<p>Harvard is obviously an upper tier Ivy, as is Yale.</p>
<p>Brown and Cornell are lower tier Ivies.</p>
<p>How do the other Ivies fare within this ranking system, and what is it based on?</p>
<p>There are no “lower tier Ivies.” It just so happens that a lot of people condescend to Cornell.</p>
<p>If it were based on prestige, Harvard would be far ahead the rest.</p>
<p>HYP</p>
<p>Columbia, Upenn</p>
<p>Brown, Cornell</p>
<p>But really you’re splitting hairs for these fours.</p>
<p>Top Tier: Harvard, Princeton and Yale</p>
<p>Middle Tier: UPenn and Brown and Columbia</p>
<p>Lower Tier: Dartmouth and Cornell</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>^ True ^</p>
<p>Top Tier: Harvard, Princeton, Yale, UPenn, Columbia, Dartmouth, Cornell, Brown.</p>
<p>Ivies are Ivies. Don’t rank them within themselves.</p>
<p>Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Upenn, Cornell, Brown, Dartmouth.</p>
<p>Haha, I completely agree with you. It’s just that, in multiple articles I read, there was constant reference to the lower tier Ivies, and I just wanted to confirm which ones they were referring to.</p>
<p>Harvard
Yale/ Princeton
Dartmouth/ Columbia/ Brown
Penn/ Cornell</p>
<p>Undergraduate (I’m just going to separate into two tiers for this one since I don’t really know much about Columbia, Brown, and Cornell):</p>
<p>1) Princeton, Dartmouth, Yale
2) Harvard, Columbia, Brown, Penn, Cornell</p>
<p>Overall:</p>
<p>1) Harvard, Princeton, Yale
2) Penn, Columbia, Brown
3) Dartmouth, Cornell</p>
<p>Prestige:</p>
<p>1) Harvard
2) Yale, Princeton
3) Penn, Columbia, Brown
4) Cornell, Dartmouth</p>
<p>Harvard, Yale
…
.
.
Princeton
Columbia
Dartmouth
.
Brown
.
UPenn Cornell</p>
<p>“…there was constant reference to the lower tier Ivies,”</p>
<p>A non-HYP Ivy League school.</p>
<p>There is no “ranking system” within the Ivies. Unless you’re talking about objective things like acceptance rate, or endowment size…</p>
<p>Harvard is undoubtedly No. 1 in terms of prestige and fame. Yale is surely No. 2, but probably not far behind. After that I’d say Princeton… maybe then Columbia, and after that I don’t have an opinion.</p>
<p>I can tell you I wouldn’t spit on a full ride to Cornell if that was the best offer I got.</p>
<p>Prestige-wise:</p>
<p>Harvard
Yale
Princeton
Columbia
Dartmouth/Penn/Brown
Cornell</p>
<p>While generally people think that Harvard, Yale, and Princeton sit a notch above everyone else, how you rank the others among themselves, and how you rank HYP among themselves, is subjective, dynamic over time, and variable regionally.</p>
<p>When/where I was in high school, Dartmouth was seen as fully competitive with HYP. The #1 kid at our school usually got his pick of colleges, and while most chose Harvard or Yale, every five years or so one of those people chose Dartmouth. (For some reason, there wasn’t a lot of interest in Princeton.) We liked Cornell a lot, too, and ranked Cornell and Brown next. We saw Columbia and Penn as sketchy, places to go if you couldn’t get into any of the other Ivies, Stanford, or Amherst, Williams, Wesleyan.</p>
<p>I’m not defending that view as correct, I’m just reporting what it was.</p>
<p>Brown got a huge boost when Amy Carter decided to go there, and lots of people still see it as the fourth “major”. At the schools my kids went to, it was much more popular than Columbia. One of my son’s friends turned down Stanford and Columbia for Brown, and another chose it over Columbia, Dartmouth, and Penn.</p>
<p>Cornell has gotten unjustifiably devalued because it is larger and isolated. Current fashion runs to urban and suburban, not exurban, and USNWR’s obsession with selectivity means that Cornell is marked down. It’s actually an incredibly strong university; objectively it could easily be fourth or fifth. Penn is also somewhat larger (but not as large as Cornell), and therefore less selective, but it has gotten boosts from its location, the immense popularity of business and finance over the past couple of decades (i.e., Wharton), and its very effective leadership for much of that period (former President Judith Rodin, probably the Ivies’ MVP of the past 20 years). Columbia seems to be hugely popular right now, and it’s all attributable to its location. People want to be in NYC. In many ways, it’s a screwed-up institution, but who cares? You can get to Wall St. from your dorm for an internship in 20 mins.</p>
<p>Dartmouth resembles a big LAC. In the circles where rural LACs are still popular, Dartmouth is incredibly popular, the best of the best. And, if I remember correctly, if what you care about is making money, Dartmouth grads, on average, seem to do better than any of the others.</p>
<p>Ranking them is really a crock. Depending on who you are and what you want, your order of preference among them would vary completely, and a lot of it would be based on completely nonacademic factors. They all have plenty of that mystical quality, “prestige”, and prestige matters a whole lot less in the world than high school seniors (and some of their parents) seem to think.</p>
<p>“Lower tier Ivies”? That’s like saying the “slow guys” in the finals of the Olympic 100m dash. They are all great and the differences between them in quality are very small.</p>
<p>… you could arrange the colleges alphabetically … ;)</p>
<p>^Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn, Princeton, Yale</p>
<p>^ Actually that’s what introduced my to Brown</p>
<p>This is BS.</p>
<p>This is dumb, obviously Yale is better than all of the other Ivies.</p>
<p>LOL, just kidding. Honestly I think the difference in the education you receive from them is so marginal it’s basically insignificant. The only thing separating them is the notion of which is more “prestigious.”</p>