Why go to an Ivy?

College Search & Selection
1

<p>I'm just curious, in your opinion, what makes Ivy leagues stand out? Why would you choose an Ivy over another school? Is prestige alone a huge factor? And is it worth it?</p>

2

<p>Ivies tend to give very generous financial aid packages. Prestige is a factor but if it’s not affordable, it’s not worth it.</p>

3

<p>(Some of the many) previous threads on the subject: </p>

<p><a href=“How much does going to an ivy matter? - College Search & Selection - College Confidential Forums”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/648129-how-much-does-going-to-an-ivy-matter.html&lt;/a&gt;
<a href=“Is an Ivy League education worth it? - College Search & Selection - College Confidential Forums”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/1618629-is-an-ivy-league-education-worth-it.html&lt;/a&gt;
<a href=“Does It Really Matter If You Go To An Ivy League School? - College Search & Selection - College Confidential Forums”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/736711-does-it-really-matter-if-you-go-to-an-ivy-league-school.html&lt;/a&gt;
<a href=“Mistake to not apply to any Ivies? - Parents Forum - College Confidential Forums”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/1477764-mistake-to-not-apply-to-any-ivies.html&lt;/a&gt;
<a href=“Does going to an ivy really matter in the long run? - Applying to College - College Confidential Forums”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/425283-does-going-to-an-ivy-really-matter-in-the-long-run.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

4

<p>If your family makes 150k a year or less AND you have the profile (stats and national/international prize), it’s definitely worth it – for the financial aid package.
In all other meanings of the question? no.</p>

5

<p>If you want to impress people and make it clear that you were “smart” at one point in your life, the Ivies+Standord, MIT, and Caltech will make that pretty clear. Also, if you want to attend an Ivy graduate school. Most graduate schools pick from their own schools and the Ivies are not any different.</p>

6

<p>frugaldoctors:

This may be true for Law Schools and, to a certaine extent, Med Schools, it’s more true to say top 20 tend to favor top 20 (not necessarily Ivy) including their own undergraduates; however it’s the opposite for PHD since it’s considered bad to stay within the same dept for undergrad and a PHD (since you need to be exposed to different approaches, theories, ways of thinking…)
While graduating from Harvard undergrad will help get into Brown for a PHD over a directional in Nebraska, each year student with precisely the type of profile the Ivy League wants get into Ivy League universities from places ranked in the top 50 (often) and top 100 or top 200.
In addition, Harvard Law School lists where their admitted students come from, and while there’s a definite preference for Top 20 universities and LACs, the students come from 261 colleges.

  • the list is available if you type “where Harvard Law come from” and college solution in Google.</p>
7

<p>While graduating from Harvard undergrad will help get into Brown for a PHD over a directional in Nebraska</p>

<p>Debatable; it depends on the research experiences and recommendations of the student as well as research fit. Academic PhD program admissions are idiosyncratic.</p>

<p>Attending an Ivy League graduate school and observing (and sometimes teaching) the undergraduates here, here’s what I think - and I think this applies to many high-ranked national universities as well (Stanford, MIT, Wash U, Rice, Chicago, etc.) and also probably to other high-ranked LACs (Pomona, Oberlin, Amherst, Swarthmore, Williams, Wellesley, etc.)</p>

<p>-Impressive, ambitious, driven student body. You’ll be attending college alongside valedictorians and honor students, prestigious private school alumni, musical virtuosos, hacker wunderkinder, mathematical geniuses, etc. The kids who get into top universities are generally a very impressive bunch overall and have had the kinds of experiences that kids in mid-tier universities can only dream of - some because of their talent and some because of the comparative wealth of their families (or a combination of both). When your peers are ambitious and reach for the stars, that kind of ethic rubs off on you. The quality of your classroom discussions will be at a completely different level here, as well as informal discussions in the res halls and off-campus. Some of the things I used to hear my RAs joke about were a absurdly funny in an intellectual way.</p>

