Schools that are on par with Ivy League or Better?

Add University of Virginia

Who’s is this Ivy League broad?

What about your community college, OP? I kinda know where you're heading.

You can get a very good education at any of the top 30 or so national universities.

Berkeley and UCLA, and other UC schools have excellent reputations

Maybe even top 50.

UCLA? are you kidding?

NOT: NYU, Ohio State, Notre Dame, Syracuse, William and Mary, Texas or Georgia-- those are all schools for B or B+ students.

ADD: Wash U in St. Louis, UVa, CalTech, Emory, Pomona, Claremont McKenna, UCSD, Brandeis and of course Cal-Berkeley, which is your #1 omission

Bowdoin is a good school, but it's a LAC, not a university, so if you include Bowdoin you need to include many others: Amherst, Williams, Colby, Haverford, Swarthmore, Middlebury, Colby, Bryn Mawr, Wellesley, Carleton, Grinnell, Davidson, Colgate, Hamilton, Lehigh, and another dozen or so that I am likely forgetting.

Williams & Amherst.

If the ones you mentioned, probably only Stanford, Duke and Georgetown in terms of their admissions competitiveness (Syracuse???)

Ohio State? I don't think so.

Bowdoin? good for what?

^^Pomona and Claremont McKenna are also LACs (liberal arts colleges) not universities, so in same league as Williams, Amherst et al.

Rice University is the best thing the Baker family ever did.

[quote]Rice, MIT, Northwestern, NYU, Vanderbilt, UCLA, Stanford, Texas, Georgetown, Duke, Michigan, William & Mary, Johns Hopkins, Notre Dame, Ohio State, Georgia, Carnegie Mellon, Bowdoin, Tufts, and Syracuse.

Top tier comparable to Ivy: MIT, Northwestern, Stanford, Berkeley, Cal Tech, University of Chicago

Next tier down: UCLA, Duke, Georgetown, NYU, Johns Hopkins, UVa, Carnegie Mellon, Michigan

Seriously? Ohio State, Texas, Rice, Vanderbilt, William and Mary, Notre Dame, Tufts, Syracruse

Then there are a host of schools that are very specialized, but excellent, such as: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Harvey Mudd, Rose Hulman,

R10 Syracuse could have been dropped from that list. I am not in New York, but I always heard they were a great school.

The only ones on par would be Stanford, Cal Tech, MIT, Duke, UChicago, Northwestern, Rice, and UC Berkeley.

The others - Johns Hopkins, Emory, Vanderbilt, Tufts, Washington U in St. Louis, Georgetown, etc. are all on a lower tier, especially in terms of international prestige.

Ugh. You attended an Ivy or you didn’t. Aren’t we done there?

r18 No I did not. I went to the school of hard knocks.

Well, if you include Cornell, R17, I'd say that the schools you call "lower tier" are all still standing ;)

R19 Is that upstate?

Ohio State? No school with State in its name is elite.

CUNY, all the way!

The best school is one where you have a low to nonexistent debt load, are surrounded by interesting and fairly nice people and have professors who have time for you and want to teach. A big plus is if you like the surrounding environment. Are you planning a semester abroad or more?

If you don't know why you are going to college or what you want to do there, you should probably wait.

[quote] Next tier down: UCLA, Duke, Georgetown, NYU, Johns Hopkins, UVa, Carnegie Mellon, Michigan

Not NYU

And bring Northwestern down to that tier and add in USC, WashU and Vanderbilt,

R15 is right with the tiers. Only the top tier could be considered public Ivys. UCLA and NYU a public Ivy? Hell no!

The Ivy League is an ATHLETIC conference, made up of primarily the oldest UNIVERSITIES in the states.

Your list contains some colleges along with universities - but those really need to be separate lists.

You can get a good education at any top 25/30 school. End of story.

The requirements of getting into a top tier university the past 15-20 years is ridiculous - not many of the students who attended in the 60's or 70's or even 80's would have gained admission under this harsh competition.

R15 Duke and even Georgetown are tougher admissions wise than Northwestern (or Rice).

Also which Ivies? Duke is ranked higher then Cornell and Penn at this point.

Vanderbilt has also shot way up the last two decades and is bascially now where Duke used to be. They still have a bit of that “we really want/need admits from the Northeast/MidAtlantic” element to it though - and a lot of these schools listed (Pomona, Michigan, Wash U, Northwestern) REALLY are desperate for them still.

Tufts? Really?

My two cents as a former academic/Ivy League PhD:

You're going to get a comparable education at any of the schools in the OP except for Syracuse. Where the Ivy League provides a definitive edge is in alumni networks and the power of recommendation that Ivy League professors command. You're far better off thinking about that when you decide on a school than something abstract like "quality of education." If you use my criteria, then there are a ton of liberal arts colleges that belong at the very top. UT, UCLA, NYU etc. are great if you're an ultra competitive self-starter. Most of us aren't, and even if you are, you kind of have to be lucky for things to work out.

In terms of quality of education only, I'd go with a smaller Ivy or an elite liberal arts college.

Dartmouth was about more than curriculum.

[quote] Duke and even Georgetown are tougher admissions wise than Northwestern (or Rice).

They attract tons of applicants for reasons other than academics.

R20, I believe Cornell is way way more prestigious internationally than any of those, at least in the international rankings. Domestically, it depends on the state. An Alabama hick will definitely have heard of Cornell, but don't know what the fuck a Tufts except in reference to a clump of hair, whereas someone living in Maryland may feel Johns Hopkins is better than Cornell, especially if they're pre-med.

Sorta-kinda Xennial.

The only schools my Princeton classmates would admit were on par are Stanford and MIT. Then maybe Caltech and they'd tell you Duke was on par with Brown or Cornell.

Of the others, it's gotten crazy--I do alumni interviews and I am pretty sure I would struggle to get in right now.

As a result a lot of other schools have shot up.

Duke is considered right below Ivy.

U Cal schools are tough because California keeps changing rules on how many out of state they admit--but Cal and UCLA are top schools if you live in CA

Vanderbilt is very hot in the Northeast right now, but so is WashU--kids usually apply to both and/or Michigan and Northwestern--those four seem to be pulling from the same pool, basically A- to A students for whom Duke or Penn are reach schools.

Georgetown is waning, as is Emory--still great schools but don't seem to have the buzz they had when I was applying almost 20 years ago.

Chicago, Rice and Hopkins also great schools but have a reputation for being overly wonky/nerdy and not much fun, plus location, so are seen as less desirable by a lot of kids.

It really depends what area of study you're going there for! You can't be going to the MIT for arts for example lol.

William & Mary is so tough, the students commit suicide rather than graduate. Yikes.

LOL, it's a joke R33/R17--all the other Ivies always dump on Cornell as it is the least prestigious of the Ivies and also the largest (I think)

This is likely colored by the fact that I went to school in the mid-00s and the Andy Bernard character on The Office went to Cornell and there were even more Cornell jokes off of that.

R37 I thought Brown was the least prestigious.

[quote] UCLA? are you kidding?

Um, no.

[quote] William & Mary is so tough,

Both of them?

As r35 says, it depends on your field. There’s some SUNY school that my computer science exec neighbor says that has some very good grads. He likes to recruit there.

A lot of the very successful people I know didn’t go to any sort of name school. Like my BIL who went to some nothing school and is a Goldman MD and rakes in seven figures.

I just talked to another neighbor whose daughter just graduated from Princeton and is going on to Stanford Law. This girl’s classmates cant find jobs. Princeton!!

[quote] No I did not. I went to the school of hard knocks.

I went to Screw U.

R35 I agree, it's become increasingly specialized, especially for computer science. My company will hire from Carnegie Mellon and Michigan, but rarely from Yale.

I also think Cornell has a bigger international reputation than schools like Brown and Dartmouth and some of the great LAC like Amherst and Williams. When I worked in Asia, everyone thought Brown was a joke school. They're all great schools, so it's weird that people have these preconceptions.

Stanford, MIT and Caltech always seem to be in the top 10 of rankings (worldwide, not even US-only), so they're the main ones, I'd say.

R36 - that's the first time I've ever heard anyone say that about William and Mary, which is a state school.

R37 - well, that's because parts of Cornell is a state school with lower admittance standards. It's still considered very good.

A lot of the admissions process in all of these schools are mercurial because there are quotas on how many they'll accept from a certain state, city, or even high school.

Plus the cost of so many of these have skyrocketed so much it's unbelievable. My undergrad Ivy school was $1600/year tuition in the early 60's - that's around $15,000 today. Instead, it's now $75k/year, all in. 5x more expensive than it used to be.

I would love to see some new colleges pop up that focus on quality academics, decent student life, but at very affordable prices. Remove all the fluff. People are getting screwed.

Probably Binghampton, R41, that seems to be the top SUNY

As for Syracuse, not sure how old this link it, but it sums up the impression most people I know seem to have of who goes there.

Not near ivy league status, but I've been watching George Washington U (DC) rising up in rankings

R45 This is from a few years ago, but it is well known to people "in the know." W&M got ripped off becoming a public school. Most think they are a prestigious private school in Virginia, which they should be.

(I'm a W&M alum)

Wow - R46 wasn't too far off from my assessment. I can't believe how many people said Long Island JAPs - but that's been my experience.

[quote] Probably Binghampton, [R41], that seems to be the top SUNY

Competition?

Harvard, Yale, Princeton along with the non-ivies of MIT and Stanford are the cream of the crop when it comes to most elite undergraduate.

Columbia here.

And the answer, OP, is none.

Stanford and MIT are second tier.

Everything else is "for the masses."

Yes r52, Cornell is certainly more prestigious than Stanford or MIT dear.

Check out the average SAT of people going to MIT versus Columbia, spoiler alert, MIT is higher.

Unlike the other six members of the Ivy League, Cornell wasn’t founded as a colonial college. William & Mary however was a colonial college and therefore, it would seem to me, ought to be in the Ivy League as well. Why is this not so? Was it because of that unfortunate switch to public status that caused WM to forfeit its place?

R54 Pretty much. Plus they are in Virginia. Princeton in New Jersey is the southernmost Ivy.

[quote] Cornell is certainly more prestigious than Stanford or MIT dear.

What are you smoking?

I know two people who chose Stanford over going to an ivy.

I’d go to Stanford over Cornell, Brown, Penn and Columbia.

R56, I think the joke might have flown over your head. Of course no one sane should think Cornell is more prestigious than MIT or Stanford.

