Wharton Prof Adam Grant: UPenn's Hypercompetitive Culture is the Worst I've Seen

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Pennsylvania
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Recently, there have been a couple thread’s about Penn’s culture, and the competitiveness of the student body.

See Here for example: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-pennsylvania/1977772-is-upenn-compared-to-other-colleges-a-stressful-environment.html#latest"

An article in the fall from acclaimed Wharton Professor Adam Grant, then, deserves mention. You can read the full article here: http://www.thedp.com/article/2016/10/adam-grant-wharton-preprofessional-culture-grading-curves

The Wharton Prof calls Penn’s hypercompetitive culture: “by far the worst I have ever seen.” It’s an interesting read.

Granted, this is just the view of one person, but Professor Grant interacts with lots of students, and is particularly well situated to provide analysis on a student body’s culture.

I have to say, the professor’s view matches my own when I was a graduate student at Penn. In my view, it wasn’t students necessarily competing against one another. Rather, Penn seemed to get a lot of students who overachieved in MANY areas (not just one area), and so there was a critical mass of students who felt they needed to push themselves academically, for their singing group, in student government, etc. This was in stark contrast to say, Chicago or Harvard, where there were a fair number of students accepted just because of incredible acumen in one area (be it mathematics, physics, whatever), and that was their core concern. They didn’t care how dance recital or their comedy troupe’s performance went - they were there to be part of a specific department and culture.

In any case, it’s interesting to read the Wharton Prof’s views!

(Not sure if I posted this earlier, so apologies if this is redundant.)

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@Cue7 yes this was an old article it has been posted on here before.

The thing to keep in mind is that Penn people are very competitive with themselves. They really like to push themselves and do many different things ( academics, internships, research, leadership positions in clubs and social life).

However they still find time to collaborate and help each other. People are not competitive/cutthroat against each other, most of them just push themselves very hard.

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@Penn95

Yes - at least in my experience, the problem was NOT students competing against each other. Rather, the issue was students trying to excel personally in so many different areas, and thereby creating an atmosphere of considerable stress. I can’t even count the number of times undergrads I mentored/tutored weren’t free until (literally) 11pm on a Tuesday night, because after class ended at 4:30pm, they had 6 hours of extra-curricular “work” to do (student group meetings, dance recital, etc.). If you do that 5-6 days a week, you’re bound to end up exhausted and stressed.

Personally, I blame Penn’s admissions office. They recruit and retain wayyy too much of the “same” student - e.g. the business-y engineering student who also was student government president in high school, the cross country runner who is interested in english and was the leader of the high school prom planning committee, the nursing student who was the HS yearbook editor, etc. etc. These students aren’t all of a sudden going to STOP being this way when they get to college. Just the opposite - when they’re surrounded by all these people who are similar, they’re just going to do all this with even MORE intensity.

Frankly, Penn needs at least some students who just sat around and did math - exceptionally hard math - all day in high school. Or, the student who was a big stats nerd in high school, and their goal at Penn is to take stats classes - hard stats classes - for four years. I never met any kids like this at Penn. They pretty much all fit the archetype I described above.

Essentially, I saw all this as a function of bad Admissions policy. They don’t recruit and retain enough people who were there at Penn for “one” (or a couple, or even a few) things. I’m sure there is variety here - but the proportions are way off.

Of course, not everyone at Penn is this way - but the school has a really high portion (I’d say, a higher portion than almost any other top school) of students who are like this. It’s even different from Penn’s closest cultural peers - Duke and Northwestern - because, at D and NU, D1 athletics are hyper-serious, and their athletes don’t tend to meld with the general student body in quite the same way.

It’s unfortunate.

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@Cue7 Penn is most similar to Stanford is that regard (Stanford is probably Penn’s biggest cultural peer). Stanford has the Duck syndrome, Penn has the Penn face, Stanford kids are very social, Penn kids are very social, both schools have a strong preprofessional element in addition to strong liberal arts etc.

I do not think it is reallY unfortunate. Every school has a different culture. Penn is not for everyone. Yes people are very busy but they choose to be this way, they enjoy being very active and doing many different things as well as they can. People do enjoy this kind of environment and in fact there are many social outlets to balance out the heavy academic.research.extracurricular workload. As you said yourself Penn likes people who not only can take this lifestyle but also enjoy it. But that also doesn’t mean that there are many kids at Penn who take it a bit easier.

