t take the wine class for a grade (take it pass/fail it’s really hard)
- the job fair sucked… the line seemed liked it was a mile long. I always seemed to have classes and couldn’t wait.
- I liked going to the Chapel for mass. (By the way Princeton has a really nice chapel as well). I’m not overly religious but I’m glad I worked that into my routine.
- just because you have high SATs doesn’t mean your smart.
- I really enjoy the clock tower, the chime masters have left their mark on me and I will miss the beautiful sound of the bells.
- there is school spirit at Cornell. If you need to gauge it then attend a Cornell/Harvard hockey game at Harvard.
The Cornell alumni make it feel like a Cornell home game (even if it’s at Harvard.)
– actually I was surprised how little school spirit there was at Harvard… MIT, Princeton, Yale seem to have way more… that surprised me. - the fly fishing in the gorges can be pretty good. I have one spot that has some nice brown trout and a lot have nice smallmouth bass. Ithaca falls is beautiful and there are landlocked salmon, trout and smallmouth bass in there. But I prefer the quiet spots around campus.
- the arboretum is beautiful and is worth visiting often (it’s part of my running route)…