<p>-Resources. Top universities have gobs of money compared to other places, and they spend quite a bit of it on undergraduates. You’ll probably have better study spaces, better libraries with better holdings, better technological resources, better tutoring and writing support. Example one: my current university offers a variety of FREE statistical consulting services for any affiliate (I work for two of them). So if you’re writing your senior thesis and you need help puzzling through the statistics, you get an Ivy League quantitative PhD student to help you through them for free. The university pays me. Example 2: While at my mid-ranked LAC I sometimes had problems finding articles and books I needed in the library because my library did not have access to them, I literally never have that problem at my current university. In the rare event that my university does not have access to an article I need, I have a variety of ways to request it: I can get it through Borrow Direct with other Ivy League campuses (it usually gets here in 2-3 days; I can get it through interlibrary loan with other prestigious universities (which takes 2-5 days); or I can just ask my librarian to buy it for us if I can justify its need in the academic libraries (not hard to do at all).</p>

<p>-Alumni connections and career services. Those smart, ambitious students have graduated and gone on to run the world. They may be at high level positions in Fortune 500 companies; or maybe they’re in high-level positions within the state or federal government; or maybe they started their own companies that are doing well; or maybe they’re doing two or three of these things. They have connections and they want to help you because you share their alma mater and all the traditions and wonder that go along with that. They come back to campus to speak about their cutting-edge fields (that your colleagues in mid-tier schools may not have heard about yet), or they start initiatives on campus in their fields with the tons of money they’ve made. One example is the small and growing tech start-up/hacker/techie initiative going on at my university, which involve both grad students and undergrads. Both the administration and the computer science alumni and faculty here want to increase representation of the university in the tech world, so they’ve thrown money at starting new initiatives like a special interest community for application developers (with preferential housing to live together and hack!), the 48-hour hackNYC program (sit for 48 hours with fellow hackers and code, code code to create an app), and a new institute on data science. Many alumni of the uni have been involved with trying to get students interested in start-ups started and/or getting them involved in NYC’s tech community.</p>

<p>Career services here are just great. All the big firms recruit - but not only do they recruit; they come to campus and hold endless information sessions and prep sessions designed to help you stand out in the process. You can start learning about banking or consulting (or publishing or whatever) in your freshman and sophomore year; you can join the consulting club and do case interview practice with our top-ranked b-school students, many of whom have already secured jobs with these companies. </p>

<p>Is it worth it? Well, given that these schools usually meet 100% of need and offer competitive financial aid packages, yes. I would even say it’s worth it to pay your low-ish EFC and take on a small amount of debt (<$30,000) to attend one of these places rather than going to a not-as-reputable place that won’t offer the same things…although note that I have a pretty broad definition of what “one of these places” is. Many awesome public universities offer many of the same advantages and connections that the top schools do, in part because of aggressive recruiting; in addition to that, many very fine places are underrated here on CC in favor of other places. (Example: I’d definitely go to Duke, Vanderbilt or Wash U any day over NYU or USC.)</p>

<p>Plus, there are personal considerations as well. If you loooooove NCAA football and really want to participate in that whole culture, or you want a huge sprawling influential Greek system, attending a place like Michigan or Ohio State (or Duke or Vanderbilt for the latter) may be a better choice for you than Columbia or Harvard. If you really want to be in warm weather or you want to be a big fish in a small pond…well, you get the idea.</p>

8

<p>@juillet Has your experience at the Ivy grad school changed your perception of the quality of your undergrad experience? Do you wish you had gone to a strong university instead of a LAC?</p>

9

<p>ivies are better because you hear it over and over and over…so it just becomes reality. </p>

10

<p>Why go to an Ivy? Connections.</p>

11

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<p>The Ivy League is (by definition) an NCAA Division I sports conference that plays football, although it is not the B1G experience that Michigan or Ohio State have in this respect. Dartmouth is one of the most heavily fraternity/sorority schools, with two thirds of the undergraduates in them, though some other Ivy League schools have very little fraternity/sorority presence.</p>

12

<p>@juillet
Duke and Vandy only for the Greek system and not for football??
Combined record of Duke and Vandy in 2013: 19-8
Combined record of Michigan and OSU in 2013: 19-8</p>

<p>All four schools have big sports cultures, and yes, the students at both Duke and Vandy got behind the teams this year.</p>

13

<p>All the Ivies don’t always “stand out” for me and for many students. For those students who are serious on majoring in engineering or comsci, the Ivies aren’t always the top picks. As a computer science grad, the only Ivy school that I am attracted to is Harvard, Princeton, and possibly, Brown and Cornell. But none of them did I find it more attracted than MIT. Stanford is as attracted as Harvard for me. And, I would rather end up at Berkeley than places like Brown, Dartmouth, Columbia, Penn, Yale or Cornell. But then again, I am a computer science grad.</p>

