<p>The Ivy League schools are a subset of a larger group of highly selective universities. It wasn’t that long ago, however, when there were only a couple of other schools that were as selective as the Ivies…Stanford, MIT, primarily. That’s changed, and now schools like Duke, Chicago, and others have caught up, and in some cases, passed some of the Ivies in selectivity. So, I think that “Ivy League” has over time become a less accurate shorthand for “the most selective universities.”</p>
<p>"Penn added a medical school in 1765, Columbia in 1767, and Harvard in 1782… "</p>
<p>Yes, and I understand that they were trailblazers in the areas of bloodletting and the application of leeches, areas where they continue to excel to this very day…</p>
<p>"It wasn’t that long ago, however, when there were only a couple of other schools that were as selective as the Ivies…Stanford, MIT, primarily. That’s changed, and now schools like Duke, Chicago, and others have caught up, and in some cases, passed some of the Ivies in selectivity. So, I think that “Ivy League” has over time become a less accurate shorthand for “the most selective universities.” "</p>
<p>I don’t know what time frame you’re talking about, but looking at the beginning of the 1970s compared to a few years ago, the selectivity ranking of Ivy League arts & sciences colleges, vs. other colleges in this country, computed by me from the guide books, was approximately as follows:</p>
<p>Colllege… 1971 selectivity… 2003 selectivity
yale…1…6
harvard…3…1
dartmouth…19…13
Princeton…5…2
Columbia…21…2
Brown…14…8
Cornell…26…24
Penn…41…12</p>
<p>If anything, looking at these two periods, the Ivies have become relatively more selective, compared to others, not relatively less selective. Particularly Penn and columbia have become radically more relatively selective, they’ve each had some of the biggest selectivity jumps in the country over these periods.</p>
<p>^^Further evidence of the USNews’ self-fulfilling prophecy effect. Just for the heck of it, what were the top ten most selective colleges and universities in 1971?</p>
<p>It’s hard to pick them out of this spreadsheet because I had them by some formula including SATs too. But by admit % alone it was:
Yale, Cooper Union,harvard,Swarthmore,amherst, Brandeis,Princeton,Stanford,Sarah Lawrence,Wesleyan, tufts, Middlebury,Cal Tech,haverford, Brown. Bowdoin,williams, william & mary, Dartmouth, Colby.</p>
<p>With my concocted combo approach there was some moving around, but for the purposes of this thread the gist of the matter is still the same: two of the eight schools are dramatically more selective now, the others jockeying in the same band but if anything moved up.</p>
<p>BTW, this all started when D1 was looking at colleges. I was interjecting my 2 cents, and she said basically I didn’t know anything because my frame of reference was from the stone age. So I got from the library one of the old college guides that I myself used back then, analyzed and ordinally compared to the then-current US News info, to see how off-base I actually was. And, in fact, as it happens there were some changes over the years that I hadn’t kept up on.</p>
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<p>Sure Harvard was small in the early days and grew. No one is disputing that. What I am disputing is the statement in post #6 that LACs are “the model (Ivy schools) were based on.” As the link in post #15 make clear, the model Harvard was based on is that of a British university. The fact that it took them more than a century to achieve something beginning to resemble a university doesn’t somehow make American LACs the model. LACs as such didn’t even exist then. </p>
<p>BTW, being small, even smaller than many LACs, doesn’t by itself mean a school can’t a be university - as in the example of Caltech.</p>
<p>You’re not getting it. You’re statement that “LACs as such didn’t even exist then” is absurd. As is your repeated phrase, “the modern LAC”; it’s an oxymoron. Harvard College was a stand-alone institution of classical liberal arts education (so far as it was understood in the seventeenth century) for the first one hundred years of its existence. Yale was modeled after it. Dartmouth was modeled after it. And, to the extent that every Colonial institution of higher learning was based on the Harvard model, they were basing themselves on an LAC. </p>
<p>Penn was an exception because Benjamin Franklin dissented from the traditional liberal arts model exemplified by his native Bostonians. He favored a practical curriculum that included mechanics and training for a profession. He traveled to Philadelphia, in part, to escape them. That’s why Penn often regards itself as the earliest American university, something it has to settle with Johns Hopkins and Cornell.</p>
