<p>nngm - I have an older son who graduated from Swarthmore and a younger daughter who is a student at Swarthmore, too!!! I cannot envision my son enjoying Swarthmore or my daughter thriving at Stanford! I think they each ended up at the right school!</p>
<p>I find it interesting that the thread started talking about what schools offer and wandered off into name recognition. I have anxiety here as well so I am not criticizing her, only observing. And that's why HYPS stay HYPS.</p>
<p>In other areas I don't really get the brand thing. For instance, I don't get Coach purses. I don't like them, and why have C's all over?</p>
<p>I ran into S1's former GF who is now a senior in HS. I asked about her plans (I never ask about colleges), she said she was going to Bryn Mawr, I immediately exclaimed, "Wow, what a great school." I have never seen a kid look so relieved. I know it shouldn't be important, but to see how name recognition affects some of these kids does tug at the heart strings.</p>
<p>Futureholds: A close relative who is a Yale grad said that in med school he found no advantage from having attended Yale (and he was a top student there). He said he wondered now if he had waisted his parents' money since he knew he wanted med school from the outset. His first roommate was from a state flagship and he felt just as well educated as he was. Later, he found that during his residency (just ended) that there was no predicting who would do well based on college attended.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I find it interesting that the thread started talking about what schools offer and wandered off into name recognition.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>that's because that was part of OP's question:
[quote]
I am curious which schools offer best academics, best social, best prestige,best alum connections compared to Ivies?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>For students considering applications to Ivy League schools, I urge you to consider all of these schools that I have listed below. ALL are true Ivy peers or have important subsets of students who would be statistically competitive with the Ivy League students. And from a social life perspective, most would probably provide a bigger, more active social life. </p>
<p>Here would be my personal rankings for National Universities that offer the best blends in each region outside of the Northeast. </p>
<p>SOUTH
1. Duke
2. Vanderbilt
3. U Virginia
4. U North Carolina
5. Wake Forest</p>
<p>SOUTHWEST
1. Rice</p>
<p>WEST
1. Stanford
2. USC
3. UCLA
4 .UC Berkeley</p>
<p>MIDWEST
1. Northwestern
2. Notre Dame
3. U Michigan
4. U Wisconsin</p>
<p>None of the Ivies appealed to my son. He thinks (and I agree) that Grinnell will give him the academic and social experience he's looking for. I admit it DOES bother me when I get the blank stare, but then I remind myself that I hadn't heard of Pomona (which I believe was the most selective LAC in the country this year) until I started helping my son with his college search.</p>
<p>hawkette</p>
<p>What would you list as LAC's that have the same mix in the different regions?</p>
<p>Northwestern: It (and Washington University in St. Louis) are awfully popular around here. The difference between them, from my vantage point, is that the two kids I know well who went to Northwestern in the past few years had mixed feelings about their choice -- loved the look and location, but thought it was very anti-intellectual and fratty/careerist. One was a computer science major, the other initially a film major who migrated into journalism (and who turned down an actual acceptance at Harvard to go there). The kids I know at WashU love love love it (but are not as intellectually inclined as the two who disliked Northwestern, so it's hard to compare).</p>
<p>Speaking of which, Chicago should certainly be on hawkette's Midwest list. In terms of overall experience, it's probably as close to the Ivies as you can come. WashU should be there, too. And Georgetown and Johns Hopkins are glaring omissions.</p>
<p>07DAD,
I interpreted the OP's request for social life to mean a larger campus life with a relatively broad diversity of social activities, potentially including nationally competitive collegiate sports programs in prominent sports like football. This is a major qualitative difference from the undergraduate social experience at an Ivy League school. </p>