But every top school has their own unique culture. For example one should not go to Chicago if they are not ready for insanely hard and stressful academics and limited social life, and they shouldn’t go to Columbia if they can’t function in a high stress, competitive environment and are overwhelmed by an enormous city like NYC.

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*(correction from above). But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t many kids who take it easier.

Also it is important to keep in mind what schools Adam grant is comparing Penn to. He did his undergrad at Harvard which is decidedly less competitive/stressful than Pen given the high grade inflation. Also he did his Phd at Michigan and taught at UNC -Chapel Hill which are not as high octane for undergrad as many other top schools. So he doesnt really have a high bar in terms of competitiveness/stress.
There are many schools that are thought to be more stressful than Penn by many people: Cornell, Columbia, Chicago, MIT, Caltech come to mind. But each has a different kind of stress.

@Cue7 Also I disagree with your painting of Pen students with such a broad brush. Just like Harvard and Chicago as you mention students come to Penn to be part of a culture. It is just that the culture is different. And for most people the extracurriculars do not involve dance and song, they involve much more substantial things, like working with local businesses as consultants to help them grow, tutoring west-chilly kids, having actual jobs with major Philly firms while they are in school etc.

Also you timing (right around college decisions) of posting an old article on here that has been posted before, and conveniently bringing in Chicago in your original post, is rather too transparent. Just saying.

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@Penn95

That’s interesting you mention Stanford as Penn’s biggest cultural peer - from what little I know about Stanford, I don’t know just who its cultural peer would be, but it certainly wouldn’t be Penn. From the Stanford students/grads I met, their tends to be a much higher degree of specialization than what you see at Penn.

What I mean is - at Stanford, if you’re an athlete, chances are you’re an extremely elite athlete, and your primary reason to be at Stanford is your athletic ability. If you’re an engineer or math whiz, you’re probably there for your exceptional aptitude in this area. Sure, there are some that are great at both (see NFL QB Andrew Luck), but it’s rare.

At Penn, where things generally aren’t at Stanford’s level (be it in athletics or engineering, etc.), students could be good at many things, and that in part creates the very stressful atmosphere - students striving across all areas.

Additionally, the Cali location and lack of a nearby city really shift Stanford’s culture - I just wouldn’t compare it to Penn.

(For me, the closest cultural comparator to Penn is Northwestern - a school in/near a major urban area, lots of emphasis on well-rounded students, lots of different undergrad schools - like a school of engineering, journalism, music, almost idential undergrad school size, etc.)

Two final points:

1.) Penn’s size really amplifies its negative points. Remember, at ~2500 per class, it’s 40-60% larger than other top schools. As I’ve heard some people say about Penn, it’s a large school, and it feels large. In some ways that drives people to join more things - to try to make a large school feel smaller by being part of different orgs/groups.

2.) I can’t speak to Columbia, but Chicago is actually a great example of a school that used its admissions policies and administrative clout to address and change the negatives about the school. You characterize Chicago as having “insanely hard and stressful academics and limited social life” - and this was true of Chicago 20 years ago. Nowadays, however, that’s changed. The school’s taken care to change the composition of the student body, to administratively-mandate more grade inflation, and to bolster the social life/housing options to make the experience much better. It’s also developed the neighborhood - and there’s now a TON more to do around the University than ever before. (More restaurants and cafes, more centralized dorms, a comedy club nearby, etc.)

Chicago is, actually, a model for how a school can change its undergrad culture/experience for the better.

Penn, on the other hand, hasn’t really done this. The admissions policies have remained constant for 20 years - if not longer. They’ve taken some reactionary steps (expanded their counseling center, expanded their Student Health Center), but I don’t think they’ve done enough to address the problematic parts of the culture head-on.

That’s why Professor Grant’s article and position is so vital - it puts the spotlight on issues the Admissions Office would rather sweep under the rug.

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@Cue7 completely disagree. In my experience Stanford kids are as multi-sided, social as Penn kids. Also both student bodies are very entrepreneurial. Stanford kids are definitely not one-sided or overly bookish. Also Penn looks to Stanford as a model. Of course on the whole, Stanford kids and departments are stronger than at Penn, but the same goes for Stanford/Harvard vs Chicago and most other schools.

Many people say Chicago is stressful even these days and has a nerdy culture and limited social life. Yes it was way worse in the past, but that doesn’t mean it is not present still now . Still the culture is more nerdy, grade-deflated, intense, less fun than most ivies. Chicago is simply now trying to be more like an ivy, attract the same kids.