I went to a Southern Ivy. Tulane? Heard of it? I majored in beer funnels and minored in Jell-O shots.

An engineering or other applied science degree from Cal Tech counts a lot more than the same from Ivy League schools. They also only accept 5-6% of applicants.

[quote] I’d go to Stanford over Cornell, Brown, Penn and Columbia.

I'd go to Stanford mainly because it's warm in California.

I went to Texas A&M University!!!!!! WE ARE NOT A CULT, WE ARE BETTER THAN UT THOUGH.

HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT THE GOOD NEWS OF JESUS CHRIST AND HOW HOMESCHOOLING IS WAY BETTER THAN PUBLIC SCHOOLS??

WE ALL GO AND WORK AT CHRISTIAN CAMPS LIKE PINE COVE OR SKY RANCH DURING THE SUMMER.

UCLA and Cal over USC and Stanford? Nope.

If you’re a middling student but your parents can pay full tuition, then Syracuse is the school for you.

I applied to 30 different universities (including all eight Ivy League schools, Stanford, MIT, Cal Tech, Georgetown, Notre Dame, and others) because I was paranoid that I wouldn't be admitted to any. I was accepted to all of them. This is not a brag; it's the simple truth.

I happily would've attended any, but my heart was set on an Ivy League school because of the universal prestige. My first choice was Yale because of the gay-friendly reputation, but I chose Columbia because of NYC and because I had other friends attending there.

If no Ivy League school had accepted me, my next choice would've been Stanford, followed by Georgetown. Today, however, I would choose MIT over Georgetown.

[quote]UCLA and Cal over USC and Stanford? Nope.

Hardly. UC and Stanford are equivalent, and UCLA is close behind. USC is not even in the same league (other than with respect to athletics.)

Where are Trump University and the University of Phoenix?

William and MARY!

So much misinformation here.

R15 is the only one who seems to have it right.

If you're talking universities only, then R15 has it correct.

But there are a number of colleges that are as good as the Ivies, and probably, with smaller classes and more direct contact with faculty members, provide a better education: Amherst, Williams, Wesleyan, Swarthmore, Bates, Bowdoin, Colby, Hamilton, Pomona, Bryn Mawr, Carleton, Haverford, Vassar, and a few others.

[quote]An engineering or other applied science degree from Cal Tech counts a lot more than the same from Ivy League schools.

Thank you!

What Ohio State does better than any Ivy. That's about it.

Definitely, 100% Duke

(Full disclosure: I’m an alum)

Stony Brook is the top SUNY. Albany and Buffalo slot right below. The rest of them are a jumble farther down.

The rising star the last decade is Northeastern. It has launched from 130’s to top 50.

Lincoln Land Community College in Springfield IL

[quote] Amherst, Williams, Wesleyan, Swarthmore, Bates, Bowdoin, Colby, Hamilton, Pomona, Bryn Mawr, Carleton, Haverford, [bold]Vassar[/bold].

This must be a first to last ranking.

[quote] Stony Brook is the top SUNY. Albany and Buffalo slot right below.

No they're not.

SUNY Binghamton is most widely considered the top SUNY. Too bad it's in the middle of nowhere-- located right next to Cornell.

Isn't Stanford the hardest to into of them all these days?

R79,Harvard, Yale, and Stanford are the hardest to get into--meaning they have the most applications with the fewest acceptances

R80 pretty much anyone I know who has only gotten into one big 3 - it’s always been Yale. Take that for what it’s worth.

I actually know a couple of people who got into Yale but not Brown.

One constant however is that ALL colleges st every level are much harder to get into. Even Cornell which has by far the largest acceptance rate is only 19%. When I was applying Harvard/Princeton/Yale were all about 15%.

According to US News, Stanford is the hardest to get into (for some reason DL won't let me post the link).

Stanford University Stanford, CA 4%

Columbia University New York, NY 5%

Curtis Institute of Music Philadelphia, PA 5%

Harvard University Cambridge, MA 5%

California Institute of Technology Pasadena, CA 6%

I am not American and I honestly had (erroneously) assumed that Stanford was Ivy League before I saw this thread. I think that says it all, really.

The Royal Academy in London

Syracuse seems to produce a lot of TV news personalities.

R82 Awesome, Columbia beats Harvard. Of course, Columbia's in New York, where people actually want to live, whereas Harvard's in, well, Boston.

Hmm.. Take it you didn't go to an Ivy, R86.

R86, you must be a product of the NY public schools.

[quote] Harvard, Yale, and Stanford are the hardest to get into--meaning they have the most applications with the fewest acceptances

Thanks for explaining that. I, for one, wouldn’t have been able to figure that little nugget out.

Brandeis over UT Austin? Hah!

[quote]Syracuse seems to produce a lot of TV news personalities.

I thought they all came from Columbia!

No one's mentioned my alma mater yet?

I keep hearing about Hudson University

The graduation rate at Hudson is very low for some reason. Lots of kids enter, but few get out.............. alive.

R87 Why is that what you take?

Because R95, R86, Columbia didn't beat Harvard. You actually have to look at the numbers and see that 5 = 5.

^As I remember--it's too boring to revisit--Columbia had a lower acceptance rate than Harvard. Wasn't that what was being measured?

Emory should be on the list WAY before Univ. of Ga.. The very idea!

R94 Women students at Hudson are constantly getting raped, and Olivia always believes them.

Hastings law school in San Francisco is a public school with a very good reputation.

This will end in tears.

R97 -- you really don't understand that 5% is the same as 5%?

It's not that you didn't go to an Ivy, you clearly never went to any school at all.

^Did it not say that Columbia had a 4 percent acceptance rate and Harvard a 5 percent acceptance rate? I thought that was what it said. I wasn't studying it for an exam, I just read it quickly on DL. You seem to be a rather petty and nasty individual.

R38 wasn't admitted to Brown, which has had among the lowest percentages of admittances in some years.

R9 doesn't know much about college admissions. NYU is hard to get into these days. Even A students can't get in. Same with Notre Dame.

Oxford and Cambridge are superior.

I went to Brown, did a semester abroad on a Syracuse University program; I remember a girl from Wesleyan and I were amazed that Syracuse students were complaining that some course required 2 papers for the semester, when some courses I had at Brown required them almost weekly. Fun semester though -- Syracuse students sure know how to party.

As I understand it, the Common App has driven down acceptances at top schools, since they get significantly more applications than they used to

Globally, Harvard will always be seen as the number one US university. Saying it's inferior because it's in Boston rather than NYC is like saying London universities are better than Oxford University. Only a clown would think that.

Columbia has a rep for upper class arty types like Timothee.

Where the fuck is Syracuse? Sounds like something out of ancient Greece.

NYU used to be a school in 2nd tier, where B students went if they could afford it and wanted to be in NYC. Nowadays it's quite competitive to go there, and really expensive. Plus in spite of all their real estate holdings, endowment and high tuition and fees, they are notoriously cheap with giving out financial aid.

I meant to say the Common App has driven down acceptance RATES at r108, not acceptances themselves

^Oh brother. Apparently Harvard doesn't inculcate a sense of humor. I went to Columbia, not Harvard. Therefore I was taking a little pleasure in Columbia's being rated, in this particular study or whatever it was, a fraction ahead of Harvard, because normally Harvard is able to lord it over all other schools. Is that really so difficult to comprehend? And if you think that Boston is a more interesting place to live than New York, then you've got other problems.

Boston is a lot less polluted and more aesthetically pleasing than fugly Manhattan, especially in the fall.

[quote]Emory should be on the list WAY before Univ. of Ga.. The very idea!

Although I went to Georgia and got a great education there, it does not even belong in this conversation.

Harvard's in Cambridge, not Boston, though Beantown is quite close.

Oral Roberts University. I believe that is the fine school that Madison Cauthorn flunked out of.

R78 I stand corrected re: Albany

US News 88. Stony Brook, Buffalo, Binghamton (tie) 160. Albany

QS 373. Stony Brook

Has anyone mentioned that UVA isn't a charm school?

[quote]Southern Ivy.

Oxymoron.

"Harvard is the Johns Hopkins of the north."

[quote] NYU is hard to get into these days. Even A students can't get in. Same with Notre Dame.

That's just not true. Tisch, NYU's arts program, is hard to get into, but the rest of the school is on par with BU and GW.

While there's a lot to quibble with in the US News rankings and strong arguments that various schools should be several places higher or lower in the rankings, their list of the top 30 or so schools is pretty accurate for 2021. (Muriel will not allow me to link it) Remember too that USN has two rankings, one for "Universities" and one for "Liberal Arts Colleges"

Also, remember that it is now much harder to get into all colleges than it was when any of us applied, whether it was 50 years ago or 15. More kids applying to top schools, especially our of region and more SAT tutors and multiple AP classes and all that.

Plus you have things like Early Decision, where you promise that you will go if they let you in early--some schools can fill up 25% or more of the class that way. (That brings up all sorts of class issues too, because if you need to know your financial aid package before you say yes, you can't apply ED.)

Finally, remember that schools will require better grades from kids from middle class public schools and unknown private schools (Topeka Christian Academy) than they will from known private schools and top suburban public schools. They have taken many kids from the latter group, know the coursework is more challenging and they know those kids can pay full price and won't need financial aid or loans and their parents can be hit up for donations.

R122 Unless you're a professional admissions person at a university, you're really not competent to post on this thread, so what's the point of it really?

The best school for you is the one which offers the on-campus opportunities and the atmosphere you are looking for. The most successful people take advantage of these opportunities and run with them, exceeding all expectations.

My company had a choice between an applicant with a degree from the U. of Toledo and an applicant with a degree from Harvard. We took the kid from Toledo. He had the experience we needed, cooperated fully with us, and was humble about his work. The move has been very successful. He is now a company vice-president.

Why isn’t Northern Arizona University on the ‘as good as ivy’s’ list???!! Fuckers 😂

R103 -- seriously? You keeping going on and on, posting about percentages on a thread -- that you keep getting wrong -- but you won't take the time (maybe, say, thirty seconds) to go look at the actual post? And on top of that you feel like insulting other posters, which also takes time. You have strange priorities.

It's even better than any Ivy R125... at cross country.

No idea why it's a long distance running powerhouse, but it is

R126 Where is the post? I looked for it and don't see it. Why are you such a trivial-minded little twit?

R126 And I meant to insult only you, not other posters. I think you're trying to assemble a gang.