<p>I think that the LAC can be a wonderful environment for a certain type of student because of the great intimacy provided by the size of the school and the relationships that can be developed there with other students and with professors as well as the myriad personal and academic opportunities that can become available in a smaller setting. The downside of this smaller size is that the social lives can be more limited and the sports scenes are decidedly at a lower level (both the quality of the play and the quality of the social experience) than at any of the national universities that I listed. Also, the Greek scene is much less in evidence on LAC campuses (only 4 of the top 20 LACs have both fraternities and sororities) than even on the Ivy League scene where 5 of the 8 schools have both fraternities and sororities. That is why I decided to list only national universities in my prior post. Also, soooooo many of the top LACs are in the Northeast and I was focusing my comments on Ivy alternatives outside of the Northeast. </p>
<p>The non-Northeastern LACs that seem to garner the most praise for their blend of outstanding academics and social life are Davidson, W&L, Grinnell, Carleton, Pomona, and Claremont McKenna. But socially, I don't think any of these (with the possible exception of W&L) can compare with the previously mentioned national universities in terms of the size of the social scene.</p>
<p>JHS,
My exclusion of those Top 20 schools (WashU, U Chicago, Johns Hopkins) was mostly due to their lower reputations for the social scene as well as their lack of prominent athletic programs which are often a desirable part of a college's social scene. But academically, I completely agree that they would belong on the list with the previously mentioned schools.</p>
<p>Hawkette, I think you have a fairly unrealistic idea of what social life is really like in the Ivy League. With the exception, maybe, of Dartmouth, I think it's a lot closer to Chicago and WashU than it is to Wisconsin or (heavens!) USC. And Dartmouth resembles a LAC a lot more than it resembles those schools. Also, even though some of the Ivy League schools have fraternities and sororities, they loom very small in the general life of the campuses (except at Penn and maybe Cornell).</p>
<p>Ditto athletic programs. Harvard sometimes has good hockey teams, and Penn's basketball team sometimes scares ranked opponents, but no one is going to have any trouble telling the difference between Ivy League teams and the ACC or Pac-10.</p>
<p>One addendum to my post above and why I chose to focus on non-Northeastern schools… </p>
<p>If you are a top student and prestige has some importance to you and you choose to go to college in the Northeast somewhere other than an Ivy, you could well face a lifetime of slights (intentional or not) from your Ivy peers. The social system of the Northeast worships at the altar of the Ivy League and that's why students at places like Tufts, while very very talented themselves, will often get treated like Rodney Dangerfields in the company of their Ivy compatriots. It sucks, it's not right, but it does happen and it's not a rare occurrence. (I see MIT as an exception, however)</p>
<p>As for the non-Northeastern alternatives, these are all universally respected in their home regions and are probably preferred by employers and locals in most circumstances over students from the Ivy schools not named HYP. These schools have every bit the prestige that the Ivies do in their home areas, eg Rice in Texas, Northwestern in the MW, Duke/Vandy et al in the South and almost certainly a better alumni network.</p>
<p>Wow, hawkette, if I knew people as snobbish as the ones you're describing, I certainly wouldn't care what they think about my son's college choice. That's just an ignorant attitude (not yours, but people who think they're God's gift because they went to a certain school). Ewww, why give them that much power?</p>
<p>JHS,
I won't disagree with your point as I think that the social life of the Ivies is different to that of most of the schools that I mentioned. Probably I've placed much of my own personal preference in this, but I love the vibrancy of the bigger schools with their greater variety of their events, their sporting scenes, their fun-ness (I know that is not a word :) ). People come out of these schools talking about how much fun they had (in addition to getting a great education and likely a ticket to some desirable postgraduate positon). You will hear that type of positive reaction from some of the Ivy grads (like from Dartmouth, U Penn, Princeton, Brown), but it is also common to hear envy about what a great social/party life they could have had at a place like U Virginia or Stanford or Vanderbilt or Duke. </p>
<p>I recently created a thread on the top social scenes of the USNWR Top 20. I would have liked to have gotten more responses, but the ten that I got were fairly consistent and the composite rankings were as follows:</p>
<ol>
<li> Stanford</li>
<li> Vanderbilt</li>
<li> U Penn</li>
<li> Duke</li>
<li> Notre Dame</li>
<li> Northwestern</li>
<li> Dartmouth</li>
<li> Brown</li>
<li> Princeton </li>
<li>Rice</li>
</ol>
<p>If anyone is interested, here is that thread:</p>
<p>bethievt,
Perhaps that's not what you get in Vermont, but that's what I have frequently run into around the Northeast, particularly around NYC and Wall Street. Maybe I'm wrong on this, but I don't think so.</p>