Penn’s size is larger, but that is what many people like about it. it is very diverse and a lot of the learning happens outside of the class through student organizations and opportunities on campus. There are so many student organizations that do amazing things and the heavy involvement of Penn students in them actually is one of the strengths of Penn, not a weakness. It is consistent with Penn’s focus on the practical applications of knowledge and of interacting, learning with ones peers. Still one has great access to professors and resources.

Not saying that there aren’t things that need to be fixed at Penn, but a lot of the things you don’t like about Penn, there are many other people that do like and choose Penn specifically because of it. The same people absolutely don’t like the culture at Chicago. It is a matter of preference and people make their choices accordingly.

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@Penn95

To take the two strands of this developing thread:

A.) Stanford v. Penn: my sample size here is small, but I see two main types of Stanford students: 1.) the “Penn-type student” on steroids (think Andrew Luck, the NFL QB, or soccer star Jordan Morris - really good students who were exceptional athletes) and 2.) the math whizzes/comp sci phenomenon/harvard types - people who are probably close to genius levels, and picked Stanford over places like Caltech, Harvard, and MIT.

The issue is, at Penn, the first type student is disproportionately present (the overachiever in many areas), but not to such an extreme degree (e.g. no potential pro athletes, Olympians, etc.), and the second type student just isn’t there enough. On aggregate, then, the atmosphere at Stanford is quite different then Penn. Maybe if you combined Penn, Harvard, Northwestern/Duke (for its higher-level athletics), and Caltech, you’d get what Stanford has. Just looking at Penn v. Stanford alone, however, is a poor comparison.

If, on the other hand, you’re saying the chief connecting point is “multi-sided, social” kids, why on earth is Stanford a better comparator than Northwestern, for Penn? Northwestern has a much more similar college size, is close to an urban area, has a similar greek life investment to Penn, and very similar admissions policies.

I’m not saying there aren’t ANY similarities between Penn and Stanford - there clearly are. I just think there are much better comparators to Penn than Stanford.

B.) Re Penn’s current structure/culture being a selling point: I’m not critiquing Penn’s infrastructure for student life, and there’s nothing that can be done about its (IMO) overly large size for an elite college. What I AM saying is that, when we look in the rearview mirror, I hope the culture looks better, improved, and not simply more intense.

In reality, though, I don’t think that’s what’s happening. You note that “Many people say Chicago is stressful even these days and has a nerdy culture and limited social life. Yes it was way worse in the past, but that doesn’t mean it is not present now either.” Well, that’s still improvement, no? You say yourself that it was “way worse in the past,” which means that the culture has gotten better.

In opposition to this, I actually think Penn’s culture gets worse every year - because every year, admissions gets just a little tighter, and they accept kids who are just a little more accomplished, so every year the screws turn a little more.

I think Penn’s culture was actually better 15 years ago - back when it had a broader SAT band (maybe 1250-1450?) and students coming in were less uniformly accomplished. When I speak to my peers who still work at Penn, they say the culture is “the same, only even more intense.” Many (who now are in admin or teaching roles at Penn) share Wharton Prof Adam Grant’s views, by the way.

That’s not a good thing.

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@Cue7 I still think Stanford is the best comparator to Penn maybe along with Duke. The whiz kids you mention are primarily preset at Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Caltech. And maybe very few at Yale, Princeton. The rest of the top schools get a tiny share of the whiz kids. In fact Penn gets the finance, business, entrepreneurship whiz kids or the super impressive kids who interested in business/entrepreneurship that would have otherwise gone to HYPSMC.

Maybe the culture at Chicago has gotten better, but then again it could only get better, and better is relative. Better than before does not mean better than other schools.

Penns culture does not get worse every year. In fact the culture is becoming more open, people are more willing to talk about failure and not keep the Penn face and open up to each other. And there have been many initiatives started in the last 3-4 years to encourage these things.
Maybe Pen is slightly too big, but as you see many top schools (Yale, Stanford, i think Princeton too) are expanding their students bodies. There are benefits from having a larger student body. At Penn the size is still manageable and it still allows meaningful interaction with professors and great access to resources and opportunities.