A relative taught at Duke, tenured, for decades. His view was that, w. the exception of a few specialities and programs, what you're really getting from the "elite" schools is the reputation. And that's not nothing. A piece of paper from Cal Tech, Yale, etc., will carry serious weight.

Why all the Syracuse hate???

This is the top 30 from US News. (There was a 4-way tie for #30, hence there are more than 30 on the list)

While no one is disputing their first choice (joking), these are the schools that the Lori Laughlins of the world are "taking shortcuts" to make sure their kids get in

Princeton .

Harvard .

Columbia .

Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Yale .

Stanford .

University of Chicago.

University of Pennsylvania.

CalTech

Johns Hopkins

Northwestern

Duke

Dartmouth

Brown

Vanderbilt

RIce

Wash U in St. Louis

Cornell

Notre Dame

UCLA

Emory

Cal (Berkeley)

Georgetown

Michigan

USC

Carnegie Mellon

University of Virginia

University of North Carolina

Wake Forest

NYU

Tufts

UC Santa Barbara

University of Florida (Gainesville)

Yeah, Gainesville ahead of Minnesota and Wisconsin. Right.

Oxford rivals Hudson University for the highest crime rate.

It's nice to get a good education but the point of Ivy is to make social and subsequent professional connections.

How could UCLA be ahead of Berkeley?!?

"That's just not true. Tisch, NYU's arts program, is hard to get into, but the rest of the school is on par with BU and GW."

This is objectively untrue. No one is getting into NYU with a B+ average unless they're famous, their parents are famous, they're a recruited athlete, or daddy wrote the school a big check. It's hard to get into. The acceptance rate for the class of 2025 was 12.8%

R67, no way is Cal on the same level as Stanford. UCLA is very rarely ranked ahead of USC in anything, including athletics, and it certainly not mentioned in the same breath as Cal. Lol

R137 Never forget: Arguing with an idiot makes you an idiot too.

Cal is the original UC campus, isn’t it?

Brown and Vandy should NOT be neighbors. Just no. And everyone knows Penn and Cornell are the bottom two Ivies.

The one consistency is Princeton has always, always been #1, when I applied to schools, even when my two much older siblings applied. Since the mid/late 80s at least.

r139 is the ultimate idiot

My rather introverted cousin who went to an open house at UVA said that it was like being among a bunch of Tracy Flicks (both the males and females) who were destined to become stepford wives/husbands. And that even the genuinely nice ones came off as rather phony due to their high energy personalities.

Must be why I get the big bucks ;) and I didn’t know that about the cross country maybe it’s because of high altitude training? Get the bigger lungs more RBI’s?.

r140 Yes. Now there are 9 campuses (10 if you count UCSF, which is just a medical school.)

The California State University system (which are the second tier of California's higher education system) has 23 campuses.

Community colleges are the third tier.

Bucknell University, Stanford , Drexel University

*rbc’s

[quote] The California State University system (which are the second tier of California's higher education system) has 23 campuses.

Why do State schools always have such a bad reputation? Cal State Hayward and Cal State Northridge are seen as jokes, like Arizona State. But the University of [California, Virginia, etc.] schools are seen as higher class. Aren’t they both state schools?

[quote] UCLA is very rarely ranked ahead of USC in anything, including athletics, and it certainly not mentioned in the same breath as Cal.

You are correct that Cal Berkeley is way ahead of UCLA in prestige but USC is not ahead of UCLA. USC is seen as a party school of spoiled rich children who pay their way in. There’s really no prestige in USC.

And yet how sad that Lori woman had to fake her kid's application to get her in there.

That was the running joke. People were baffled that she went through all that not to get her child into Harvard but fucking USC!?

USC always wanted to be the southern Calif. Stanford, but it wasn't even close. That said, it's improved markedly in recent years.

As for UC-CSU (and by the way, there's no more Cal State Hayward--it's Cal State East Bay)--the California Master Plan for higher education was designed so that the top 10% would be eligible for the UC system; the top 1/3 would be eligible for the CSU system, and everyone would be eligible for community colleges (which were tuition free for many years.) The CSU schools are generally more targeted toward business, accounting, teachers, nursing, etc.

why have small Liberal arts colleges declined so?

I grew up a block away from Drew University in Madison NJ. Seemed like a nice school. Beautiful campus. They used to call it the little Princeton back then. Now its acceptance rate is really high.

University of Pennsylvania I found depressing for some reason. I did a research job there one summer. I found it very grim. Similar opinions? I may have just been unhappy with my job.

I went to a UC school and I would not date someone from a State school. Is that elitist?

It is amazing how many of you do not know that there are eight Ivy League schools. Including OP.

You forgot Columbia as part of the ivy league. Do your homework. And interestingly enough the Ivy League did ask Rutgers university to join at one point. They said no

While kids clamber to get into the top three Y-H-P, as adults they'll discover that outside of their professional circles they have to keep quiet about where they went to school to avoid being thought snobs.

I knew two girls in high school who were obsessed with getting into an Ivy.

One got into Harvard. One Penn. The Penn one went to law school and practiced three years and became a housewife.

The Harvard one got into a prestigious MFA drama school was in one movie and one play then got an MA in Education at Columbia and then became a housewife.

Maybe women shouldn't be admitted.

Wasted places in the class, wasted money.

OP and others missed University Of Florida.

It has won more Olympic medals than any other college in the world this year.

I completed a Master's program at Fordham, and most of the people I knew there had undergraduate degrees from Ivy League schools (I was not one of them). I don't know if that means they were on the lower academic end at those schools, or they simply were offered a better deal at Fordham. I felt like I got a good education there, but it certainly doesn't have the name recognition outside of tri-staters or Catholics.

Lol@R149

seriously, Brown is shit. it's worse than many of the top 20 schools.

Stupid, dated concept and thread. First of all, we’ve learned degrees can be bought (that’s you Olivia Jade). It’s more about how hoard you work and how well you work with people and work the system. My Boss and I howl that we left unknown schools, debt free, and have morons who went to Ivy League schools reporting to us who can’t even fill out an agency brief.

I know someone who went to one of the worst law schools in the USA but he reps one of the biggest stars in Hollywood. Although I do not know in what capacity, this star has lots of biz ventures and I'm sure he has more than one agent. This star shouts out his name in acceptance speeches.

George W Bush went to Yale...let that sink in. He's a dumb fuck!

r149 that was the old image of USC. Party school for rich kids.

Now it has improved academically and gets many more applicants since the country has become so celebrity obsessed. Same with NYU. Kids want to be in New York or LA not some quiet remote liberal arts college.

Big mistake. With the way the cities are the last year I'd love to be in some podunk town with a leafy green campus I never leave.

and UCLA is odd if you aren't Asian. You'll feel like a minority if you are white.

NYU (undergrad) is not hard to get into at all.

NYU's grad schools like the Biz school and Law School are much better.

UCLA is in a much, MUCH nicer part of town than USC. I'd prefer UCLA over USC just for that. (Of course Pepperdine is even nicer, but it's not a great school.)

Yes UCLA is nicer area but it is so big. You have to take buses across the campus to get to classes.

Go to an eastern school. College should be filled with classic buildings, beautiful autumn leaves, and snow. Like Love Story.

yes, Cornell is more popular overseas. Boston University is another one with good international rep.

William and Mary grad, can you give some info about the school?

G went there r`172. (at 26!) Good school but doesn't lead to Oscars.

Forgotten and unmentioned, but Georgia Tech is a top-10 public.

Ohio State???

Swarthmore College

My high school crush went to Swarthmore. He was a wrestler. Had gay rumors. I should have followed him there. Never been able to find him on social media.

[quote] Dartmouth was about more than curriculum.

Yes: drinking and date rape.

[quote] It is amazing how many of you do not know that there are eight Ivy League schools.

Mary!

What am I, chopped livah?

What about me ?

But OP couldn't even complete a simple list of 8 famous universities! Cornell is Ivy League, and despite its reputation for being the bottom of the Ivies, it offers the best frat cock, and it's a very grand university indeed.

You’re all so adorable.

I was a poor white trash kid from nowhere who just happened to be very, very good at school. My guidance counselor in high school made me apply to Stanford just to see if I could get in.

I did.

But I couldn't afford to go, was overwhelmed at even attempting to move there, had no desire to go into debt for college, and had no parental guidance pushing me to do it. So I let that great opportunity die.

Far and away, the biggest mistake of my life.

[quote] Far and away, the biggest mistake of my life.

Bigger than posting on DL?

Where did you end up going r184?

Not going into debt was probably a smart move. Don't be so hard on yourself. Sounds like you made a good decision for someone your age then.

I remember a news story a few years ago about a poor kid who got into all the ivys but also got into the University of Alabama on a full scholarship. He wanted to go to medical school after. He wisely chose Alabama.

(Plus all the publicity he got about getting in everywhere probably will get him into a good medical school later on if he does well in college.

R187 its a misreported story, obviously. Every IVY is NEED BLIND and if he kid was "poor" he would have been offered free rides at all 8 of them. Yes. FULL FUCKING SCHOLARSHIPS.

In short your story is urban legend. Bullshit.

I don't know r188. Here's the kid. Seems real to me. Credible source.

Maybe he wasn't "poor" r188 but he wasn't able to easily pay Ivy tuition and didn't get much aid from any of them. (and boy you got triggered. Such hostility. Ativan is your friend.)

The poster above said POOR. If he is POOR then the Ivy League schools will offer a full ride. He's also BLACK. Get real. There are other reasons he is going to Alabama. It seems likely someone at Alabama made human contact with him there, and created a relationship of trust and safety for him.

I know from what I speak as I had a "full ride" at an IVY. And I'm not referring only to the primo dickings on campus.

I will accept the story if he is NOT poor, however. Though the Ivy League generally generously funds middle class black students, as well.

You sound unbalanced. The Ivys made a bad investment.

Deep Springs College

Whatever. People are so ignorant about the true college game. And hardly anyone who never enjoyed the benefits of Need Blind knows anything about the system. This myth that the most select college are "unaffordable". Well, yeah, if its NYU or USC. Which are ripoffs.

The average debt of a graduating senior at Harvard is around 15k, total, for 4 years. On an education sticker priced at 300K. They won't tell you the average debt of a "poor" southern Black man. Because it's like ZERO.

The average debt of a undergraduate succeeding to graduate from Alabama State University is over 50K. (Not U of Alabama, though.) For a diploma with no cachet whatsoever.

So the Ivys are filled with poor people? Can you imagine?

