<p>why is everyone so hard on cornell?</p>
<p>They are probably hard on it because it’s not as old as the other Ivies are. While the other seven members of the Ivy League were founded before America was even a country, Cornell was founded in the 1860’s.</p>
<p>A lot of prestige is based on age.</p>
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<p>That’s how CC lists them: <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/ivy-league/[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/ivy-league/</a></p>
<p>I think Cornell gets picked on because their structure is a little different than the other Ivys. Cornell has 7 undergraduate college but three of them are connected to the state. As I recall admissions to these three colleges can be very different especially with regard to in-state and out of state applicants. Here is a Wiki explanation of these three colleges:
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<p>I’d rank them like admitone in post # 8, but agree that the differences among the Ivies in terms of quality of the student body are slim to none. Certain programs are definitely stronger at some schools compared to others. Speaking of Cornell, they’ve traditionally been highly regarded in engineering, for example. In my opinion, Brown is the only school I’d rank significantly lower than the others in terms of educational quality, resources, and on-campus recruiting.</p>
<p>It is time to point out that changing their
spelling to ‘Ale’ should help our friends in
New Haven reverse their standing in the
rankings both on CC and in Peyton’s helpful
listing!</p>
<p>This way if we become Arvard they still get
to keep the advantage.</p>
<p>:)</p>
<p>Also, Cornell has the biggest undergrad population of the ivies, so it’s statistically easiest to gain admission. Thus it earns the epithet “safety of the Ivies.” The quality of education there is excellent.</p>
<p>I think thirty years ago Cornell was considered a very desirable college, now it’s been somewhat displaced by Penn (the two essentially switched places).</p>
<p>Why are people really trying to rank the Ivies? That’s just dumb.</p>
<p>I think that since golf is a sport of rich people, and the Ivies are rich colleges, we should analyze the name rankings using inverse-scoring. With this implemented, it becomes clear that Yale is best.</p>
<p>To seriously answer the OP, the best ranking for Ivies is the two tiered structure of HYP in the first tier, and the others in the second tier. If considering undergrad, Dartmouth elevates to the first tier (although certainly not for affordability; its FA is decidedly second tier.)</p>
<p>Actually Dartmouth is one of the best FA with all its recent changes. Probably the best of the non-HYP Ivies.</p>
<p>It still isn’t anything close to HYP level, though. My offered grant from Yale was 20k more than my grant from Dartmouth.</p>
<p>Saw a similar difference in my son’s grant from Harvard compared to Brown.</p>
<p>JHS and coureur, Well said!</p>
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<p>I think the problem with Cornell is that it was founded on a fundamentally different philosophy than all the others. It was meant to be egalitarian - to provide any person study in any field they chose, so long as they were qualified. As such, the typical student is not so easy to ascertain because each field really draws upon different values. The others - especially HYP, were always feeder schools for the ruling class. </p>
<p>Right there Cornell is going to be snubbed without even looking at stats. </p>
<p>It was pretty radical for its day, and I just think that in our current trend toward urban sophistication, people tend to look down on institutions that help feed us and train people not only in the liberal arts and business but also in fields where they actually get their hands dirty. Not very Gossip Girl chic. </p>
<p>I don’t know how one compares a school structured like Cornell to one structured like Brown or Dartmouth and say one is better than the other. Might as well ask whether UMich or Bryn Mawr is better.</p>
<p>I’d say Northwestern is probably the closest structural peer to Cornell, and Stanford was modeled after Cornell. I think that’s a prime example of location, location, location. Would Stanford be what it is today if it weren’t in the middle of Silicon Valley (allowing for its contributions in creating Silicon Valley in the first place)? I can guarantee you Cornell would be much more highly regarded were its main campus in New York City (it is actually expanding operations in NYC quite a bit).</p>
<p>Cornell just built a top-notch life sciences research facility and is putting a lot of resources into developing nanotechnologies for bioengineering, so perhaps a new respect for the school will emerge if it can become a major contributor to that industry. </p>
<p>I studied at Harvard after graduating from Cornell, and frankly developed a profound appreciation for what I could learn and how I could learn at Cornell that Harvard simply could not provide. I personally would not have been happy at any of the other Ivies, so I guess I get annoyed when people always snub it without really understanding its mission.</p>
<p>“The others - especially HYP, were always feeder schools for the ruling class…It was pretty radical for its day,”</p>
<p>Dartmouth is an even bigger exception and even more radical for its day. It was founded as a school for American Indians.</p>
<p>Upper Tier ivies: Stanford, MIT and CalTech</p>
<p>Lower Tier Ivies: University of Virginia, Swarthmore and Pomona</p>
<p>^
That’s supposed to be a joke, right? Just in case not, there are 8 schools in a very specific Ivy League athletic conference.</p>
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<p>That’s pretty cool. I didn’t know that. I would only offer that Dartmouth has clearly abandoned its original mission while Cornell has stuck to it. But, kudos to Dartmouth.</p>
<p>Dartmouth hasn’t abandoned its original mission. It works hard to make certain that it has a decent number of Native American students.</p>
<p>But creating a missionary school – that’s what it was – was not radical when Dartmouth was founded. Applejack is right that Cornell was extremely progressive for its time, although it had the support of the NY State Legislature. Cornell was also progressive in opening its doors to women and racial/ethnic minorities from the get-go. I’ve never read the Karabell book, but I don’t remember anyone ever thinking Cornell had a Jewish quota, when places like Yale and Princeton obviously did.</p>
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<p>A better way to put it is that Dartmouth <em>rediscovered</em> its original mission. It had turned pretty much all white over the centuries until about 40 years ago. With the general rising social awareness of the late 60s/early 70s, Dartmouth re-embraced its mission of educating Native Americans. (It’s also when they stopped calling their athletic teams the Indians and became Big Green instead.)</p>
<p>There was an American Indian kid in my high school back then who went to Dartmouth. He was perfect for them. He was Native American, he had decent stats, and he was pretty good football player. Dartmouth recruited him hard.</p>
<p>Louise Erdrich is a fairly well-known Native American novelist who graduated from Dartmouth as part of their effort to educate smart, talented Native Americans. They brought her back to her alma mater as Commencement speaker a few years ago.</p>
<p>Louise Erdrich married one of her Dartmouth Native American Studies professors, Michael Dorris, and spent at least a decade after graduation as part of the Dartmouth community.</p>