The Penn culture is not more intense than many other top schools. That is simply not true. It is just different. Yes it is more intense compared to Brown, Yale, Dartmouth, Harvard sure. But is it not more intense compared to MIT, Columbia, Chicago, Cornell, Caltech. Most would say these schools are more intense/stressful than Penn.

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@Penn95

This is a good dialogue, thanks for engaging.

To address your main points:

1.) Stanford v. Penn - Why is Stanford the best comparator (in your view) to Penn, as opposed to Duke or NU? Also, of the three, why isn’t Northwestern clearly the best comparator? I still think NU is (by far) the best comparator because it is, structurally and situationally, so similar to Penn.

The sports aren’t quite as intense at NU (just like Penn, and in contrast to Stanford and Duke), the size is almost identical (important, because Duke and Stanford are considerably smaller colleges), the admissions policies are strikingly similar (both schools look for similar types of kids, are similarly selective), both have pre-professional undergraduate schools (Wharton, nursing, and engineering at Penn, journalism, engineering, music, etc. at NU), heck, even the weather is similar (Chicago is colder, of course, but Phila is much closer to Chicago re weather than Palo Alto or Durham!).

The lack of the same proportion of whiz kids also puts Stanford in a different category for me. Yes, Penn gets its fair share, as do Columbia, Brown, Duke, etc., but there’s a reason why Stanford (and Harvard and a couple others) generally occupy different air space.

2.) Chicago’s cultural changes: you state that, “Maybe the culture at Chicago has gotten better, but then again it could only get better, and better is relative.”

I disagree that the culture “could only get better.” To the contrary, it takes a lot of work (and money!) to change the culture - the easiest thing to do is let the culture languish or, perhaps, even get worse. I think we’d both agree that no school has seen as much change as Chicago over the past decade - it’s moved at hyper-speed to get many changes done. In the past 10 years its revamped its admissions policies, changed the composition of the student body, created pre-professional pathways, added all sorts of amenities and supports, etc.

Also, note, I’m NOT trying to compare Penn directly to other schools - at least not to an officious degree. Rather, I’m wondering whether the school is becoming a better version of itself, and/or whether it should modulate some of its composition.

3.) Penn now v. Penn before: more articles like this have proliferated about Penn in the past few years than ever before:

http://www.phillyvoice.com/12th-suicide-less-4-years-hits-upenn-report-says/

http://www.thedp.com/article/2015/03/mental-health-at-penn-2015-task-force

https://billypenn.com/2016/04/27/pressure-of-perfection-the-stigma-of-suicide-and-mental-health-at-penn/

These are case-by-case, intense, and tragic situations, but they are jarring to read about as an alum, as someone still quite connected to the school. Make no mistake, this has always been a problem at Penn - but it’s especially amplified now.

Yes, the school has made some (reactionary) steps to address this - but, as is true of many admins, it’s been just that - reactionary. Some of this, as well, is on the margins - few address it as directly as Professor Adam Grant.

I’m not sure exactly how the culture now is better than before. CAPS has expanded, SHS (health services) has expanded, but that comes lock step with increased admissions selectivity, stagnant admissions policies, and no real admin push (and $$) to foster cultural change.

Can you point to structural/policy changes and the concurrent SPENDING associated with these changes, that have improved the school? Is Penn now looking for a different archetypal student? Have they spent millions encouraging “non-traditional” employers to come to campus to fight the “pre-professional” vibe? Has Penn’s contribution to “non-traditional” channels for post-grad work (like the Peace Corps) or deep-knowledge areas of study (like PhD programs) increased markedly in the past few years? Please point me in the direction of these changes.

Similarly, if I look back at career outcome reports in the career office - will I see changes over the past 5-10 years, or consistency?

(Career outcome reports available here: http://www.vpul.upenn.edu/careerservices/reports.php, and they look remarkably consistent to me.)

Until then, I see a university that is pouring hundreds of millions into its research plant/feeder pathways, and showing unfortunate complacency to the culture present in the undergraduate community.

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@Penn95
Penn’s closet peer is not Stanford just because they have certain things in common. Some of the examples you cited could be said for many top schools. Penn is more preprofessional with strong affinity with the banking and financial sector. It underachieves in terms of prestigious scholarships (which supports Cue7’s argument that it lacks its fair share of nerds for a school of such high level; otoh, Stanford is probably second only to Harvard). Even the “professional” field at Stanford is full of geeks and nerds (engineering that rivals MIT). I’d say Duke is a bit closer (though Duke does better in external scholarships and has much stronger D-1 athletics).

