Ok so I’m a junior and I’ve just about finished my list of colleges that I want to apply to next year. After doing all my research I can’t help but ask, why are ivy’s considered so great? I’ve looked at college rankings and many universities such as Vanderbilt, Dartmouth, and Princeton all show up at the top. But the moment I look into specific majors like engineering and business the schools that come out on top are generally Berkeley, UIUC, Stanford, UT Austin, and sometimes Harvard. So what gives? Whats so special about Ivy’s?
Well Vanderbilt isn’t an Ivy, but there are a few things you should understand.
- The name Ivy League just sort of has a famous name that people assume are the best schools in the country.
- The individual rankings don’t always say much about a University’s quality, especially undergrad.
- The Ivies, even though they are NOT the end all be all schools, do have a lot of attractive features.
Nothing great about Ivies in college its just that they have the strongest connections, hence you’ll be making a ton of money
A university education differs immensely from a trade school’s. While you may learn the rudiments of a profession during your undergraduate years, you should also (hopefully) be exposed to great minds (faculty, classmates, alumni, university leadership, and much more) and to great ideas and experiences (both academic and beyond the classroom) that will shape your life’s course, equip you for ever greater responsibilities, and imbue you with ethics and with intellectual curiosity It’s a profound pity if you believe the only reason to matriculate is to study a “specific major” (e.g., engineering, business, etc.).
What is special about the Ivies – and their non-Ivy peers such as Stanford, MIT, Cal Tech, Duke, Northwestern, Rice, JHU, Berkeley, UVa, WU/StL, etc. – is they have long had some of the greatest minds in residence, they have developed, enhanced, refined and discussed some of the greatest ideas, and they have produced some of the most successful individuals (in a huge variety of areas). For many youngsters – perhaps not for you – being a part of an intellectual community of this sort provides breathtaking opportunities, real challenges that can potentially accelerate personal/professional growth massively, and substantial lifelong advantages of all sorts.
Nothing at the undergraduate level at all. Through seven children in the family not one applied to an ivy league school and three or four could have gone. However, Brown is excellent in undergraduate teaching.
As far as business schools are concerned Ivies do not dominate undergraduate rankings anymore. Schools like Notre Dame, Boston College, Villanova have risen quickly to the top.
By the way, ivy league professors at a rate of three to one send their kids to liberal arts colleges. Most of these schools are in the northeast.
Source plz. Tnx. 
Morass of banalities.
I could not find an appropriate smiley.
Poetry. I prefer Homer and Bashō, and for the novel, Cervantes and Dumas.
Great thread, OP. My answer: “it is the possessive of the singular of a term denoting a member of an athletic conference that comprises eight schools and in which no school besides those eight schools is included.”
“why are [Ivies] considered so great?”
If, as your question implies, they are universally considered great, then your question is superfluous; you are, as it were, part of the “universe,” and therefore should know the answer.
Alternatively, if you personally don’t consider them to be great, then your premise is simply a false one.
The Ivies have a vast array of talent on their faculties that is unmatched anywhere else in the world. I t is a sea of Nobel and Pulitzer prize winners, members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Guggenheim fellows, and MacArthur genius winners If college is meeting with and learning from great minds then the Ivies are clearly among the best places to do this.
The Ivys consist of eight outstanding universities that combined to form a sports league. There are many other non-Ivy schools that are also excellent.
Don’t they have more than their share of need blind admissions and need met financial aid? Not sure I’m using the right terms.
@“vienna man”:
Um, some non-Ivies (generally the Ivy-equivalents but also some top state schools) can match the Ivies on prowess of faculty.
If you want a ranking of faculty research prowess, ARWU is probably best:
http://www.shanghairanking.com/ARWU2014.html
3 Ivies in the top 10 (4 of the top 10 American schools). 6 of the top 20 (also 6 of the top 20 American schools).
The Ivy League is an athletic conference, but many people (generally the less-informed) endow some greater qualities to that collection of schools even though there are non-Ivies that are just as good.
For instance, would anyone say that the 8 schools of Stanford, MIT, CalTech, Chicago, Duke, Northwestern, JHU, and Rice (you can substitute Cal for JHU or Rice if you want to) are definitively worse than the 8 schools of Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, UPenn, Brown, Dartmouth, and Cornell? I don’t think you can find a measure that would show that.
It would be the one with an enormous, sparkling, solid gold incisor up front.