<p>My understanding of the history has been more in line with johnwesley’s (but I think coureur has an interesting alternate view). </p>
<p>It seems reasonable to suggest that Harvard’s founders intended it to become one of many co-located colleges comprising a university on the Oxford-Cambridge model. Were the intentions of Amherst’s (or W&M’s) founders any different? Regardless, is there any reason to believe that, without the Hopkins innovation, Harvard actually would have wound up looking very different than Amherst and Wesleyan do today? Why did some schools not follow the same path?</p>
<p>Hopkins (and a little later, Chicago) introduced a model of the university as a unified, specializing “knowledge factory”. This seems to have competed with a concept of higher education more focused on character-formation. The 20th c LAC could take up the latter banner, and simultaneously market intimacy as a strength.</p>
<p>A good history would sort this all out with a little more precision and evidence.</p>
<p>“what do you think of schools like Brown, Cornell, or Dartmouth … if you were accepted to one of these schools, would you choose to go there, instead of a higher rated school …”</p>
<p>First of all, few non-Ivy schools are rated higher than Brown, Cornell, and Dartmouth. Only Stanford, MIT, and Caltech are arguably of higher caliber overall. Second, you would never gain an advantage or disadvantage by choosing Cornell over Caltech or choosing MIT over Brown. So, this question is completely pointless and comes down to personal preference.</p>
<p>I think it’s significant to remember that most of these schools were founded as institutions “for the classical education of indigent young men of piety and talents for the Christian ministry.” (Tyler, A History of Amherst College) Some statements (yep, from Wikipedia! sorry–it’s quick) re- Harvard’s founding: "An early brochure, published in 1643, justified the College’s existence: “To advance Learning and perpetuate it to Posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate Ministery [sic] to the Churches…”[10] Harvard’s early motto was Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae “Truth for Christ and the Church.” In a directive to its students, it laid out the purpose of all education: “Let every Student be plainly instructed, and earnestly pressed to consider well, the maine end of his life and studies is, to know God and Iesus Christ which is eternall life, Joh. 17. 3. and therefore to lay Christ in the bottome, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and Learning.[11]”</p>
<p>The idea of education for its own sake, or for professional training in a field other than the ministry, seems as though it was a later development. In fact, many were founded in reaction to the “apostasy” of older institutions, as in the founding of Princeton by Yale graduates who were deeply affected by the Great Awakening. They articulated a broader vision: <code>Though our great Intention was to erect a seminary for educating Ministers of the Gospel,‘’ one of the founders later wrote in a letter to another clergyman,</code>yet we hope it will be useful in other learned professions – Ornaments of the State as Well as the Church. Therefore we propose to make the plan of Education as extensive as our Circumstances will admit.‘’ Their plan was to educate Christian thinkers who could contribute to the wider society, whether or not they were in the clergy–a practical result of the Great Awakening vision of the ministry of all believers.</p>
<p>It’s fascinating to see the evolution of the idea of education. Kenyon College was founded by a Connecticut Bishop who wanted to remove his seminary students from the temptations of New England, so he searched for a spot as remote as he could find–still an issue for kids deciding whether or not to choose Kenyon! :)</p>
<p>…and I was just thinking–if poor ol’ Bishop Chase had only known how that remote Ohio location would effect Kenyon’s USNews ranking, I’ll bet he would have reconsidered! After all, what could be more important than your ranking?</p>
<p>I guess I should revise my statement - the students in one of my departments are also required to take a teaching seminar. What I meant was in graduate school the emphasis is certainly not on training teachers; it’s on training scholars and researchers. When I brought up that I wanted to TA (because I want to be a professor at an LAC) my advisor said “But it will take time away from your research!”</p>