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@Cue7 No NU students are more one-sided/focused just on academics and less on extracurriculars, jobs, research (in general pre-professional endeavors) than Penn. And this is according to people I knew at Penn who had transferred in from NU. As i said before Stanford and Penn are very similar in terms of campus culture and type of students. (social life, students with many interests, duck syndrome/penn face, entrepreneurial student body, big focus on involvement on-camus organization ). They also have a similar academic philosophy, new initiatives (start-up incubators, dual degree programs, practical application of knowledge). I agree that Duke is very similar in many of these ways, but Penn and Stanford are definitely very similar in all of these ways.

I don’t think that Chicago has anything that extraordinary. They have decided to become more like am ivy, have really gamed the USNews rankings, bombarded applicants with promotional materials, and started to morph themselves into an ivy and go after the same students as the ivies. They have gone into huge best to finance all of this and the new facilitiesamenities you mention. But that doesnt mean the schools doesnt have many of the issues it had in the past, severe grade deflation, anemic social life (even people nowadays say that), and just really intense academics.

Yes Penn has expanded CAPS, has organized and funded many organizations such as Penn Wellness, launched a mental health hotline, student organizations like Active Minds, CAPS Advisory Board. a;so the students have taken initiative to be more open about failure http://www.thedp.com/article/2017/02/wall-of-rejection-now-in-annenberg

Also Penn has spent millions and millions in revamping the campus and creating an even better campus environment adding all sorts of new amenities.

Regarding admissions and careers, Penn has completely overhauled the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowship to provide more support to students interested in pursuing rides, marshall etc scholarships. and they have had great results (in the last decadeit has had the same number of rhodes scholars as columbia (6) and not much worse than chicago (10).

Why should there be such drastic changes? I dont think you should expect to see any rapid changes in career outcomes/preferences, like you don’t see any changes in most other top schools. Chicago is an exception because they have decided to make themselves look more like an ivy so they needed a big overhaul. But for the rest, why should there be a change? Last year 17% of Penn grads went on to grad school. For Yale it was 18%. For Harvard it was 15%. Penn’s numbers are consistent with other top schools. of course there will be more people going into finance/consulting due to Wharton.

I just reject the idea that Penn has any bigger issue than many other top schools. It has its own distinct culture and that is what many students like and why they choose to attend. Penn has a pre-professional element without neglecting liberal arts but that is exactly one of the reasons many people are attracted to it and frankly it is one of Penn’s strengths.

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@IWannaHelp We are talking about cultural peers. not peers in terms of strength. In terms of strength/prestige of course Stanfords peer is only Harvard probably.

Your point for underachievement in Rhodes scholarships depends on which schools you compare Penn to.

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The number of NU grads transferring to Penn can’t be more than just a couple a year. Also, the fact that they transferred means you should took whatever they said with a huge grain of salt. There are always gonna be people that have something negative to say and the transfers would be those people. After all, they want to justify their transfer and tell themselves how smart they were with that decision.

Much of the stress at NU exists precisely because people try to do too much. “And is our DNA”. They like quarter system so they can double-major while doing many other things. You mentioned research; well, NU awards more than $3 million for undergrad research funding.

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From my extensive experience interacting with Penn grads, they are most culturally similar to those from Cornell and Duke. Maybe a subset of Wharton folks are culturally akin to those from Stanford, but I’ve never had the impression that Penn is a close “cultural peer” of Stanford.

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For Wharton, I’d think the closet peer culturally would be Stern?

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@Penn95 - three points:

1.) Responding to your post #4, where you say: “your timing (right around college decisions) of posting an old article on here that has been posted before, and conveniently bringing in Chicago in your original post, is rather too transparent. Just saying.”

You’ve seen the threads where I’ve been accused of being the biggest UChicago pessimist around, right? In fact, I think you’ve actually posted on threads where I’ve been named as a “grump/cynic” about Chicago. Some of that is in fact true - I assess my college alma mater with a very skeptical view, and I have a fairly negative view of many of the things going on at Chicago.

Given that you know this, to imply that I’m making some sort of play here for Chicago is pretty rich. I have, at best, an ambivalent relationship with Chicago, and this would actually be the worst year to try to woo Chicago admits from other schools (as Chicago accepted so much of the class ED, they have only a tiny number of cross-admits with other schools - I’d be wasting my energy here).