Stay away from them.

r196 but isn't that because a lot of the students are wealthy and can pay the whole tuition without going into debt?

R199 yes of course! But it is also because anyone who is poor but gets in, gets the financial aid necessary. Need Blind is a point of pride. And expensive. A school needs a large endowment AND the mission or will to shell out accordingly.

Which is why I am incredulous that a "poor" black dude accepted to all 8 Ivies didn't get at full rides offered by at least 4 of them. If not all 8, because they are members of the Need Blind club and morally obliged to give it.

So I said the dude is not POOR or there are other reasons Alabama is more attractive. Maybe he is insecure and was offered security by someone at Alabama that he will be a big fish in a small pond.

And if he needs an "honor" program to feel special, then some of the Ivys have them too and slap MORE money and attention on the students. Columbia gives all their "honors" program students full rides if they need them - meaning the poor kids don't have to do work study distracting them from their "honors" achievements.

hardly any middle class or rich person attending an Ivy feels the need for an honors program because in theory everyone of them feels confident he or she is brilliant and special (even if it's not the case). Or daddy is PM of Malaysia or mommy is the richest woman in Texas not to mention an alumna, so of course golden boy belongs on the Ivy campus, and has nothing to prove to anyone, except himself.

This thread is a mess. How could it be anything but, on DL, and with OP starting it off with Syracuse. SYRACUSE. How cute and ignorant. But a mess.

R172 W&M grad here. Long port LOL:

Founded in 1693, it is the oldest college in the United States (Harvard and W&M go back and forth on which is technically older). W&M goes in and out of the history of Virginia and the United States. It has produced epoch making alumni; George Washing, Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, John Tyler, John Marshall, Henry Clay, Robert Gates, James Comey, Jon Stewart, Jen Psaki, Beth Comstock, and the DL favorite Glenn Close.

In 1906 the General Assembly passed a n act to make the college public. In my opinion, this is where they went downhill. Look at its contemporaries- Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. All three schools are private with excellent research and graduate programs. Once W&M became public, the priorities shifted to undergrad. W&M does not have a school of nursing or architecture. They have a great law and business school.

The Rockefeller Foundation has taken a vast interest in the school for eons. Without their support, I really am not sure W&M would be around today. The school is not hurting, but it needs the Rockefeller Foundation's endowment to survive.

Every W&M student and grad that I know/meet comes from a white upper class well educated family.

To be curt, prestigious private universities are only worth it to most students if they study at the graduate level.

Long post*

Honey, you couldn't even list the 8 Ivy League schools.

[quote] Every W&M student and grad that I know/meet comes from a white upper class well educated family.

How is that possible if it is a state school?

Don't they need to take kids from all across Virginia who have good grades the way every other state schools does, and limit the number of out of state kids they take?

Tuition room and board seems to be around $40K/year for in-state students making the school a considerable bargain compared to private schools where room and board runs more in the $75K - $80K range

(It's also possible the poster graduated in the 1960s, because DL demo)

These threads are hilarious because they conflate so many things with quality. I mean, Emory? A university that famously games the US News rankings, has plenty of deadwood on the faculty, does bait and switch in hiring, etc. Not a great university.

Vanderbilt has a more solid faculty even as it still struggles to lose the finishing school-types as students.

Then there's the WashU troll--they've still failed to rebuild what had been flagship departments in the past and it will take them a long time to overcome the mismanagement of the 60s-80s. Case Western is in a similar position.

The game here is made obvious by trying to knock places with stringer academic environments than the Ivies (or most other schools) like U of Chicago and Johns Hopkins. I'd sooner hire a U of Chicago grad than someone who went to Brown (hard to get in, easy to graduate) or even a Yalie.

And Ohio State--without Indiana, it would be the weakest of the Big 10 schools and it's not even the best of the public universities in Ohio. Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota are much better schools, along with Northwestern.

Brown still has a lot of subpar faculty while Penn has steadily built itself up over the last few decades and Columbia has rebuilt itself from its low days in the 60s and 70s. The little Ivies and many of the schools that claim to be in the top 50 of private schools like Oberlin and Kenyon are better places for an education than jokes like Emory.

Competition for students is pretty meaningless unless you know who is in the pool.

NYU lost all credibility when they gave a degree to Tommy Didario.

[quote] Ohio State???

THE Ohio State!!

You're an academic R208 so you have a very different view of these schools. You show up on these threads with the same arguments every time, and while they're valid points for someone choosing a career as a professor, they have no relevance to the discussion.

The kids applying to Emory don't care about the faculty, they care about which companies recruit there, what the dorms and food and Greek life are like, the types of kids they're going to meet there, and how easy will it be to land that first job with an Emory degree

R207 I'm just reporting what I have seen. Of course there are minorities and poor kids that go there, but overall the students are the same.

Btw I graduated from there in the 2010's.

Well they all let in a few cute hairy jews so whatever with the classic DL Eugenics Club.

William and Mary may well called William and MARY!!! - it seems the school is known for having a sizable gay population.

[quote] (Harvard and W&M go back and forth on which is technically older).

News to us.

I knew a guy from MANASSAS who went to W&M. So, decidedly not upper class.

He was, however, an insufferable little shit. A trait many W&M alumni have in common.

I will make an exception for Jen Psaki, whom I adore.

R215 Don't bash my alma matter. It's tacky. Have class.

I wouldn’t dream of bashing your alma mater, though now I may question its Classics Department.

[quote](Harvard and W&M go back and forth on which is technically older).

I'm sure that's more on W&M's end and Harvard is just humoring them. I mean that's all they've got when they're up against Harvard.

The College of William & Mary sometimes asserts a connection with an attempt to found a "University of Henrico" at Henricopolis (also known as Henricus) in the Colony of Virginia, which received a charter in 1618; but only a small school for Native Americans had begun operation by 1622, when the town was destroyed in a Native American raid. A page on their website says "The College of William & Mary [...] was the first college planned for the United States. Its roots go back to the College proposed at Henrico in 1619." However, it immediately proceeds to note that "The College is second only to Harvard University in actual operation."[4] Since William & Mary describes itself as "America's second-oldest college" and gives its year of founding as 1693, it does not seem to be suggesting institutional continuity with the University of Henrico, rather, W&M is providing historical perspective.

Look, there is no on par or better. If someone says they went to one of the Ivies, that will ALWAYS be more impressive to most people than a non-Ivy. The only exceptions would be if that someone was a Kushner or Dubya, because we all know how those imbeciles got in.

Whenever anyone tries to say "These are on par with the Ivy League, " everyone knows they're not really on par.

I had a colleague who would say, with all seriousness, "I graduated from Carleton College, considered the Harvard of the West."

While Carleton is a good college, stop kidding yourself.

To this day, the best laugh I've ever had about this topic is in the thread about the "Harvard of the south" when someone responded "Yale."

There are many factors that can lead to acceptance to an ivy league, not just grades, of course.

The Ivys make an effort to have as much representation from different states as possible. So, they may let in someone from Alaska with not as high a grade point average, just to have someone from Alaska. Donor alumni's kids get a leg up. Kids that go to very top boarding schools (Exeter, etc) send tons of kids.

Interestingly, they don't want to let too many kids from even the best suburban public schools. Usually only one per school is given acceptance to each ivy no matter how many have fantastic scores and activities.

The thread here is a bit anachronistic. Does a degree from an Ivy League school matter? Yes, of course. Does it have the same power as a couple decades ago? No.

When I think of "on par with," I think that when an employer sees that college on a resume, the employer will immediately think, "This graduate must be smart and it would be great to have someone from that college at the company."

[quote] If someone says they went to one of the Ivies, that will ALWAYS be more impressive to most people than a non-Ivy.

Stanford and MIT.

R226, I went to an Ivy and know that I got my last and my current job largely because of that name on the resume. My first boss said, we wanted someone from an Ivy on our roster to impress clients.

R227, and honestly , those would be the only two.

and some of the lesser Ivys wouldn't impress: Univ of PA, Brown

Slightly OT, but my father’s second wife is profoundly crazy.

She once tried to tell us that the very small, rural Georgia college she attended in the 60s was known at that time as having the “best Physics department in the country.” (She was a Physics major.)

I wanted to say, “Oh, really? Better than MIT? Better than Caltech? Better than Georgia Tech?”

She’s nuts.

R227, those would be the exceptions to the rule.

I went to Yale for undergrad and Harvard for grad.

Honestly, Harvard was the superior Ivy. It's resources are unsurpassed.

R227 Caltech.

It depends on the degree... that's a change in the last few decades. University departments have "upgraded status" in disparate ways. Some departments that used to be prestigious, have lost ground. Others have gained in prominence - especially the large public universities - like UCLA, Cal, Virginia, Michigan. For example Arts and Humanities - Cal and UCLA's departments (as are Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge) now rated over most Ivy League. The generic degree still matters - but major tracks to the quality of the department in the institution.

CalTech may deserve to be on the list, but it isn’t.

[quote]I went to Yale for undergrad and Harvard for grad.

Are you Dubya? Because we know how you got into both. We are not impressed, "legacy"!

R235, Yes, it's me, GWB. I'm trolling DL between paintings.

No matter where you go among the top 100 colleges, your educational opportunities will likely be excellent. Going to an IVY will surround you with other very smart and connected people, which is their biggest advantage

This thread is filled with all kinds of misinformation. People are posting their opinions as fact. There are few facts, outside of the ridiculous US News rating systems which shouldn't count for much of anything. It's all relative to who you are, what you want from school, and many other factors.

That said, I went to Stanford and hated it. Weirdly anti-intellectual, filled with bright kids who were embarrassed to be considered bright. The kind of place where if you were caught reading a book, someone would say, "dude, it's frisbee time!" I met almost no one who could be considered interesting. And they all wanted to be lawyers or doctors. And, the campus is oddly conservative in a libertarian way.

If I could do it over, I'd have gone to Bard, or Swarthmore, or some other good small school with interesting people.

[quote] Every W&M student and grad that I know/meet comes from a white upper class well educated family.

I was definitely a lower-middle class kid, so I dispute that. And while both of my parents have undergrad degrees, my sister and I are the only ones on either side of the family who have advanced ones.

The members of my friend group who weren’t from Virginia tended to be folks from the Northeast who didn’t land an Ivy and were looking for cheaper tuition.

A star from our high school went to Harvard. When he got deeply into drugs by his second year, his father drove up there and brought him back home. He recovered for a year and then went to a local college to finish his degree. I think he's a hiking tour guide now.

