<p>@majoreco - post #40</p>
<p>Here is a recent thread showing how people at Princeton can, of course, be defensive:</p>
<p>[thread=1308291]Thread example showing defensiveness at Princeton[/thread]</p>
<p>I’ve also frequently seen the same type of overly-defensive debates on boards of (all) other top schools. These types of debates perhaps occur a bit more often for Cornell, but they crop up for every school.</p>
<p>"On another point, I heard that Cornell is the most difficult Ivy to graduate from. "
No. Rumors are not substantial points.</p>
<p>"Always the same people who enter these threads complaining about Cornell. Based off some posts I read on the Cornell board, Cornellians have the worse inferiority complexes. "
I agree with this as a Cornellian. It’s not something I have or something I see others having, but it’s especially noticeable on these forums. It just jumps right out at you and it is amazingly repulsive. Not that it isn’t present on the other boards, but the fact that most of these originate from pre-frosh makes me really not like the next generation of students and makes me question Cornell admissions.</p>
<p>Also, I really do agree with wavedasher about his points on selectivity - it shouldn’t really matter if the difference is small, but the difference is pretty big now and Cornell should really pay a bit of attention to it - especially with how they reject some more academically qualified candidates for less qualified ones. However, I don’t care particularly much about the numbers (%), but more about how they choose their students.</p>
<p>Don’t know how you can intelligently draw any conclusions about a school’s students from a handful of posters on a CC board.</p>
<p>“Rumors are not substantial points.”</p>
<p>No, not rumors; based on stats of graduation rates.</p>
<p>@wavedasher:</p>
<p>I think you’re suffering from a rose colored perspective on history. Cornell’s been ranked 12-15 pretty consistently since USNWR started in the late 80s, with some variations. You really exposed the failure of your argument in your last post by, first of all, obsessing over one publication’s efforts to sell magazines (and choose a set of very subjective criteria by which to try and judge vastly different colleges and universities. Read Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker article on this subject for a thorough dismantling of the argument). Secondly, by admitting that the only aspect of Cornell one could possibly identify as being in decline is perception by high school students based on that publication’s efforts to sell magazines.</p>
<p>That perception matters to some degree and your point isn’t completely without merit by any means, but Brown seems to avoid any negative backlash for having basically the same ranking year after year.</p>
<p>I agree that if they just invested in shrinking class size a lot of these issues would go away.</p>
<p>You can’t just shrink the class size, how will cornell recover the lost tuition money?</p>
<p>The reality is that Cornell has a 93% graduation rate, similar to that of the other Ivies.</p>
<p>
I didn’t say reduce students. I said reduce class size - hire more professors, build more facilities to handle more classes. </p>
<p>It’s questionable how valuable that is (there’s a point where a big class is a big class and a personal relationship with the professor becomes nearly impossible - whether it’s 50 students or 1000). Nevertheless, one of the subjective criteria that the USNWR magazine editorial staff decided was to have significant weight in their assessment is class size. </p>
<p>Shrinking Cornell’s class size below their designated criteria would boost its ranking in that particular magazine. If I recall from reading somewhere else, it would qualify Cornell as a top 10 for that magazine. </p>
<p>Whether that is worth it to a university or not is debatable. Other rankings that favor research investment tend to hold Cornell higher and hurt others, like Brown and Dartmouth. So, it all depends who they want to impress.</p>
<p>@ladyelizabeth,</p>
<p>Don’t remember who said this earlier but graduation rate in Cornell is 93%, similar to other ivies.</p>
<p>This thread is literally just an insult to Rice, Berkeley, Michigan, etc.</p>
<p>Cornell is a great school and it always will be. Just because a school is an ivy doesn’t make it the best (Stanford and MIT), but to compare Cornell to Michigan or Cornell to UC Berkeley for undergrad is wrong. It’s like comparing Harvard to Cornell, you know one is clearly better than the other. Cornell’s main competitors are Duke, Brown, Dartmouth, UPenn, and U Chicago and so it should be compared to those schools!!!</p>
<p>Clearly you have not read the thread at all. Rice, Michigan, and Berkeley are schools just as amazing as the rest you have mentioned among different fields.</p>