All this being said, I actually think you’re underselling the profound shift Chicago’s been able to orchestrate in a short period of time. It’s about much more than lots of marketing and “gaming” US News - Chicago backed this all up with a huge investment (a huge bet!) on its College. It took on more debt DURING the great recession because it felt the College could pay dividends down the line. So far, the plan seems to be paying off in spades. The college is probably healthier and more viable than it ever has been, and the #3 US News ranking (merited or not) marks the first time a non-HYPMSCaltech school is in the top 3 in at least the past 20-30 years.

(Also, I think it’s too simplistic to say Chicago is trying to be more “ivy-like” - the ivies are not a monolith, and I don’t think Chicago is trying to be like Penn or Brown or Dartmouth or Cornell - it seems, rather, to be trying to keep its ethos while emulating some of Yale’s community-focused characteristics, and Columbia’s urban research center approach.)

NOW, all that aside - I retract my original two comparators with different student populations - how about instead of saying “Chicago or Harvard,” I say “Penn is in stark contrast to Swarthmore or Harvard”? Perhaps that would’ve solved this whole sidebar!

2.) @Boothie007 and @IWannaHelp - I’m not sure why @Penn95 is so steadfast in targeting Stanford as Penn’s closest “cultural peer.” Frankly, this caught me off guard. When I was at Penn, the schools I heard talked about the most as comparators were Cornell and Duke, and I drew the comparison to Northwestern a lot just because I knew NU fairly well, and it struck me as so similar to Penn.

@Penn95 said that, from the NU to Penn transfers s/he met, they said NU was more academic/one focus. Maybe that’s true, but to me, knowing NU, this still seems more like a difference in degree from Penn, NOT a difference in kind. The higher proportion of Caltech/MIT level geniuses walking around Stanford, combined with a higher degree of specialization amongst the the Stanford students (they had more kids walking around whose goal and chief reason for being there was, say, swimming or football or soccer) makes me see it as a difference in KIND from Penn, not a difference of degree.

3.) Finally, @Penn95 - you note that Penn students do more than just “song and dance” as extracurriculars, and this is absolutely true. I don’t mean to undermine that at all. What I mean to say, though, is this - I was surprised by the level of intensity surrounding such a wide range of extra-curriculars, and I was puzzled as to why students spent so much time on them. You know this as well as I do - singing groups like the Penn Glee Club and Penn Masala, comedy troupes like Mask and Wig, and a host of other clubs are a big deal. There are tryouts, intense rounds of interviews, and huge time investments into all this. Same thing goes for externships, student government elections, etc.

Students don’t compete with each other, but they exist in an environment where there are competitive application processes and pathways, and that just creates a of stress.

NOTE: I’m NOT saying that other top schools aren’t stressful. That’s far from my point. I’m also not trying to say Penn has more stress than other schools. I’m trying to say that Penn, when looked at singularly, has a cultural problem, one that’s been documented in many places, by many people (Wharton’s Adam Grant included) and this seems to be a more recent (past 5-10 yr) trend.

Just because people don’t compete with each other doesn’t mean an environment isn’t competitive, and just because other schools have issues doesn’t mean Penn shouldn’t be pouring more into improving this.

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Start-up incubators and dual degree programs exist in many schools and Stanford actually has less dual degree/joint school programs than many schools. In that regard, Northwestern is actually closer to Penn than Stanford is. Out in the west, USC may be more similar in more ways than Stanford is.

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@Penn95 You seem to have a seemingly endless fascination with pointing out negatives at UChicago and refusing to accept that it is a different place now that has consistently over the past five or so years climbed to the top. why Jeffe, why ? I for one am happy to welcome UChicago as a peer (with some qualifications of course) of my beloved H.

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All (and specifically @Chrchill ) - outside of the HYPMS schools, I pointed out Chicago as a comparator/differentiator from Penn because, of the peer group (Columbia, Chicago, Penn, Cornell, Northwestern, etc.), Chicago and Penn seem to have the most distinct student bodies. Don’t get me wrong, there are more similarities than differences (now, more than ever) but I did NOT intend for this to be a debate/comparison between Chicago and UPenn.

REPEAT: I did NOT intend for this to be a debate between UChicago and UPenn!

With this in mind, note in post #16, I retracted my inclusion of Chicago, and used Swarthmore and Harvard as schools with different student populations than Penn.

Let’s move away from this unintended sidebar!