Sad to see that potential die.

R238 A point I was making upthread. If you want to work in "the art world" - gallery management... or BE and artist or a writer, Bard is much, much more useful to you than a generic Ivy League degree. If you want to be an English professor, yep, a Yale English degree would really help you throughout your career. This thread wants simple answers for world that is no longer 1980.

A240 "Potential" as defined by hegemonic standards or personal happiness? We've learned nothing...

WUSTL

Duke and Rice?

OH, MY SIDES!!!!

Brown is very well known in glammy circles and professions around the world since it became the Global .1% and Hollywood Ivy in the 80s. They don't know Dartmouth at the Dubai Polo & Equestrian Club, and billionaire ladies at the Couture shows do not mention their daughter or son at Cornell. Harvard or Brown, yes.

Many many years ago, I went to one of the state universities mentioned above and noted as being a shitty school. But, I had a natural talent for business and a great deal of luck. So, graduates of Duke, Penn and Northwestern now run to get me my coffee with a smile.

Recently, while on Martha's Vineyard, I borrowed a Harvard cap from my host to wear on their boat. Some cunt asked me if I'd actually gone there. I admitted that I hadn't attended the acclaimed school but that I had fucked a couple of its graduates over the years and that I actually preferred Yalies.

I notice that Cornell seems to have lots of Asian graduates. If you meet an Asian who went to an Ivy, it is most often Cornell.

[quote]I had a colleague who would say, with all seriousness, "I graduated from Carleton College, considered the Harvard of the West."

Minnesota is "the West"?

R246, yes, for everyone on the East Coast

[quote] If you meet an Asian who went to an Ivy, it is most often Cornell.

Probably because Cornell has a larger student body than the other Ivies, more likely it's just who R245 knows, as they all have lots of Asians now.

Do the WUSTL!

R246 Yes, because anon is posting from 1850, as are most of the posters on this thread.

Cornell has a huge engineering school. Has always been tops in science. And Cornell Tech in NYC is a game changer. Cornell is and always has been a grind school. Like MIT. Asians do not shy away from grind schools. And the schools know that asians can cope with that culture. Brown, Dartmouth and Princeton are the country club Ivies. Princeton was more so in the olden golden days, as they all were to some extent. Brown in recent decades specialized in this.

What is Cornell Tech? An extension school?

Cornell and Syracuse are the same school.

My niece was choosing among various great colleges. She took my advice to avoid Cornell--not because it's bad or anything because it is really in the middle of nowhere. To fly from there (5 hours NW from NYC) to anywhere is a hike and takes many planes.

NYers have an advantage at Cornell as some parts of it are considered a state school, so they get a Cornell degree with in-state tuition.

Cornell Tech is Cornell's billion dollar grad tech campus in NYC. To compete directly with MIT, CalTech, the Swiss ETHZ and EPFL, etc.

So people can live in NYC and still say they went to Cornell without ever stepping on campus?

3 schools at Cornell are NYS land-grant statutory colleges. Tuition is between the level of SUNY and elite private tuition. Financial AID is much better than SUNY, however, because it is Need Blind. Cunty Ann Coulter was one of those Liberal Arts students who ran around campus claiming (right so but who cares) that an biology major in the Ag school was not in the Ivy League while a biology major in the Liberal Arts school, was. THIS WAS VERY IMPORTANT TO HER. Being a eugenicist trapped at the bottom of the Ivies. hahaha

R251 I agree with most of what you said except for the part about Brown, Dartmouth and Princeton. Princeton is rigorous and not known for its grade inflation. Brown, on the other hand, is in a class of its own - the p/f option, no grades below C showing up on your transcript, ability to drop classes until the last day of classes etc. The grading policy is one of the reasons so many people want to go there.

Stop trying to make Cornell happen!

R257 It is Cornell! Just like Cornell Medical School has always been in NYC.

Cornell doesn't need help to make itself happen. I went to other Ivies but some of my best friends went to Cornell. Great fabulous school. Has everything and is very diverse.

Given that we always talk about how DL is frozen in the year 1987 or so, here's what's been going on:

1. Top colleges have become much harder to get into. Tutors for everything, everyone plays a sport, plays an instrument, takes 10 AP classes. As a result HYPS (Harvard-Yale-Princeton-Stanford) can curate their classes like a social experiment--X number of kids from various states, various races, ethnicities, interests, etc. It's completely changed the vibe of all of those schools, even from when I was there 15 years ago.

2. They all need to admit a higher percentage of athletes than many of you realize--that's one reason why Stanford recently cut a bunch of sports. Because none of the kids on the sailing and field hockey teams were getting in if they didn't qualify as athletes and, especially at smaller liberal arts schools like Williams, over a third of class might be there for athletics and not football, but sports like rowing and field hockey and lacrosse that are not played at inner city or middle class high schools.

3. As the top schools got harder and harder to get into, that made it harder to get into the next tier down too, the Dukes and Vanderbilts and Northwesterns. As a result--and this is key so I am italicizing it [italic] many of the top companies (McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, et al) are now actively recruiting at that second tier of schools. [/italic] This is a big shift and it basically expanded the pool of "top colleges"

4. Colleges are recruiting a more national student body. The common application and the ease of doing everything online means that more kids are applying to more colleges from more places, e.g., Stanford doesn't just get a handful of applicants from Connecticut anymore.

5. As others have noted, HYPS is great if you want to work at Goldman Sachs or McKinsey, but less valuable in other fields. If you want to work in, say TV broadcasting it's far less valuable.

6. Tom Wolfe really nailed it in "A Man In Full" when he talked about how easy it is for kids who go to HYPS to wind up in a middle management job at a big prestigious company. They all recruit on campus, limit their training programs to kids from top schools, etc., but it's easy to fall into complacency there or go the other route and go to law or med school than to try and start a business or do something different. (Stanford is the exception in that there's a whole culture of Silicon Valley startups there run by Stanford grads and they tend to hire and fund each other.)

[quote] So people can live in NYC and still say they went to Cornell without ever stepping on campus?

If you go to Cornell Tech or Cornell Med, you will never have to go to the Cornell campus in Itica, NY

Just like how I live in Iowa and have never stepped foot on the Harvard campus yet got my Ivy League degree from Harvard Extension.

[quote] Brown, Dartmouth and Princeton are the country club Ivies. Princeton was more so in the olden golden days, as they all were to some extent. Brown in recent decades specialized in this.

Stereotypes from around 2005 were: Brown = Artsy Eurotrash or wannabe Eurotrash, Princeton = preppy social country club tennis players, Dartmouth=preppy antisocial rugby players and iconoclasts.

It's a shame that the great LACs like Williams, Amherst and Swarthmore aren't really valued outside of certain select groups (mostly on the East Coast, finance, academia). I live on the West Coast and most people have no idea how good or selective these schools are.

r258--Actually 4 schools at Cornell are NYS land-grant statutory colleges

"As a private university, Cornell operates four state-assisted “statutory” or “contract” colleges pursuant to the authority set forth in Article 115 of the New York Education Law: the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, the College of Human Ecology, the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, and the College of Veterinary Medicine."

So if I was hiring a Cornell grad, do I have to ask if they’re from the Ivy League portion or the state portion? I can see a lot of fraud happening.

[quote] Just like how I live in Iowa and have never stepped foot on the Harvard campus yet got my Ivy League degree from Harvard Extension.

Actually, that's a thing. If you desperately want a Harvard degree, you can get it through Harvard extension classes, which I think anyone can benefit from.

[quote] So if I was hiring a Cornell grad, do I have to ask if they’re from the Ivy League portion or the state portion?

It's ALL considered IVY league. The schools that are funded in part by NYS are very specialized.

OH brother, R269. They are all CORNELL. And they can all play Ivy League sports and all cornel graduates have a CORNELL diploma.

And the Ivy League is 2 things officially - a sports conference, and for several decades it was an admittance office consortium. I don't know if there is still any admittance policy coordination. Read the good post at R263.

Yes I forgot College of Veterinary Medicine, but I don't think that is an undergrad school. The Labor School, while not being "ivy" (hardeeharhar) is basically a pre-law, pre-business school and a major feeder to the top MBAs and law schools.

R270, Harvard Extension is for those who want to get a degree while working--1-2 courses are semester. You wont get the on-campus experience, but you'll have a Harvard under grad or grad experience.

[quote] hardly any middle class or rich person attending an Ivy feels the need for an honors program because in theory everyone of them feels confident he or she is brilliant and special (even if it's not the case). Or daddy is PM of Malaysia or mommy is the richest woman in Texas not to mention an alumna, so of course golden boy belongs on the Ivy campus, and has nothing to prove to anyone, except himself.

The bitterness is strong with this one!

Is Brown still considered the easiest of the Ivies? When I was applying to colleges, the guidebooks generally agreed that the hardest part was getting in. The semiotics program was regarded as a "gut" major for rich dilettantes.

Really depends on your major R275

If you go to a competitive high school, college actually seems a lot easier, even more so in 2021. You're taking fewer classes and they don't meet every day and there's none of the pressure you felt in high school either (unless you want to go directly to med school, I guess.)

I can't tell you how many kids I've done alumni interviews with who've said something to the effect of "everyone says college is a lot easier than Dalton/Horace Mann/Chapin/Scarsdale"

I went to a very competitive high school and took lots of AP classes. I would still say college required more high level thinking. Also, your fellow students are smarter so, to match them, your work must be at their level.

[quote] can't tell you how many kids I've done alumni interviews with who've said something to the effect of "everyone says college is a lot easier than Dalton/Horace Mann/Chapin/Scarsdale"

LOL--wait until they actually get to college.

Not really R277/R278

That does seem to be the conventional wisdom and with the exception of a few classes I also found college to be easier.

Remember, if you go to a very competitive high school and take mostly AP classes, your college classmates are not really going to be that much smarter, even at Princeton

[quote]I had a colleague who would say, with all seriousness, "I graduated from Carleton College, considered the Harvard of the West."

[quote]While Carleton is a good college, stop kidding yourself.

It may not be Ivy caliber, but Carleton has gotten way more selective over the last decade—comparable to Wellesley, Haverford, Washington and Lee, and Wesleyan U.

I believe I was the last Brown grad awarded a BA in Semiotics and that was many, MANY, moons ago.

DL, where time stands still. Semiotics being as forgotten in most parts as Althusser's strangled wife, Hélène.

