What are Considered America's Elite Colleges?

College Search & Selection
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Fascinating. Which US Presidents or Vice Presidents graduated from Wellesley? :)</p>

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<p>Hillary (1st lady + Secretary of State) >= president. :D</p>

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<p>bjomountsi09</p>

<p>No one is trashing anyone or any school here. All the schools being discussed here are elite schools. Its just that, some are more elite than the others. But, all in all, they’re all elite schools. </p>

<p>For example, UPenn may not be as selective as Brown, as some posters here suggested, so they assumed and concluded that because of that, Brown is more elite than UPenn as an institution. I find that totally wrong. I think UPenn has far more resources, talented staff and prestige than Brown has. So, therefore, UPenn is superior to Brown – as an academic institution.</p>

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<p>Why is it that only science majors seem to matter? If a lit major graduates from MIT they would get no respect. Elite institutions are not just research institutions. Those are just one category. This is made clear by ranking like USNWR which breaks the schools into multiple categories. BTW, an elite school doesn’t need a graduate program. If you graduate from an unknown school but go to a grad at Yale then that undergrad was as elite as any other undergrad that you could have entered Yale from.</p>

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<p>Good I thought Cornell was a great school and I did not understand how someone would put it down. If it weren’t for its location it would have been a school I would have liked to attend. </p>

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<p>Because science is more important to society. The world can exist without Hemmingway, but we would not be where we are without Comp. Sci.</p>

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<p>Oh and just a side not for those who don’t know. UC Berkeley is almost impossible on out of state students but is easier on in state ones. That is why some very talented and high scoring people are rejected. Berkeley is not as selective across the board.</p>

<p>Oh and btw science matters less than many other areas. A scientists boss is a business man or politician that did not major in a hard science.</p>

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<p>RML-- a list of prominent positions is not going to mean anything to me when Cal has four times the undergraduate population. Salary potential taken as a whole like that is not helpful either since the same job in California is going to pay higher than almost any other part of the country and the huge in state population and number of Cal folks that stay in California have an influence on that. Additionally, we’d have to know that the two populations are choosing similar career paths to make that a fair comparison – if more Cal students are working in science for instance, that would explain the very small statistical difference between the salary numbers you posted.</p>

<p>As for your pretending you know who would and wouldn’t get into Brown versus Berkeley-- a quick note on that stuff.</p>

<p>1) The 20 or so students I’m close with from California all turned down Berkeley to come here.
2) Revealed preferences surveys put Brown at #7 and Cal at #27. In fact, Berkeley wins about 14% of all cross admits with Brown.
<a href=“http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/09/17/weekinreview/nwr_LEONHARDTweb-ch.jpg[/url]”>http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/09/17/weekinreview/nwr_LEONHARDTweb-ch.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Anyone making a definitive claim that student X rejected here can get into school Y is pretty much full of ****.</p>

<p>I really don’t want to continue this debate, I think I’ve laid out my position and I know you feel you’ve laid yours out. Let others read what we wrote and make the choice for themselves-- similar to a slipper/Alexandre debate in the past, we don’t need to rehash it. Slipper and I agree and that’s why she’s at Dartmouth and I’m at Brown despite both of us having choices to go to schools that more resemble your and Alexandre’s experience at Berkeley and Michigan.</p>

<p>I’m not defending my school, I use it as an example because I’m familiar with it. I’m defending the importance of undergraduate education on a site which is talking about college decisions for undergraduates (with the exception of the grad school sub forum). I’m sorry that you disagree that undergraduates are better served at institutions that make it their central mission to provide high quality education and experiences to undergraduates, but that’s my general premise/opinion and that alters the landscape of top places.</p>

<p>In the end, it’s not the school that counts, it’s the person so there is no need for us to continue to split hairs when there is a clear ideological gap neither of us is leaping across any time soon.</p>

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<p>A very specific example of the general point that Berkeley grads tend to underestimate how many of their smart fellow Californians left California to go to college at colleges they desired more than Berkeley.</p>

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<p>There are many, many more schools out there that are larger or even way larger than Cal, but they don’t the have caliber of the alumni roaster of Cal. How would you explain that then?</p>

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<p>Here we go again throwing in some data which would tell something about students or student selectivity or student preferences. I thought I made myself clear that we are not talking about the students. If the title of the thread is about the students, I WOULDN’T rank Cal above Brown or Dartmouth. And I guess I already said that several times that Cal isn’t the most selective there is. But to say Cal is not selective is also wrong, thus I showed you some data to prove that you were wrong. And, please understand that this isn’t about the students. This is about the institutions that we are discussing here. So, let’s discuss the institutions. </p>

<p>Also, I don’t really bite that Revealed preferences survey you’re showing me. I mean, we wouldn’t know how accurate that is. Here’s another survey that would contradict the Revealed Preferences Survey: [Harvard</a> Number One University in Eyes of Public](<a href=“Harvard Number One University in Eyes of Public”>Harvard Number One University in Eyes of Public)</p>

