<p>^If Duke was built in the North waayyy back, it might actually be in the IVY LEAGUE.</p>
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<p>Your opinion would be worth as much as anybody else’s were it not for the facts that Princeton doesn’t have a medical school and Dartmouth and Brown don’t have law schools. (Princeton doesn’t have a law school, either.)</p>
<p>Right…no medical/law school for Princeton…no law school at Dartmouth and Brown. Dartmouth does, however, have a well respected business school.</p>
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<p>It’s funny that you include Brown in “those schools.” In his book The Price of Admission, Daniel Golden [recounts</a> how Duke and Brown became as prestigious as they are.](<a href=“The Providence Journal: Local News, Politics & Sports in Providence, RI”>The Providence Journal: Local News, Politics & Sports in Providence, RI) One can certainly disagree with his suggestion that the two schools became prestigious largely in part by attracting the scions of the rich and famous, but it can’t be denied that as recently as the late 1970s, neither Duke nor Brown was anywhere near as desired as both are today.</p>
<p>I don’t know what you mean exactly by “much more selective.” In this year’s cycle, Duke accepted 14.86% of its applicants. By contrast, Penn accepted 14.22%, Brown 9.30%, and Columbia 9.16%. 0.64 percentage points hardly qualifies as “much more selective” in my book, though I acknowledge that some could argue that 5.7 percentage points does qualify. When you get to <20% acceptance rates, though, who cares whether you admit one in ten or one in five? ([Source](<a href=“http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/31/applications/]Source[/url]”>Applications to Selective Colleges Rise as Admission Rates Fall - The New York Times)</a>)</p>
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<p>Tuck is a well respected business school. Unlike Fuqua, however, Tuck does not have any PhD programs; Tuck offers only the MBA degree.</p>
<p>Fuqua produces excellent scholars. trollnyc appears to believe that Columbia is significantly superior to Duke. How does he explain that two recent Duke PhDs placed and earned tenure at Columbia’s Graduate School of Business?</p>
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<p>How? Who says Duke suffers from being a southern school?? I have never heard anyone say this.
If Duke was located in the Northeast, it would have to deal with snow. That’s really all I can imagine. I really don’t see how the Northwest is a magical new area where competition and prestige exceed divorce rates or some crap.</p>
<p>Duke would definitely hold out on its own. Its ranked 10 in the U.S News for a reason.</p>
<p>Prestige battles ARE SO ANNOYING. </p>
<p>/rant</p>
<p>^I agree…</p>
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<p>Oh, for God’s sake. Thanks for pointing that out, geniuses.</p>
<p>I don’t agree that Cornell is more prestgious than Duke. The Ivies benefit because they are in the same league. I wonder what would happen if the Ivies decided to open up their league to 2 other colleges. Would Duke even apply?</p>
<p>I see that Harvard goes out on recruiting trips with Duke and UVa for whatever that is worth.</p>
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<p>If you go down this slippery slope, when you get to <50% acceptance rates, though, who cares whether you admit one in five or one in two? Still don’t care?</p>
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<p>Look, this really doesn’t follow. For reasons discussed in a related thread (on grad school at Duke), there is quite a slippery relationship between excellence in graduate or professional programs and the reputation of a university as a place to get your undergraduate degree. </p>
<p>What makes undergraduate reputation so complex is that it’s an unstable, feedback-ridden, three-sided relationship between (1) measurable aspects of the structure & composition of a school, (2) people’s beliefs about those measures & the decisions they make based on those beliefs, and (3) the efforts of schools to influence both of these things by various means. Better to have a solid understanding of that process than be buffeted this way and that by prestige-mongering one way or the other.</p>
<p>My dad’s a software architect at Google…he’s from IIT in India, and he’s never heard of Dartmouth and Brown till yesterday…</p>
<p>He said he knew about Duke and Cornell and Yale, which he considers to all be at the same prestige level…</p>
<p>In india people don’t know **** about US colleges.</p>
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<p>Your dad is uninformed.</p>
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<p>More evidence.</p>
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<p>By definition, if you reject more than you accept (ie. <50% acceptance rates), you are considered selective as most applicants will not be offered admission.</p>
<p>Regarding your question, I said I was indifferent between 10% acceptance rate selectivity and 20% acceptance rate selectivity. I did not say I was indifferent between 50% acceptance rate selectivity and 20%, but I will say I am indifferent between 50% and 40%.</p>
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<p>I may have misunderstood your post. Were you being sarcastic? It’s hard to detect sarcasm in writing unless there’s a ton of it. Heck, the first time I read “A Modest Proposal,” I thought Swift was being serious until halfway through.</p>
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<p>Yes, I was. I assumed the context of the discussion and its location (a board devoted to college application issues, with a bunch of reasonably well-informed people) would have made that clear, and that it obviously wasn’t intended to be a serious contribution or to mislead people. I guess not. For what it’s worth, I have a Ph.D from one of the schools mentioned and I know perfectly well which Ivies have Law or Med Schools and which do not.</p>
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<p>I am not ashamed to admit that until this semester, I didn’t know “which Ivies have Law or Med Schools and which do not.” My excuse is that I did not pursue a pre-law or pre-med track and thus have done virtually no research on who’s good and who’s not in law and medicine.</p>
<p>I agree with you, however, that fights over perceived prestige are mostly pointless. I should probably disclaim by noting that I will be pursuing a PhD at Duke in the Fall, so I felt compelled to point out my disagreement that a school whose undergraduate acceptance rate is not even one percentage point higher than Duke’s can be considered “much more selective.”</p>
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<p>No worries, mate. I’m fairly new here myself and may have misjudged the crowd. In any event, this is not the kind of board I have the slightest interest in ■■■■■■■■ or picking fights on.</p>