<p>By saying “LACs are the model that…” I think what the earlier poster means is that the early, elite American universities were built on a model of a broad liberal arts education that incorporated the scholarly study of many subjects for enrichment of the whole person, and a model of close personal interaction between students and faculty (like the Oxford tutorials). I don’t think that the poster meant that Harvard was designed after Williams, so to speak, but that Harvard began much like a Williams College for undergraduates before expanding to be the large university that it is today with more pre-professional majors. Or basically, what johnwesley said.</p>
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<p>Of course Harvard would look very different from LACs today, because it already did so by time Johns Hopkins came along. Johns Hopkins was founded in 1876. By that time Harvard already offered graduate degrees and had a Medical School (1782), a School of Divinity (1816), a Law School (1817), a School of Engineering (1847), and a Dental School (1867). It’s hard to imagine that without the advent of Johns Hopkins that Harvard would have dumped all these advanced programs in order to regress into an LAC. It’s clear the trend had long been in the opposite direction. </p>
<p>By 1876 Harvard had long since fulfilled its founders’ model by becoming a university consisting of separate schools. Where it departed from the original British model was that it had only one College. It finally achieved even some aspects of that in the 1930s when it divided the College into Houses that, at least in terms of undergraduate residence, function much like Oxford colleges.</p>
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<p>It’s obvious that you’re basing your ranking on US News. If that’s correct, then this is what I can say about your thoughts on this particular issue.</p>
<p>All the top 30 schools on the USN&WR ranking offer almost identical undergrad education. Where it matters is in prestige. For example, HYPSMC are regarded as better schools for undergrad that Columbia or Chicago despite that the former schools aren’t any different from the latter schools in terms of academic standard and rigor for undergrad teaching and research. </p>
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<p>Again, where it matters mostly is in the prestige level of these schools and the quality of research works conducted at these schools. </p>
<ol>
<li>because universities conduct research, university students do have access to some if these works. The level of research works at universities is of national or international importance. </li>
<li>because universities offer professional programs and postgrad programs many of their grads end up into teaching at some of the finest schools around, including many top-ranked LACs, the names of these universities extend far, far beyond than those of LACs’. However, in terms of teaching quality, they’re basically the same. </li>
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<p>I would prefer to attend an university (ivy league for that matter as it’s the given) than a LAC. For example, I would prefer Harvard over Williams or Chicago over Amherst or UC Berkeley over Swarthmore or MIT over Mudd or UPenn over Haverford and so on.</p>
<p>I believe this, approximately, is the conventional wisdom about the emergence of the modern university in America:</p>
<p>
[quote]
The American university of today is the product of a sudden, mainly unplanned period of development at the close of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. At that time the university, and with it a recognizably modern style of academic life, emerged to eclipse the older, religiously oriented college. Precedents, formal and informal, were then set which have affected the soul of professor, student, and academic administrator ever since.<a href=“Laurence%20R.%20Veysey,%20%5Bu%5DThe%20Emergence%20of%20the%20American%20University%5B/u%5D,%20overiew%20on%20back%20cover”>/quote</a></p>
<p>Are historians ignoring earlier, important developments at Harvard (or Penn)? Were Harvard’s medical, divinity, and engineering “schools”, which existed in some form prior to the Civil War, true precursors to modern graduate schools and departments? Or were they so different in scope and mission that they represent something more like an evolutionary dead-end?</p>
<p>^^The key phrase in Mr. Veysey’s quote is “The American university of today…” No one is saying that Harvard was a 21st century university by the mid-19th century. But it’s pretty clear that by any legitimate definition it was a university - a university of its own time and already substantially expanded in function from what we would now call an LAC. </p>