Ivy’s what?
All 8 Ivies are ranked among the US News top 20 national universities.
To understand why, you first need to understand the criteria US News uses to rank colleges
(http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/2014/09/08/best-colleges-ranking-criteria-and-weights)
All 8 Ivies do well against almost all these criteria (which, of course, are not the only criteria one could use to rank colleges.)
For example, they are among the most selective colleges in the country. Harvard’s admission rates are under 6%; its median SAT score range is 1410-1600 (M+CR) meaning that about 25% of its students scored perfect 800s on both the CR an Math tests. The least selective Ivy (Cornell) appears to be slightly more selective than the most selective state university (Berkeley).
The Ivies tend to have smaller classes than most other research universities.
Harvard’s student:faculty ratio is 7:1; Princeton’s and Yale’s are 6:1. Compare these numbers to Berkeley’s (17:1), Michigan’s (15:1) or UVa’s (16:1). You won’t necessarily escape big lecture classes at the Ivies, but you will tend to get a higher percentage of classes with less than 20 students and a lower percentage with 50 or more.
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/708190-avg-class-size-p1.html
The Ivies generally have excellent 4 year and 6 year graduation rates.
Their 4 year graduation rates range from 84% to 90%.
Only 3 public colleges have 4 year graduation rates above 80% (http://www.kiplinger.com/tool/college/T014-S001-kiplinger-s-best-values-in-public-colleges/index.php?table=public).
The Ivies generally have long lists of distinguished alumni.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Harvard_University_people
5 of the 8 Ivies are among the world’s top 20 universities by numbers of affiliated Nobel laureates, with Harvard topping the world list.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_university_affiliation
The Ivies tend to draw students from all over America (and to a lesser extent, the world):
http://chronicle.com/article/Where-Does-Your-Freshman-Class/129547/#id=166027
Even the most respected state universities don’t have nearly the same national drawing power (since they are committed above all to serving the people of their own states):
http://chronicle.com/article/Where-Does-Your-Freshman-Class/129547/#id=110662
The Ivies are among the richest universities in America.
Three Ivies top the following ranking of colleges by endowment per student:
http://www.reachhighscholars.org/college_endowments.html
5 of the 10 universities with the largest endowments are Ivies:
http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/the-short-list-college/articles/2015/01/13/10-universities-with-the-largest-financial-endowments
They generally have excellent facilities.
5 of America’s largest libraries (including the largest academic library) are at Ivy League universities.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_libraries_in_the_United_States
All 8 Ivy League schools are among the ~60 US colleges that claim to meet 100% of undergraduates’ demonstrated financial need.Of the 6 U.S. institutions that are need-blind and meet full demonstrated need for both U.S. and international students, 4 are Ivy League colleges.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need-blind_admission
The Ivies also tend to do very well in graduate department rankings, such as the NRC/Chronicle or US News graduate program rankings. However, in these rankings they do get stronger competition from some state universities (such as Berkeley, Michigan, and Wisconsin).
They share a number of fine qualities amongst themselves and other peer institutions. That doesn’t make any one of them them the right or “best” place for any given individual. And there is absolutely no guarantee that if you attend an ivy league school you’ll be “making a ton of money.” That one made me laugh out loud.
No. In fact, if these schools are doing a good job of educating students for citizenship, one might expect many graduates to choose low-paying careers in public service.
However, they all seem to have at least 4 important factors in common:
great students, great faculty, great facilities, and great financial aid.
Very few other institutions quite measure up on all 4.
“Ivy’s what?”
This.
@tk21769, actually, about as many non-Ivies match up to the Ivies on all 4 as the Ivies. I noticed that you compared the Ivies with state schools for some reason. Now do the comparison with the 8 privates I listed.
The only difference between the 8 I listed and the Ivies is that the Ivies are closer together and have a sports league.
Don’t think people are giving enough attention to how old these schools are. Yeah, Cornell is relatively young, but that’s one reason it is an outlier in a lot if people’s minds. The rest are (by American standards) very old, established, historic, and used to be very traditional…the opposite of new and trendy.
A lot of the newer elite schools, in comparison to the ivies (except Cornell), have a new-rich feel to them…some zillionaire decided he wanted in on the College game and built his own version of what he thought a college should be. So they are often more practical and professional, reflecting the kind of smarts that earned them their fortunes. Not many got rich from poetry or history.