<p>Title says it all.</p>
<p>Brown. The location (cute city), good distance from home, open curriculum, liberal, quirky, has the sort of smart-but-not-snobbish reputation that is, to some extent, important to me...</p>
<p>I want to get out of NYC, so no Columbia. I don't like Harvard or Yale's location, Cornell is too isolated and like 10% of my school's seniors every year go there, Princeton is too close to home, Dartmouth is too isolated and Greek, UPenn is too far south and I don't like the city...</p>
<p>I'm picky, lol.</p>
<p>Cornell
great engineering and sciences (and everything else)
attentive faculty who try to make classes interesting, sometimes fun
enthusiastic faculty
beautiful campus, beautiful area of New York State
perhaps the most diverse Ivy
excellent theater in Collegetown and art museum
down-to-earth students, many from public high schools</p>
<p>I felt really comfortable there for reasons even I may not understand.
I went there for a weekend when I was in high school for faculty science demonstrations and had a great time. </p>
<p>My parents used to take the whole family there for football games every fall. We used to walk by the electrical engineering building on the way to the stadium. Gorgeous view of the valley with fall foliage from the stands. Eat lunch in Collegetown. Stop at Taughannock Falls Park or Treman State Park. Taughannock Falls Inn for dinner. Cornell Dairy ice cream. Moosewood vegetarian restaurant. Lots of cool stuff in Ithaca. Fond memories going back to childhood. The image of Cornell campus on the hillside across the valley from route 96 driving into Ithaca from Rochester...etched in my memory.</p>
<p>I wonder how many students fall in love with a school because of childhood familiarity....</p>
<p>Cornell. Very chill atmosphere, and amazing natural surroundings.</p>
<p>"I wonder how many students fall in love with a school because of childhood familiarity...."</p>
<p>^Actually, that's reason #234987 why I don't like Princeton. It's always been the school my parents wanted me to go to, and while I fondly remember running around the campus as a 5-year-old, going there would be cementing my parents' influence on the rest of my major decisions.</p>
<p>teenage_cliche
It is too bad you were turned off to Princeton. Were your parents overbearing?</p>
<p>Not overbearing, exactly, but...they're immigrants and I'm the oldest child, so they really don't know anything about the college process. The only schools they know are HYP and a few in our area (literally, I brought up some I was interested in, including Swarthmore, Wesleyan, etc and they hadn't heard of any of them), and so they've always pushed for one of those. Princeton's the closest to home, so that was the one they picked.</p>
<p>maybe you can at least widen their perspective to include "ivy league" writ large.</p>
<p>Anyway my favorite is Penn, because I go there, and there's no place quite like it, for so very many reasons. i feel bad for people who don't go here.</p>
<p>Penn -- doesn't seem as elitist as HYP, great history, good location, good size, good offerings, strong linguistics department.</p>
<p>I don't want to change the topic but here are some statistics that don't indicate favorites but which might be tangentially related. Each Ivy has its unique appeal.</p>
<p>school, number of applications, yield</p>
<p>Yield is the percent of accepted students who enroll.</p>
<p>Harvard University 22645 83
Yale University 19451 70
Dartmouth College 13938 49
Princeton University 17564 69
Columbia University in the City of New York 19851 58
Cornell University 28098 46
University of Pennsylvania 20483 66
Brown University 18316 58</p>
<p>Penn. The luminous glory of its existence casts hoary shadows on all competitors.</p>
<p>Dartmouth, only one with legitimate Greek Life.</p>
<p>Brown: pretty campus, open curriculum, great city, great vibe.</p>
<p>Brown for its quaintness and Providence.</p>
<p>Cornell because its students are generally laid back, down to Earth and genuine.</p>
<p>Princeton because it is so well rounded.</p>
<p>columbia....the location...</p>
<p>Cornell...it's gorgeous...literally and figuratively:</p>
<ul>
<li>Fall</a> Creek</li>
<li>Beebe</a> Lake</li>
<li>Cascadilla</a> Falls</li>
<li>Campus</a> Gardens</li>
<li>View</a> (wow!) of Cayuga Lake from McGraw Tower</li>
</ul>
<p>Harvard's Museum</a> of Natural History is pretty cool in an 'old school' sort of way.</p>
<p>collegehelp,
While doing some recent analysis, I was struck by how prominently ED plays in the yield numbers for some of the Ivies. The Harvard and Yale numbers are truly great because of the non-binding EA they had in place last year (and of course nothing now at H). Princeton and U Penn and Columbia, however, were less impressive to me because they took such high percentage of their class via ED. In U Penn's case, they also published how many of their ED deferred admits got in and I calculated that they accepted nearly 60% of their class from their ED applicant pool. Their yield on everybody else was a lot lower. </p>
<p>This year should be an interesting one for Princeton and we'll find out just how strong their brand is vs H and Y.</p>
<p>Cornell because of its people and 1345670689756478647864 opportunities to learn.</p>
<p>Why only ask about the Ivy League? </p>
<p>Honestly, I'd only consider Brown and maybe Cornell. They seem like the only places where "fun" is apart of the students' vocabulary.</p>