<p>
</p>
<p>zchry, by any chance, you do realize that typically the studies are easier once you get to graduate school don’t you? — and this is for most schools.</p>
<p>My mistake, I honestly didn’t mean to include Princeton in that. I’ll reduce that statement solely to Harvard.</p>
<p>
In many aspects, such a claim is incorrect.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>zchryens, hence the word “typically” in my post…Please do us a favor and tell us which departments your Reed friends entered at Princeton and stated that they were easier than Reed’s undergraduate school.</p>
<p>Reed has one of the most demanding programs of any American college. Every student must write a thesis to graduate, but before you can even do that, you have to pass a PhD-style battery of oral exams in which you can be grilled on the content of any course from your first 3 years. On a per capita basis, Reed produces more PhDs and research scientists than nearly any other institution in the country (besides CalTech and maybe Harvey Mudd). So why doesn’t it have the admit and yield rates to show for it?</p>
<p>Certainly, it lacks the social prestige of Princeton or Yale. Reed is self-selecting; it is unlikely to get a lot of Hail Mary Pass applications. Nor will it attract too many parent-pleasing robots with straight A’s, coached scores, “community service” Caribbean excursions, and long long checklists of ECs. It is probably more likely to attract the kind of students who blew off busy-work assignments because they were more interested in dissecting cats in their parents’ garage, or reading all the works of a single author who wasn’t on any school reading list.</p>
<p>I’m stereotyping, a little. HYP educate many fabulously brainy students. Most who have what it takes to pick and choose would choose HYP over Reed. But Reed does fill a niche and deserves some respect, too.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Reed gets plenty of respect, but to claim that its students and its undergraduate education are much more intellectual than schools like HYP is totally and utterly unacceptable.</p>
<p>Oh and, by the way, Princeton has had a required Senior Thesis in order to graduate for decades upon decades - with some students also completing Junior Thesis for their majors.</p>
<p>Ugh, I didn’t respond to your previous posts because I thought the debate was pointless, which it was, but I will clarify my position one more time in the hopes that you will read it carefully: Nobody said Reed is superior to Harvard, or that Harvard and its peers cannot offer a good education to someone interested in learning. All that was said was that Reed is a different school that may be the better choice for a certain type of person–because different schools fit different people to a different degree. They aren’t all the same, not all students are looking for the same thing in a school, and not all schools can give their students the same thing.</p>
<p>I hope you’ll stop dredging up outdated statistics now (Reed’s acceptance rate is far below 47% or whatever) because there seriously isn’t anything to prove here. Oh, and a lot of schools have a senior thesis; Reed’s is notoriously hard to complete. Whether Princeton’s senior thesis represents the same commitment I cannot say, but I don’t see why you would bring it up at all.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Ghostt, please take the time to read the posted messages on this thread before making such foolish comments as you have done above…</p>
<p>thanks</p>
<p>Reed and a few other schools (Chicago, Swarthmore) do make a bit of a fetish out of being “intellectual”. It can be a little cloying in some contexts, I’m sure. Though in my opinion the Loren Pope quote amounts to harmless hyperbole about a good school that easily falls off the radar.</p>
<p>^Reed may consider itself as “intellectual”, but few others consider it a top academic school (other than those affiliated with the school).</p>
<p>^ Keep in mind that you never heard of Reed, so you have no idea what anyone else thinks about the school.</p>
<p>OP, the major differences between top-notch universities and top-notch LACs are PRESTIGE and access to top-notch research. Other than those two, almost everything is about even.</p>
<p>^depends on the school. Arguably, no university has a wider reputation than the University of Chicago (home of the so-called, Chicago school of economics, a top ten law school, many world-class graduate programs) and yet most of the NESCAC colleges rank consistently above it in the Revealed Preference head-to-head contests.</p>
<p>“access to top-notch research”</p>
<p>Access is indeed the key. At the LACs every undergrad has access to research; some schools require a master’s level research thesis of all seniors. At the big U the grad students get most of the research opportunities, with the overall research level being higher in some fields than at the LAC.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Yet another uninformative post from informative, who thinks that the world revolves around what people in Boston think.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>ROFL, what do acceptance rates and yields have to do with whether one is intellectual or not?</p>
<p>Intellectual is an attitude, a way of thinking, not some numbers.</p>
<p>Reed is definitely very very well-regarded, definitely on par with top universities (leading producer of PhD students–that’s a strong indicator). If I remember from my college search days, the Reed-US News debacle was basically like</p>
<p>Reed: “US News, your rankings are ******* stupid. We’re not going to participate or give you data.”</p>
<p>US News: “Oh yeah? Well we’ll show you what happens when you choose to defy US News!”</p>
<p>Reed: “Eat it.”</p>
<p>so I’m not surprised that some students now think less of Reed because of its ranking.</p>
<p>informative never even heard of Reed (he’s not really familiar with much outside of Boston other than the usual suspects) but he’s confident that “no one thinks it’s very intellectual.”</p>
<p>My D is going to a top 10 LAC that doesn’t get the immediate name recognition that her twin brother’s top 20 university gets. Of course, that doesn’t matter, because having the man on the street recognize one’s college is of little importance in the scheme of things. Those who are in the know will be in the know, and those who aren’t? Their problem.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>US News actually handled (and continues to handle) the issue quite immaturely. The year Reed refused to submit the US News survey for the first time, it was demoted to the lowest possible category. Given that it had been in the top 15-20 the year before, that raised more than a few eyebrows. A couple of years later, a representative of US News admitted that Reed’s new position was more of a ‘punishment’ for snubbing the rankings than an accurate assessment of the quality of its education. US News sheepishly put Reed back in Tier 1 after that.</p>
<p>Even so, ever since its withdrawal from the rankings, Reed has been assigned very low values in every category where the institutions themselves are usually asked to provide information. On the one hand, US News can always claim plausible deniability here by saying that in the absence of official information, those are its closest estimates; on the other hand, though, it’s obvious that its estimates are not entirely scientific, which makes US News look comically butthurt. In any case, I doubt anyone at Reed is particularly bothered by this; otherwise, it would have changed its stance on college rankings by now.</p>
<p>Personally, I think that it would be fair if US News simply excluded those colleges that do not wish to participate in its rankings from the list, and added a note mentioning them by name and explaining that their positions on the list cannot be determined. The fact that it’s basically making up numbers and statistics seriously undermines its credibility.</p>