R211: Actually, I'm not an academic, but I interact with lots of them across departments and see what schools produce over time. I also have known several university presidents, a few provosts and various department heads, while at the other end have hired graduates at the BA level and above. I also know what a joke UN&WR is and so do most people in universities. Unfortunately, university administrators are stuck in a spiral of having to deal with those ratings. I also know the limits of test scores, esp. when schools teach to tests (which means the students can't write well) or you get scores that reflect a lot of test prep and students who can regurgitate but not think.

The real problem here is people arguing bullshit. Schools that turn out future Nobel laureates, leaders in their fields, etc. over decades are a better predictor of a fine education than whether competition among some cohorts of Biffs or Bettys with resume coaching and test prep represent anything. The dissing of schools that have challenging academic cultures gives away the game here. It's what "looks good" and that does change over time. Some places like Brown have always been also rans and a few periods of popularity based on being easy to graduate doesn't help. Emory has been a joke for ages and people who live in Atlanta are a little embarrassed if their kid winds up there, and not just well educated parents. The Southern finishing school circuit has been trying to broaden their appeal for several decades but most of them fail to break the kind of snobbish culture that they've historically had or they turn into places like Tulane which is known for its party culture and weak graduate as well as undergrad programs. The large private research universities outside of the Ivies have tended to struggle---they often could serve as safety schools for the regional elites and attract local strivers but now have to compete with a much wider array of schools locally and nationally. If they can't rebuild their academics, their graduates will be regraded the way grads of USC and other sub-par private schools of the past were.

What's interesting about some of these places is where they go to build programs--when WashU got money to build up their social work school in areas related to public health, the place they raided was St Louis University, the supposedly inferior place nearby, not notable social work programs like UChicago, Michigan, Case or Columbia or notable public health programs like Chapel Hill, Hopkins, or UWashington. It speaks both to the limits of supposedly resurgent WashU but also to what a lesser known Jesuit school had accomplished with little fanfare over the pervious couple decades.

So what happens now that SAT and test scores are no longer going to be considered for admissions for a lot of schools? How would you even decide between students with top GPAs and activities?

You could ask for video applications and base it on looks, charm, moxy and vibrations.

Smart people don't got to Brown, only the dumb cunts go there.

Oh I'm joking in r284 but only so much. This "unquantifiable" human aspect is how the Ivies have locked out qualified Asian Americans. Because you have a perfectly capable and charming lacrosse stud at you want and need to admit.

Doesn’t Harvard Law do video applications?

If you want to get ahead in the real world, like in the business, legal, science, tech field, Brown is the last place you should go. Everybody knows it's a shit school.

If you don't really need a job and just want to go to college for the sake of college, yeah then go to Brown. It's not for serious people.

Didn’t Ya Ya Acosta go to Brown? I think that was a storyline in ANTM.

R288 = Someone really wanted to go to Brown who didn't get into Brown.

R244 You sound charming. An Ivy might have taught you better manners.

R263 "They all need to admit a higher percentage of athletes than many of you realize"

That's one of the reasons I liked Columbia--they didn't give a flying fuck about sports. Even more so at the University of Chicago (which has been conspicuously missing from this thread).

What really matters is not the caliber of the education (they are arguably the same in most undergraduate programs) but how much push just having the school's name on your resume will give you.

Do employers (who know nothing about the details about each school) pause and smile when they see the name of that school on your resume?

Having gone to an ivy, the best thing about it was the extraordinary people you meet there. Each person had done incredible things--like writing operas or helping redesign the healthcare system of a developing country.

Your head will spin once you realize how much talent your classmates have.

Nowadays a young, attractive and capable Ivy Grad is probably going to sense "hisses" and hostility from interviewees. Not just smiles. The rose is off the bloom. Today, many Americans despise the meritocracy as well as the undeserved privilege, and both are largely represented in Ivy grads. People hate the wokeness, or the entitlement. They hate the super Tiger Kid automatons, and the undeserving rich and glossy spawn. All the usual suspects. For every foot in the door, there are other doors in bedrock America of the outrage culture diminished opportunities, that will be slammed shut. Sometimes people don't want a fancyboy.

^Oh, okay. Good to know. We won't apply at any NAPA Auto Parts stores then, or at the Country Kitchen on the edge of town,

[quote] Even more so at the University of Chicago (which has been conspicuously missing from this thread).

Is that an Ivy?

R297 No.

Yes, Rose. University of Chicago and the Sheboygan Conservatory, as well as Katharine Gibbs. Ivies.

Why not?

"Sheboygan taught me to play a mean ukulele."

Small liberal arts schools can really be great for some kids. I went to a huge school my first year and just felt lost and alone. Transferred to a small school and it was nice to see teachers and students walking around campus. Felt less isolating.

[quote] Today, many Americans despise the meritocracy as well as the undeserved privilege, and both are largely represented in Ivy grads

Valid thought captain, but on what planet are Ivy graduates interviewing for jobs with people who aren't also part of the meritocracy, and most likely fellow alums or friends of our parents?

Do you think we just randomly search the want ads?

r287=Elle Woods

I've noticed some people are embarrassed to say they went to Harvard. (the more humble ones I guess.) They must get a lot of attitude like oh wow smell you, you went to Harvard.

R301 Good school!

[quote]The rose is off the bloom.

Oh, dear.

R307 Thanks, I'll be here all night. Tip your waiter.

Isn’t that a lyric to a Seal song? Why oh dear?

Are there even going to be regular brick-and-mortar schools that much longer? COVID showed that most everything could be done online. I work at a huge state university and all our growth is in online programs, including thousands and thousands of students working on degrees from overseas. I know some programs can't be done online, but there are so many that can, that it will be other things like the amount of tuition that will draw in the students.

Dordt University in Sioux Center Iowa. The alumni and students will inform you that Christian Reformers are the chosen ones.

Good universities with billions in endowment are not closing up their brick and mortar operations.

Howard University.

R302 I taught at a top-ten private liberal arts college for three years. Yes, you see students, faculty, and staff when you walk around campus, at the library, and bookstore. All of which is nice. But you also see them at the supermarket, coffee shop, restaurants, and movie theaters. I found that atmosphere oppressive. Since the college was in a large metropolitan area, my partner and I could escape by driving a few towns over to see a movie or eat out, but that meant that we avoided the wonderful amenities in the small college town that we lived and worked in. My three year review was positive and I was offered a fourth year sabbatical to work on my book, but I was on the market that year and ended up taking a position at a large university. It is a better fit for me – I'd rather be a medium sized fish in a large ocean than a big fish in a little pond.

Harvard Yale Princeton Stanford CalTech MIT

That it.

[quote] Minnesota is "the West"?

Carleton is on the west side of the Mississippi, and the Mississippi is the dividing line between the east and the west iin the US.

But the poster you're responding to is misquoting. Carleton has t-shirts that call it "The Harvard of the Midwest,": not "the West."

The University of Chicago has t-shirts that say “Harvard—the University of Chicago of the East”.

I bought one to wear ironically.

The reason these schools aren't Ivy League

Rice- too pretentious for their own good.

MIT- has a chip on their shoulders for not being Ivy League

Stanford- great school but it is in San Francisco, which is far away from the action (excluding tech).

Chicago & Northwestern- too busy competing with each other to realize they are the same school.

Duke & Vanderbilt- same as above

Notre Dame- there are in Indiana, which is purgatory for a college.

NYU- they are good, but Columbia is better.

Johns Hopkins- great school for medicine. Good luck living in Baltimore.

Texas- too busy trying to prove themselves

William & Mary- they were great back in 1800

Georgetown- they have a great law school?

Michigan- Gerald Ford went here. These kids always need to prove something

Georgia- I couldn't hear you over the accent

Syracuse- they are only around because _______________

Stanford is not in San Francisco.

R232, it’s “[i]ts.” For a moment, I believed you there…

I told ya it was Dubya, R320!

The reason they are not Ivy League is historical. The Ivy League is a sports conference. It came to meet other things, rightly so. You can't go back in history to add in current, excellent schools. It's as simple as that.

came to mean

Let's be excrutiatingly clear about law schools. Every law school in America teaches to the same test. All of them. They all have the same core curricula. And, even though there are too many law schools of late, the market is still not large when it comes to text books. There are the same several books for each area of the law that are used by every school in the nation.

The best law school is the one that gets you the JD without sinking you into debt. The exception is that if you have an opportunity to go to Harvard or Yale or Stanford... do it. The rest of them? No.

If you really want to read "Theory and Philosophy of Women in the Prison System," do it after you graduate. While you're in law school, study black letter law and try to learn some lawyering skills.

The Ivies' grad schools don't have complete overlap with the many significations and cultural meanings of the term "Ivy League". The "Ivy League" is mostly about the undergrad experience. A Harvard MBA or JD is great because it is HARVARD not because it is "Ivy League".

[qupte] Let's be excrutiatingly clear about law schools. Every law school in America teaches to the same test. All of them. They all have the same core curricula. And, even though there are too many law schools of late, the market is still not large when it comes to text books. There are the same several books for each area of the law that are used by every school in the nation.

More #FakeNews from Datalounge

Lesser laws schools teach to the bar exam and often have the highest pass rates as a result. St. Johns in NYC is known for this and people disparagingly call it a three year bar review course.

Schools like Yale, Harvard and Stanford teach a much more theoretical version of the law on the theory that their students are smart enough to pass the bar by cramming for a month or so.

Ivy Tech Community College in Lawrenceburg, Indiana.

Oh, honey. The point of law school is not passing the bar. It’s getting hired.

MIT students do not have chips on their shoulders. I spent time there doing research while pursuing my own masters degree at a flagship state university. MIT students were more laid back, more friendly, more creative, more realistic and more hard-working than Harvard students. The differences were clear. There were no discussions about the other "Ivies" either.

MIT's biggest "rival" is CalTech. They frequently play practical jokes on each other. It is very funny.

I was a visiting professor at Cal Tech for a year. The small size of the undergraduate population is surprisingly small, fewer than 1000 students. Like the poster above me found at MIT, Cal Tech students are extraordinarily friendly, laid-back, and hard-working. As a Humanities professor, I expected Cat Tech students to pooh-pooh my classes, but it was exactly the opposite. While many just went through the motions, working hard enough for an A, most of them displayed superior creative analysis of themes, discourse, and philosophical approaches to the Arts and literature. It was easily the most unexpecedtly pleasant year in my 35 year career of teaching college students.