<p>The Ivy League was founded based on athletics, not academics. To say that Cornell is equivalent to the rest of its Ivy League peers is sort of random, because the “Ivy” title doesn’t just automatically mean good quality of education. It means prestige and a strong network, and Cornell definitely has those, but in terms of quality of education, I don’t think Cornell is at the level of Chicago, Penn, Duke, Northwestern, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon etc. If you look at the recent 2013 Graduate Rankings - Cornell is ranked 10th for Engineering (a field it’s supposed to be “very good” for), while Berkeley is 3rd, Carnegie Mellon is 7th, and Michigan 8th. For Business, almost every school is above Cornell - starting from Penn, Northwestern, Chicago, Berkeley, Dartmouth, Duke, Michigan - to NYU and UCLA. For Economics too, Chicago, Berkeley, Northwestern, Penn, NYU, Michigan are all ranked higher. For Law as well, we see the same trend - Chicago, NYU, Berkeley, Penn, Michigan, Duke, Northwestern all ranked higher. </p>
<p>Yes, you might argue that rankings don’t “mean” much - but the trend here is difficult to ignore. For all of the programs that Cornell is best known for, it’s beat out by all these other schools. Cornell is DEFINITELY not in the same league as any of them right now. It was termed as part of the Ivy League based on athletics and location, and to believe that it is “rightfully” a part of the League is technically incorrect, because you have to earn that title. Cornell is a huge university, with some schools that are even publicly funded, and the quality of its education, be it undergraduate or postgraduate, is arguably not of a quality as high as some of the others listed above. That is not to say that Cornell is not a great school in its own right, because it is - and it is a well-recognized and reputable school, but not quite in the same league as some of its so-called “peers.” Prestige is a subjective term, however, and Cornell definitely has prestige.</p>
<p>Fine, here’s something for someone who cares about rankings so much. As you said, those are GRADUATE school rankings. In terms of undergrad, Cornell is best in the ivies for overall engineering, and slightly behind wharton in its business program (but it’s ranked higher than wharton this year for Bloomberg, 3rd in the nation too). 2nd in the world for undergrad architecture and 1st for hotel management. In terms of grad school: number one vet grad. program, top 10 med school, top 10 chem, math, physics programs, top 10-15 for everything else (too many different grad school programs in existence to list) - which is quite an accomplishment for a school with so many programs.</p>
<p>aangel,</p>
<p>What makes you such an expert when you are just a high school senior??? If you are going on rankings alone, you have no idea the quality of education you can get at Cornell. Just because one school is ranked a few points above another does not mean the lower ranked school is not in the same class. You have a lot to learn.</p>
<p>@NY even with rankings alone I just pretty much showed that what he said was false. And yes, rankings are rather superficial and subject to fluctuation - which is why i said all those schools listed above by goud and others are all amazing, comparable schools which are good at different fields.</p>
<p>@aangel42:</p>
<p>That’s either an extremely naive post or one attempting to promote the school you will attend (Northwestern, is it?) at the expense of another. I’ll give you that Chicago and a few others are operating at a higher level, but Northwestern? Carnegie Mellon? Come on. Even if you stick with the rankings by which you based your assessment, Cornell trumps the schools you listed in various fields, is behind them in various others, and is ahead or behind in various overall undergrad rankings. Thus, putting them all in the same overall realm of quality.</p>
<p>I’m sure you’re aware that MIT is also a land grant university that serves the interest of the state, or that you can’t consider Cornell inferior because it receives money from the state (why, exactly, would a funding source to serve a public good make it inferior?) and then list Berkeley and Michigan as superior.</p>
<p>It is clear you have not experienced an education at any of these schools, much less more than one of them.</p>
<p>And aangel says (in Graduate School rankings) that Cornell is ranked 10th for engineering, but implies that 10th is not in the same class as a school that is ranked 7th! Is he/she kidding me??? Last time I checked, 10th was pretty awesome! I guess Northwestern is not that good of a school since it is ONLY RANKED 12TH in undergraduate rankings lol.</p>
<p>aangel: I don’t know what you are trying to get at, but your response reminds me of people who say certain things because they are jealous of not being in the ivy league.</p>
<p>I don’t think he’s jealous, but he’s just insecure. Applejack had it right - he has the need to push other people down to promote the school he will attend at the expense of another. Seems like a common thing on all of cc.</p>