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<p>See, for the educated elite, Berkeley would trump Brown in the survey. The gap isn’t even close.</p>

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<p>I love how Penn ties with Penn State…oh the irony</p>

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<p>Way to ignore the overriding point of my post and pick on something I wrote specially in response to a claim you made. of course, I assume you’ll decide that not responding to the above would be my conceding the point, but I’ll stick with thepoint I made in my last point and not continue this now clearly useless discussion from my cell phone while in bed. my spring break is over so I have considerably less time available to repeat myself only to have most of what i’m saying ignored or mistaken.</p>

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<p>This is hilarious. This survey has a sample size of 3200. And how many cross admits between Cal and Brown did they find? 7? I don’t find this graph very credible when determining which school is more desirable. Frankly most kids from California have no reason to apply to Brown and those that do must really like the school or want to get out of CA or they wouldn’t have applied to Brown in the first place. Oh and there are kids that turn down Brown for Berkeley. I know two kids who got into Brown and passed, which is strange because very few kids I know even applied to Brown. Plus lets not act like Berkeley students are that far behind Brown with an unsuperscored SAT range of 1280-1500 last year, which is impressive considering Berkeley UG being 4 times as big as Brown’s UG.</p>

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<p>modestmelody’s 20 or so Brown friends all turned down Berkeley to come to Brown. What a big surprise!
revealed preferences polled from where? Rhodes Island?</p>

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<p>RML that poll is dumb. It asks Americans for the best school meaning one choice right? So any half intelligent person picks one of the HYPS, leaving out other good schools like Penn or Brown, which are clearly not number one. The other not so intelligent people pick their state schools like Penn state or UNC, because they know nothing, but since they live in the state the name is bigger. Stupid survey…not accurate at all. I would take revealed preferences any day, because presumably students have done the research.</p>

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<p>Huh?? You probably did not read this part.</p>

<p>*
What about post-graduates themselves, who might be expected to know better than others what schools are prestigious, given that they applied to schools at least twice (for undergraduate and graduate work) and most likely spent a good deal of time evaluating schools? Here’s the list of schools most often mentioned by college graduates with at least some post-graduate education:</p>

<p>Harvard 29%
Stanford 27
Yale 14
MIT 11
Berkeley 7
Princeton 7
Michigan 7</p>

<h2>-</h2>

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Brown???
*</p>

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<p>Revealed preferences observed from all over the country. The revealed preferences working paper included regional groupings of results, and several colleges outranked Berkeley in the region that included California. </p>

<p>[A</a> Revealed Preference Ranking of U.S. Colleges and Universities](<a href=“http://www.nber.org/papers/w10803]A”>A Revealed Preference Ranking of U.S. Colleges and Universities | NBER) </p>

<p>(Some subsequent, slightly revised, versions of this working paper are no longer hosted on the Web. The underlying research is being prepared for peer-reviewed publication.)</p>

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<p>We are talking about elite colleges here, not elite academic institutions.
Newsweek probably put their list together based on what looked right. So here you have it:
[The</a> 25 Most Desirable Schools - Newsweek - Education](<a href=“http://education.newsweek.com/2010/09/12/the-25-most-desirable-schools.all.html]The”>http://education.newsweek.com/2010/09/12/the-25-most-desirable-schools.all.html)</p>

<p>Ever wondered why 7/9 colonial colleges are now part of the Ivy League, and why 7/8 of the Ivies are among the oldest in the US. Also, there is a general consensus of prestige before USNews, which goes like Harvard > Yale, Princeton > Stanford, MIT, Dartmouth, Columbia, Berkeley, etc. If you look at Newsweek’s list (as well as USNews’), 7 of the top 10 schools (HYPSM, Columbia, Dartmouth) are on both. These 7 schools are also among the 10 with the highest average ranking by USNews(<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/228347-usnwr-07-91-avg-rank-wsj-feeder-revealed-preferences.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/228347-usnwr-07-91-avg-rank-wsj-feeder-revealed-preferences.html&lt;/a&gt;) and among the top 10 (with the exception of Columbia, which wasn’t ranked) in USNews’ first ranking.</p>

<p>I don’t think RML understand how the system works here in the US, probably due to his experience in the UK where the best places to go corresponds almost perfectly with the research productivity of the university. In the US, many college’s prestige are carried to the present from the past when only the most elite of the population goes to college. Many smaller schools are more elite than larger schools. RML’s reasoning sounds awfully similar to: India has larger GDP than Switzerland, so the typical Indian must have better opportunities granted to them by their country than the typical Swiss (just replace “India” with “a large state flagship,” “GPD” with “operational budget,” “Switzerland” with “Amherst,” “Indian” with “student at the flagship,” “country” with “school,” and “Swiss” with “student at Amherst.” Cal is no doubt a great school, and the top students there are no doubt as capable as the top students at Harvard, Dartmouth, Columbia, Brown, etc. However, the fact that it’s bigger doesn’t make it a better school than Amherst, etc.</p>