14

<p>The Ivy league is composed of eight schools which are among the best in the country. Two of those schools (Harvard and Yale) are extremely well respected among academics, professionals, and laymen in all of the regions in the United States. The Ivies are also among the oldest institutions in the country and have a very old and important history in the development of the United States. Here’s an excellent post on Columbia (an Ivy league school) by @tk21769</p>

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<p>Since the U.S. spends an insane amount of its GDP on education, U.S. universities are essentially, inarguably, the finest in the world. Most countries lack more than a handful of universities which could be called their peers. Because of that however, we now have several U.S. universities which are more or less on par with the Ivies in terms of faculty, quality of student body, and success of alumni. </p>

<p>So, as i said, the Ivy league is comprised of some of the most excellent schools in the country. But the league, as a whole, probably hasn’t been the pinnacle of higher education for 30-40 years, perhaps longer.</p>

15

<p>That’s kind of dumb, simba9. Why are the connections at the Ivies any better than the connections at similar-quality LAC’s and universities? People from all those places get into high positions and make connections. And indeed, frankly, there are plenty of connections through “lesser” schools today. Loyalty is loyalty.</p>

16

<p>Gravitas; and to be one with the ancient academic pantheon. (In the U.S., anyways.) Plus, when you hear your Ivy’s name mentioned in movies, you can go, “That’s my school!”</p>

17

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<p>That sounds about right. During WWII, then in the years between the Sputnik launch and the collapse of the Soviet Union (roughly 1960-1990), the federal government poured boatloads of Defense Department and other public money into the nation’s research universities. It was far more funding than 8 small- to mid-sized universities could have absorbed. It probably is not coincidental that, toward the end of that period, US News began ranking what we have come to call “national universities”. Much before that, such a label probably would not have made too much sense. Among research universities we had the Ivy elites, a few upstarts, and a lot of “cow colleges”.</p>

<p>The Baby Boom, Sputnik, the Civil Rights movement, and the Counter-Culture together have challenged any claim the Ivies had to exclusively represent the pinnacle of higher education in America. Indicators:</p>

<ul>
<li><p>Chicago, Berkeley, MIT and Stanford vie with Harvard and Columbia for the greatest number of affiliated Nobel laureates. Today, as many Nobels have been affiliated with the University of Chicago as with Yale and Princeton put together ( Source: <a href=“List of Nobel laureates by university affiliation - Wikipedia”>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_university_affiliation&lt;/a&gt;).</p></li>
<li><p>In the ranking of universities by research expenditures, Cornell is the highest-ranking Ivy … at #15. In the ranking of universities by science & engineering PhDs awarded, Cornell is again the highest-ranking Ivy … at #18. The alumni of Caltech, MIT, UChicago, and Rice all earn more PhDs per capita than the alumni of any Ivy League university. (Source: <a href=“http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/rankings_2013/national_university_rank.php”>A 10-Year-Old Child | Washington Monthly). The alumni of several small liberal arts colleges also earn more PhDs per capita than the alumni of any Ivy League university in many fields.</p></li>
<li><p>As CC poster barrons points out in another thread, the proportion of Fortune 100 executives with Ivy bachelor’s degrees dropped from 14% in 1980 to 10% in 2001 (<a href=“New analysis-undergrad schools of Fortune 100 top execs - College Search & Selection - College Confidential Forums”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/1625670-new-analysis-undergrad-schools-of-fortune-100-top-execs.html&lt;/a&gt;)</p></li>
<li><p>In 2013, for the first time, the Forbes “Top Colleges” ranking has non-Ivies (Stanford and Pomona) in the #1 and #2 positions. (<a href=“America's Top Colleges 2013”>http://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinehoward/2013/07/24/americas-top-colleges-2013/&lt;/a&gt;)</p></li>
</ul>

<p>Only time will tell if admit rates and SAT averages will prove to be lagging indicators. The Ivies continue to have powerful appeal to brand-loyal legacies and to brand-aware first gens. However, if you want the highest quality arts & science classroom experience, you may be better off choosing a LAC. If you want the best in engineering or computer science, you may be better off choosing a state university. Only in the lucrative investment banking and business consulting sectors does Ivy prestige, per se, seem to trump the competition consistently. </p>

18

<p>thanks for putting that together, tk. worthy of a bookmark.</p>