R324 Complete nonsense there. Any good law school doesn't waste time teaching you blackletter law or prepping you for the bar exam. That's what bar prep courses are for.

Law school teaches you how to think and analyze problems like a lawyer. Any good school takes this approach, some more successfully than others of course.

[quote] The small size of the undergraduate population is surprisingly small

Hopefully not an English professor ;)

R332, I took that to mean that he anticipated it to be small, but it was even smaller than what he expected.

One small bonus of having a couple ivy degrees is that they "certify" excellence, deserved or not. When one makes language mistakes one just shrugs and moves on. Nothing to prove. Grammar nazis are usually people trying prove their intelligence and knowledge of the finer distinctions. Often because such qualities have never been "certified".

R334 I don't think so. I'm only so-so at grammar but when I see a clear mistake, I judge the mistake maker. I think grammar nazis or grammar trolls are like me times a thousand, because they really are smarter than everyone else. Or maybe not smarter, but very classically taught. Most people are not great at grammar.

Does Duke even hold on campus classes anymore? Considering their demographics…🖕🏻🇨🇳

[quote] Chicago & Northwestern- too busy competing with each other to realize they are the same school.

They couldn’t be more different, actually.

Add University of Colorado-Boulder. It helps that it regularly is also voted most beautiful campus.

[quote]It helps that it regularly is also voted most beautiful campus.

Well, no doubt that you've now just drawn the ire of the UVA alum.

Princeton, Cornell and Vassar, all classy schools with Seven Sisters or Ivy pedigree, have gorgeous campuses. And Cornell's is truly dramatic.

The number of grammatical and other language-oriented mistakes on this thread is ironic given the topic.

R337 -- Chicago and Northwestern couldn't be more different? Yes, they could. Think about it. All the ways they could be more different. Then stop using sorry cliches.

Are there any liberal arts colleges in the East which are not denizens of the woke, SJW, cancel culture, female empowerment, gender-neutral philosophies that seem to start in the East? In other words, are there any sane campuses in the East?

[quote]Total language snob who went to a good school and is hated by everyone

"a good school"? I'm afraid I'll have to be the judge of that.

Name it or shut up.

R342 I am sure you'll be at home at Bob Jones U.

I am pretty sure they still don't admit black people on campus, unless they are there to clean.

[quote]Who am I? What’s my purpose? What is truth and how do I know it? How do I as a Christian engage with society? At BJU we believe in tackling these big questions head on. And we find the answers in God’s revelation to us through His Word and His creation. By viewing our lives and the world around us through the lens of those answers, we develop a biblical worldview—the foundation for everything we do here at BJU.

R342 schools like Hamilton, Colgate, Haverford, etc, know their potential clientele and alumni donors well, and are not going overboard like, I dunno, Oberlin.

Ha! Those were the exact three schools I was going to use as an example too R345

r342, you're AGAINST female empowerment?

Are you posting through a time warp from the year 1958?

Why all the William & Mary hate?

I don't see hate. Merely putting it in its rightful place.

[quote]Are there any liberal arts colleges in the East which are not denizens of the woke, SJW, cancel culture, female empowerment, gender-neutral philosophies that seem to start in the East? In other words, are there any sane campuses in the East?

Liberty University, of course.

LOL, "cancel culture." I love that attack on the left by "moderates" like that poster.

We literally have a political party trying to "cancel" the most basic tenet of being an American: The right to vote. And turning this country into an autocracy, yet that poster's most pressing concern is no doubt, some repugnant, rich bitch getting "cancelled" from her shitty talk show or some nonsense limited to ONE, local college but being so apoplectic over it that you magnify its actual reach.

Washington and Lee is a highly respected school that also leans conservative—think an LAC version of Dartmouth. So far they've resisted pressure to change the name of the school to eliminate the reference to Robert E. Lee.

The student body is 70–80% Greek. Students who aren't interested in rushing or who couldn't get a bid anywhere often transfer out, because there's not much else to do for fun and upperclassmen have limited options for off-campus housing. The ones who stay tend to be content with just studying all the time, or they lean into being outcasts and nonconformists.

W&L is a perennial hot topic on College Confidential. The academic rigor and generous merit aid are huge draws, but the general consensus is "Don't come here if you know you wouldn't fit in."

[quote] Why all the William & Mary hate?

Because WM is a public school in the South that looks like it’s trying to be a private school in the North? That would be my guess. At least it’s not Hampden-Sydney.

What's the word on the street regarding Penn? It seems to be very gay friendly. If you had to chose between Boston, New Haven, and Philly what would you do?

Yale has always been the wet dream for gay boys. It also suffered the greatest AIDS deaths among alumni.

I would add Georgia Tech.

[quote]Yale has always been the wet dream for gay boys. It also suffered the greatest AIDS deaths among alumni.

That's no surprise when you're talking old money/family Republican WASPs. Lots of self-loathing, dl fucking with no protection.

[quote] What's the word on the street regarding Penn?

It’s often confused with Penn State.

Yale was 100% the gay Ivy

For a long time, Penn was the Jewish Ivy (or more Jewish, anyway, well known for taking the top 10% of the class at Scarsdale, Millburn, Lower Merion, Horace Mann, et al) and was like a smarter version of Syracuse or Tulane.

But it seems about 10 years ago they decided they were done with that and started pulling in a more national student body and not taking 20 kids each year from Great Neck North and Harvard Westlake.

So it's sort of in-flux reputationally.

This move has worked to the advantage of Vanderbilt, WashU, Michigan and Northwestern who now get all the Jewish kids who used to go to Penn.

[quote]I think the joke might have flown over your head. Of course no one sane should think Cornell is more prestigious than MIT or Stanford.

I think that would depend on your field of study. For example, "Harvard University, Cornell University, and Auburn University are three of the best schools for architecture. They were all nationally ranked by Design Intelligence in 2016 and the first two are Ivy League schools. Also, they all offer relevant programs at both the undergraduate and graduate levels." Also if you were going to major in English, Theatre Arts, or Fine Arts, I shouldn't think MIT is better than Cornell. It's great for engineers. MIT doesn't offer pre-Med. Etc.

R342 No, Cletus, y'all better stick with y'all's redneck hayseed schools in the West and South.

Butler. Just ask them.

One more note on this: while Stanford and Duke are top schools and on par with Ivies (Stanford is on par with HYP) they both maintain very competitive sports programs and send many athletes to the major sports leagues and to the Olympics. While Ivy schools are also D1, they're nowhere near as competitive.

Skews things a little on campus as you have a goodly number of kids who are really top at their sport and a much bigger focus on sports.

Duke is hardly on par with Stanford and the Ivies. It's a good enough school but not one of the best schools. It's for people who can't get into the good schools, or, Southerners who simply can't bear leaving the Old South

Going back to the law school thing, every law school is regional.

Why would a Harvard grad want to work in Jackson, Mississippi unless they had ties there?

Look at South Texas College of Law in Houston. It is an excellent school that has won number one in their moot court programs for decades. However a South Texas graduate would have extremely difficulty trying to get a job in Cincinnati, Ohio.

[quote]Great non-Ivy schools: Rice, MIT, Northwestern, NYU, Vanderbilt, UCLA, Stanford, Texas, Georgetown, Duke, Michigan, William & Mary, Johns Hopkins, Notre Dame, Ohio State, Georgia, Carnegie Mellon, Bowdoin, Tufts, and Syracuse.

I agree the University of Georgia belongs on this list but Georgia Tech deserves a spot on this list too.

Davidson in North Carolina is a small school that also has an outstanding reputation.

So Penn is the lowest of the Ivys?

I toured it but the campus felt so grim as did Philadelphia as a whole. It just seemed like a miserable place to spend 4 years.

"No, Cletus, y'all better stick with y'all's redneck hayseed schools in the West and South."

Sorry, Madisyn, but many more DLers would agree that the "woke" cancel culture rampant on college campuses ( mostly in the East) should be "canceled." You are in the minority....a small minority.

Madisyn,

People named "Madisyn" don't go to college.

Or at least colleges without the words "Community" or :"State" attached to them.

[quote]Sorry, Madisyn, but many more DLers would agree that the "woke" cancel culture rampant on college campuses ( mostly in the East) should be "canceled." You are in the minority....a small minority.

Yes, those liberals are really a threat. Thank God for places like Liberty U and Cedarville giving rise to the future feces spreaders and cop beaters for the next Insurrection.

Bill Mahr's schtick is getting stale. The whole conceit that he's smarter than everyone else is really not that self-evident.

[quote]I agree the University of Georgia belongs on this list

It really, really doesn’t.

Does IVY league make for the best waiters?

WUSTL

When I was at the Sorbonne we just laughed at you.

[quote] WUSTL

Hahahahaha. We have an associate provost, recently hired, who kept comparing her former institution to mine as a peer-school. One of her superiors finally sighed and deadpanned that WUSTL is not a peer school – not even close.

I have some questions for you smarties. We were with my in laws yesterday. Brother in Law was saying some guy he knows said that his kid would be a "shoe in" at Princeton because he is on all kinds of swim teams. This person supposedly also said that Princeton needs more white people (???) and fewer Asians. Now, I know everybody thinks their kid is the smartest kid ever, but our son is really smart. Like, reading at two years old smart. I know a lot of people on here are smart so this is the place to bring this up. Anyway, I assume my son won't get into Princeton because he is super shy and doesn't have any extracurricular activities (but I'm starting to work on forcing him to do some stuff). We live near Princeton that's why it comes up all the time. I can tell my son loves the beauty of the campus. So that is part one. Will an average smart swimmer really get into Princeton no problem?

Part two is that I really think William and Mary could be the place for him. It's beautiful and kind of status-y and doesn't seem impossible to get into. I was jabbering to him about W&M before I ever saw this thread. Oh, I also said to the in-laws that none of us will know anything until these kids take their PSATs and SATs. He poo-pooed the tests and said they didn't matter. They do still matter, right?

By the way their kid is going in to 9th grade and my kid is going in to 10th grade, so it's early to be really serious about this stuff.

I was listening to a podcast with Glenn Close and she loved William and Mary. Got her out of the crazy cult she was in. She started college at 26 interestingly. Said it was better than going to acting school since although she had theatrical aspirations at a school like William and Mary kids from manymajors get involved in theater.

R378. Most Ivy Leagues dropped the SAT for COVID years admits and I wouldn't be surprised if they don't come back.

The Ivy League using athletic skill in two ways for admits.