<p>Similarly, there is no reason to assume that Harvard has achieved its final form and function today. I suspect that 200 years from now Harvard and other research universities will be very different in many ways from what they are now. But that doesn’t mean that they aren’t universities now.</p>
<p>Also It’s true that the Ivy schools long ago abandoned their religious origins, but I’d hesitate to characterize the “older, religiously oriented college” as an evolutionary dead-end. It’s certainly a somewhat different model for a university, but I’ be very reluctant to tell active, vibrant, religious schools like Notre Dame, BYU, or Baylor, they are not universities or that they are a dead-end.</p>
<p>Okay let’s take this one by one:</p>
<p>The Harvard Law School - “By 1827, the school, which was down to one faculty member, was struggling… Enrollment remained low through the 19th century as university legal education was considered to be of little added benefit to apprenticeships in legal practice.” In other words, Amherst has more lawyers on its faculty today (teaching “Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought”) than Harvard did for much of the nineteenth century</p>
<p>The Harvard Medical School - left Cambridge in 1810 and hasn’t been a part of the Harvard campus since.</p>
<p>The Harvard Dental School - wasn’t established until the late-1860s.</p>
<p>The Harvard Divinity School - big whup. Wesleyan was turning out ministers by the wagon load up to and considerably after the Civil War, as were Amherst and Oberlin.</p>
<p>That doesn’t leave a heck of a lot that would have separated the Harvard in the picture below and “what we would now call an LAC”: <a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HarvardElizaSusanQuincy1836.jpg[/url]”>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HarvardElizaSusanQuincy1836.jpg</a></p>
![http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HarvardElizaSusanQuincy1836.jpg[/url]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HarvardElizaSusanQuincy1836.jpg%5B/url%5D){kind=link}
<p>Up through the early 1800s, all US schools were small, undergraduate-focused institutions, typically offering a “core curriculum” in liberal arts disciplines. They didn’t make a deliberate choice to follow a “LAC model”, because at that time there was no other model. </p>
<p>The alternative model of the “research university” did not arise until the late 1800s. The institution most commonly associated with that change is Johns Hopkins, founded 1876, because JHU was the first new school established with that model in mind. But elements of it had begun to appear at places like Harvard and Yale during the same general time period. Harvard, for example, organized a “Graduate Department” of Arts and Sciences in 1872, and began offering the PhD degree at that time. Harvard didn’t enroll enough grad students to warrant a separate “Graduate School” until 1890.</p>
<p>According to the [Harvard</a> Guide](<a href=“http://www.news.harvard.edu/guide/intro/hist2.html]Harvard”>http://www.news.harvard.edu/guide/intro/hist2.html), published by Harvard itself:
So what kind of “small provincial institution” was Harvard like before Eliot took over in 1869? The Harvard Guide notes that Eliot took over a school with an enrollment of 1,000 and a faculty of 49. By today’s standards, it would be called a LAC – and a small one at that. By contemporary standards, it was not regarded as a fundamentally different kind of institution than, say, Bowdoin College or Trinity College. Sure, Harvard was offering medical and engineering degrees, but so was Bowdoin (in medicine) and Trinity (in engineering).</p>
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There were undoubtedly some dead ends. Princeton, for example, operated a law school from 1847 to 1852, which closed after graduating seven students and never reopened. Princeton’s status as a research institution today owes nothing to any pre-Civil War graduate schools or departments. </p>
<p>But I don’t think Princeton (then the “College of New Jersey”) was perceived as a fundamentally different type of institution from (say) Harvard or Bowdoin in the early 19th Century, despite its lack of engineering, medical, law, or graduate programs.</p>
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<p>While the HYP ivies are superior to the top LACs, Amherst and Williams do have as good if not better grad school placement than the non-HYP ivies.</p>
<p>The reaction you have to the LACs is similar to the reaction some people have to, say, the University of Pennsylvania. At least people don’t mistake LACs for state schools (except for maybe some who confuse Amherst with UMass @ Amherst).</p>