<p>I should’ve been more clear. By “prestige,” I meant that from the students’ point of view not the academics’ (i.e. the PA score). Students tend to choose colleges that they themselves and their peers find “prestigious”; they don’t necessarily care so much what academics think. </p>
<p>This is the problem that top publics like Berkeley and Michigan face. They struggle to attract students away from their private peers despite having higher PA scores. That’s because students tend not to view the publics as highly as academics do. </p>
<p>Personally, I think you can get as good an education at Berkeley or Michigan as you would at Penn or Duke. (No one touches CHYMPS though.) But not a lot of (esp. upper middle class) kids feel the same way. So in a sense, Penn benefits from this prejudice against the publics, assuming it isn’t actually mistaken for a public! :)</p>
<p>^so you want the choices 18 year olds make to affect college rankings? I would say 18 year olds should be the last people whose opinions you seek. In my peer group at high school anyway, Penn was seen as the same as Duke, better than Brown and Dartmouth and either the same or eversoslightly lower than Columbia (depending on who you talked to). Columbia gets a boost from high school students by being in NYC and Brown by being the least like other Ivies. I don’t think academics are really a huge consideration when students are choosing between Penn, Columbia, Dartmouth, and Brown (unless they want to do engineering).</p>
<p>Yes, in a sense. That’s the idea behind the Revealed Preferences study. </p>
<p>The choices that high school students make ultimately determine the quality of student bodies at various colleges. To the extent that student body quality is what makes a college good or bad, the choices that high school students make affect the quality of a given college.</p>
<p>That’s the beauty of the RP survey. Unlike USNWR, it doesn’t rely on any methodology, which arbritrarily or at least subjectively weighs the given criteria. In fact, the given criteria themselves are subjective. Who’s to say what should count and how much?</p>
<p>The RP study makes no such claims. It just accurately reports what students (would) do.</p>
<p>The RP study orders them Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth, Penn. If you take out LACs, they are right next to eachother. IMO, students at all these schools are about as smart as eachother (I’ll give “CHYMPS” for having slightly better students on the whole). I wouldn’t say that the dumbest kids choose Penn and the smartest choose Brown. According to crossadmit data (which is flawed in its own way) Penn does lose to these schools, 65% choose Brown over Penn, 59% Columbia over Penn, and 54% Dartmouth over Penn. Sure Brown is more popular, but how does that really speak to quality of the students?</p>
<p>And I asked how the 65% of students choosing Brown are significantly smarter than the 35% choosing Penn.</p>
<p>I looked at some numbers on CC and on the cross admit data, and Brown has a ton of applicants (4th in Ivies after Cornell, Harvard, and Yale) and beats most Ivies for cross admits. It seems really popular among high school students. I never realized that.</p>
<p>I agree with you entirely. The sad thing is Penn DOES have a unique selling proposition: the One University policy</p>
<p>
Now there I disagree with you entirely. Brown’s faculty is inferior to Penn’s in terms of research, accomplishments, and prestige. Brown gets lots of applicants because people are either stupid or intellectually lazy and “I don’t want to take a SCIENCE class”</p>
<p>I honestly don’t understand the One University Policy. If we’re one university why was one person running for Wharton UA have a platform consisting of “only Wharton students should be able to use the computers in Huntsman”? I havn’t run into any problems when I work in Towne. I guess the fact that I can take MBA classes should make up for it though.</p>
<p>uhh, people pick brown over ivies other than HYP for obvious reasons unrelated to their intelligence</p>
<p>kid: so you’re saying I get an Ivy degree, but I don’t have to study subjects that don’t come naturally to me, and I can use pass/fail limitlessly until things are as easy as hell? and I can play frisbee throughout exam week and still make B+'s and A-'s? </p>
<p>Penn should change its name to Wharton, guaranteed marketing/application boost. </p>
<p>In fact, I think I’ll write an e-mail to Gutmann right now. I mean, “University of Pennsylvania”? What a mouthful. “Wharton,” on the other hand, reeks of elitism and prestige</p>
<p>It took Chicago GSB $300 million to change it’s name. It’ll take possibly a few billion for Penn to change its name. Wharton, Penn Law, and Penn Med probably wouldn’t go for it because it’ll hurt all of their names.</p>
<p>Penn would be better known if it took advantage of opportunities to make itself known in the media. For example in Transformers 2, it should have allowed the film to use their name. </p>
<p>Although this sort of media marketing does have its disadvantages. Dartmouth has gotten a rise in popularity thanks to Gossip Girl, and although has made it more well known, will get a lot of applications from people who just apply because they think its “cool” as its been mentioned in the show…</p>