<p>I don't doubt you, hawkette; I'm just saying I could do without the friendship of those people.</p>
<p>And of course, it is so individual what constitutes "fun". The parties and student organizations at Grinnell sound like the best kind of fun to my son. He would HATE the big frat and sports thing.</p>
<p>Hawkette--It's not just Vermont, though. Wall Street is a pretty tiny slice of the Northeast; maybe there and at a few tony country clubs, Harvard grads are looking down their noses at Tufts grads (and I'm not at all persuaded that's true) but in the vast rest of the region, that just seems like a silly thing to worry about.</p>
<p>And that's the beauty of a place like Grinnell. Great academics and a social life that is loved by its students. Not all of us have to go to an Ivy or to a Stanford or a Duke. You can find great knowledge, great experiences, great friends, and great enjoyment at a great many places.</p>
<p>garland,
In looking back over my posts, I probably came across stronger than I intended. I actually like very much and respect the Ivy League schools and especially the students who attend them. There are some graduates who wear their name on their sleeve and that is more than a bit annoying, but for the very large majority of Ivy Leaguers that I know and have known, these folks are smart, fun, and highly accomplished. I am certainly not meaning to turn this thread into an anti-Ivy rant and if it came across that way, then my apologies. My message here, as it has been in many threads, is that students can get a great education at many schools outside of the Northeast and often these schools can provide a more attractive social and athletic scene as well if that is of interest to you.</p>
<p>I really feel a need to give a different perspective than hawkette.</p>
<p>As a matter of background, I am a card-carrying Northeastern educational snob. My undergraduate and graduate degrees are from Yale and Stanford (and my wife's from Yale and Penn). I have worked on Wall Street (way back when, for Morgan Guaranty). My relatives and friends have attended practically every U.S. elitist educational institution there is, and include faculty and administrators at a number of them. I care about prestige. Both for myself and for my kids, I preferred the scope and diversity of research universities over LACs.</p>
<p>But here in my own little corner of the Establishment, I have never, never looked down on graduates of top LACs (and in fact often find myself looking up to them), and I don't know any of my peers who does, either. I could not have had the fantastic undergraduate educational experience I did at an LAC, but I couldn't have had it at Harvard, either, at the time. My father went to Wesleyan (ages ago) and it changed his life; his college friends included Herb Kelleher (founder of Southwest Airlines) and Robert Ludlum, who certainly represent far more economic success than any of my college friends.</p>
<p>Contemporaries of mine, and contemporaries of my children, feel as passionately proud of the educations they received at places like Amherst, Williams, Wesleyan, Swarthmore, Vassar, Haverford, Oberlin, Pomona, Carleton, Smith, Wellesley, Reed as any Ivy League alum.</p>
<p>I believe UChicago has more actual ivy, than many of the "Ivys", if that is any help.:)</p>
<p>JHS,
I think I dug a hole when I didn't mean to. I'll try again and hope I don’t make the hole too much deeper. I appreciate you clearing this up as I obviously didn't express myself very well when I addressed the social life of the LACs. </p>
<p>Please don't interpret my remarks as intimating that the LACs are inferior schools with weaker students. They are not. Nor do I think that their graduates walk around disappointed that they did not attend an Ivy. Frankly, my impression is that it is the student and alumni passion for these schools that sustains them and keeps them so attractive to new students. I was only trying to contrast the SOCIAL life that one can find at a school like a Williams with the social life that one can find at a school like U Virginia. Both are terrific schools, the students are happy at both and the graduates of both are happy. And this goes for all of those LACs that you mentioned and the national universities that I originally posted. </p>
<p>I'm gonna stop digging now….</p>
<p>hawkette, I'm curious. What makes a "good social scene"? And it's a real question, I'm not being snide here.</p>
<p>Edit: OK, I read your other thread a bit. You mean a place where fairly often reasonably large groups of kids gather together in an unhibited way to dance, hear music, or cheer on sporting teams, and they all report a high degree of happiness in their environment, right?</p>
<p>Could, theoretically, be alcohol-free....</p>
<p>BYU might count, for example.</p>