1) Its a way to admit VIP spawn and Alumni spawn who do not cut it really, intellectually (but are not complete dullards) or 2) it provides an EXTRA push to applicants who are both brilliant of brain and body.

If your kid is not brilliant academically, or you are not the CFO of Amazon or the Finance Minister of Chile, or a long giving Alumni of Princeton, then your kid's swimming skill means nothing. Unless he is really TOP TOP. I suppose if he is gorgeous and attends one of the 10 top boarding schools, and is OK academically, and is STATE champ in swimming, then the swimming could help gain admittance.

For Catholic universities, the closest to Ivy (most selective) are Notre Dame, Georgetown and Boston College.

The next tier down are Villanova, Fordham, Santa Clara, and Loyola Marymount. After those, the most well-known are mostly well-known for their football and basketball teams, but not much else.

For liberal arts colleges, there is Holy Cross, and possibly Thomas Aquinas (CA). After those, there's a precipitous drop to obscurity.

Given R378's insanely bad writing, is that a troll post? Sounds like a "shoe-in" to me.

Not really R380

Your kids swimming skill only matter [italic] if he is good enough to be on the Princeton Swim Team.[/italic]

Meaning that they are recruiting him for swimming.

A good percentage of the class at any Ivy or similar college is there because they are on a sports team. Princeton has a lot of sports teams, almost 20 different men's teams and 20 women's teams. If there are, on average, 15 people on each of those teams, that's around 600 kids who are there because of sports.

At a school like Princeton, the athletes still need to be smart, but few of them would have gotten in had they not played sports. They also have to be very disciplined because playing D1 sports is a full time commitment--you practice all year and you travel a lot.

But to circle back to R378, the issue with W&M is that it's a state school, meaning that X% of students need to come from Virginia, and so that makes it considerably more difficult for kids from out of state to get in.

r378:

1. shoo-in, not shoe-in

2. pooh-poohed, not poo-pooed.

r381 How is St. Mary's (California) rated? Mahershala Ali went there.

Thank you all. What does shoo-in mean? I thought it had to do with a shoe. I will have to look it up. Was my writing really that bad? Hard to follow?

The other kid (nephew) is probably a good swimmer on a local or state level, but nothing national. He's fourteen. My husband says if he were that good he'd be trying out for the Olympics. It's hard to believe that he is really that smart. I have no way of knowing.

My kid is smart like a lot of you guys. In 7th grade they seem to have made up an award for him in middle school (writer of the year). Covid struck in eighth grade and ninth grade was fully remote. He doesn't spend a lot of time on his school work but I remember my sister didn't either. I remember she got a 740 on the English part of the SATs. Went to Johns Hopkins. Then dropped out of life. So are the SATs really over? I don't know how I feel about that.

That's a bummer about William & Mary. So it would be much harder for a kid from NJ to get in? Don't they want some Northeastern kids? What colleges should he start to think about then?

Monmouth County Community College.

Ha ha but no to Monmouth County. A four year college. Really. I'm not from a stupid family, though I might be stupid. My mother went to Barnard and Carnegie Mellon (said it was Carnegie Tech then). My sister went to Johns Hopkins. Intellectual family. I'm just not that way. I want to steer my kid in the right direction.

Daughter will be a different story, but she's very pretty. She could be a Disney Princess for a year or two, but I'm not sure that she's tall enough. A whole different situation.

Oh fank you R384. Now I understand shoo-in. It has to do with horse racing and cheating. But why does it matter how I spell spell poo-poo? Isn't that just kind of slang?

In the most prestigious and competitive private colleges I think SATs are goner within coming years.

They are trying to figure out ways to keep their student bodies diverse (e.g. not all Asian) and avoid lawsuits.

Also, "woke" arguments that SATs are part of systemic classicism and racism in American education.

I went to Ivies in a simpler time. I would never get in nowadays. It means nothing really if your kid doesn't get in, nowadays,because the competition is so FIERCE and the admittance is VERY rigid to fulfill so many stats they feel is important. A high percentage of academically strong and interesting young people cannot be admitted.

they feel are important.

Thank you. I agree that he won't get into any Ivy. So I want to know what he should shoot for. I was kind of right on with William & Mary, right? Or is it like getting into an Ivy for an out of state kid? (It says the acceptance rate is 37% or something pretty high, so I thought it was reasonable. But you say acceptance rate is much lower for a kid who isn't from Virginia? So school needs to be somewhat prestigious, not huge, and have a beautiful campus. It helps if you can get there on a train from central NJ.

He should do some common applications and take the best deal offered that will result in the lowest debt or no debt, and respectable academics, and a swim team he will enjoy. Really. And if he hates it, he can transfer.

So R390, 39% off those admitted are white-white? We have blue eyes, so it's kind of hard to hide that. Or is it good? So confusing. My grandfather was Jewish. Someone posted something on DL about Jews being people of color.

I guess Asians are people of color? I guess it's better on college applications to be people of color, but not Asian, right?

Thanks R393, but my kid isn't the swimmer. That's his cousin. I guess I am a bad writer. My kid is the one who was a VERY early reader. I just explained shoo-in to him though.

If you are for real R392, your best bet is to hire a private college counselor. It's not cheap but well worth it. They can help you figure out a strategy and help you narrow it down. Even at a really top private school the guidance staff is going to be overly cautious as they want their numbers to look good. That's why every kid at a Manhattan or LA private school has a separate college counselor.

If financial aid won't be an issue, you are in a much better position because you can apple Early Decision.

I would also assume that if your kid is at a good suburban public school where most kids go to college, that his friends will be talking about it non-stop too.

Also SAT/ACT not going anywhere. They may wind up being optional, but parents will pay SAT tutors and the rap will be that high SAT scores help even if they're optional, and the kids with the high SAT/ACT scores will all be the children of the 15%.

And Asians.

It will also give AP scores/courses greater importance and guess which schools offer dozens of AP courses rather than just three or four?

Last post and then I am going to take a shower and take the kids for a walk somewhere.

My posting is partly about my kid, who really is smart. I know you guys don't believe that. He doesn't really have any extracurricular things going on yet (he's just going into tenth grade). I got him involved with some library stuff this summer, but I'm open to more advice on that. Don't say dirty things though.

Then my post is also me preparing myself for the feelings of jealousy if the swimmer nephew kid gets into a better school. My husband saw him push my daughter down once when they were all toddler-preschooler types. We don't know how we'll deal with it if they win. Neither daughter is super-brainy, though ours is objectively prettier.

LOL at the affirmative action foe whites at the selective schools because Asians are more qualified.

Rutgers.

[quote]—Our kids have blue eyes, theirs have brown eyes

OMG, not brown eyes! Why didn't they drown them at birth for being born with that glaring defect? I hope they at least had the decency to have them chained up in the basement.

Rutgers is way to big. I know two age 30ish people who went there and just got lost in it. Both sort of dropped out of life. Not nurturing enough.

Sorry "way too big."

I don't know if everyone with kids is as competitive as we are. It's a sickness. My siblings don't have kids so I don't know how I would feel about them. These kids are my husband's brother's kids. I am attached to them but not that much. I wish them well but that's about it. My husband and his brother have a competitive but close relationship, so it's just there. Their family is short but both my family and the other wife's family are taller. Well, my family is tall but she has a tall father. So both of the boys are getting tall. It's a draw there. For some reason the tallness skipped the girls. We used to hang out with a larger group of my husband's friends. There was a girl who was prettier than my daughter. More stunning. Like a child form of Anna Nicole Smith. My brother got mad at me for saying my daughter was the second prettiest. I said, well, my daughter is a Barbie, the other girl is a Bratz doll. (Don't know if you guys can picture those. They had really exaggerated eyes and lips, and those stupid big feet where you take of there feet to change their shoes. I didn't like them because they could never be barefoot.) In DataLounge terms, my daughter was the Lee and the other girl was Jackie. My daughter had perfect features but the other girl was stunning. But we don't see that group much any more

R78, I think Binghamton was the top SUNY University Center 30 years ago, but both Buffalo and Stony Brook have invested heavily in their science and graduate programs so they are the top 2 now. Binghamton and Albany are still better than the colleges but a step below UB and Stony Brook.

R386 Your writing is not "insanely bad"--it's perfectly fine for the level of this board. Some people, like your grammar/spelling tormenter, have too much time on their hands, not to mention dispositions that might be lacking in certain desirable qualities.

Thank you R404.

These rankings need to be reconsidered in light of revelations about legacy admissions and the recent scandals with Felicity Huffman, et al. Does anyone really think J Kushner was "Harvard material"? OTOH, much of what one takes from college depends on how hard one works. Given how expensive a four degree is these days, I think community colleges are an option to be considered.

[quote]Does anyone really think J Kushner was "Harvard material"?

We don't have to think, we already know the answer. We also know the answer with Dubya.

We know Kusher's HS was shocked that he got into Harvard. We also know what it cost to get him into Harvard: $2M from his low-life scummy dad (1M for him and 1M for his equally-unqualified brother).

We also know Bush was a C student in HS and got into Yale where he maintained that stellar mediocrity which then earned him a place at HBS.

It seems like everyone applies to the Ivys now. That is why their acceptance rates are like 6 percent or so.

In my day you were encouraged to be realistic and only apply to schools where your statistics matched what they were looking for.

R407 Not only did Bush Jr's father and grandfather attend Yale, his line there stretches back to 1841 when his great-great etc grandfather Bush entered the school. Under the legacy admissions policy of the time it would have been remarkable if he hadn't been admitted.

Speaking of conservative LACs, College of the Ozarks in southern Missouri was rated the most conservative college in America by [italic]The Princeton Review.[/italic] It's affiliated with the Presbyterian Church USA, a moderate-to-liberal mainline denomination, but it became Wingnut U under its current president. Before he was hired in the late '80s, it was a typical small LAC.

COTO offers students a free education in exchange for working an on-campus job (15 hours a week + two 40-hour weeks). They have a 10% acceptance rate, but that's because applicants are required to provide three character references, including one from a pastor.

Like most hardline Christian schools, it has rules out the wazoo: no sex, no drinking, no fun. Students are summarily expelled for breaking the rules. Gay students aren't welcome—they can be kicked out if they're even rumored to be gay—and they even kick gay people out of their student-run hotel and restaurant. (A former student who did an AMA on Reddit said they have a document outlining "What to Do if a Homosexual Comes In.")

The president recently instituted a required "Patriotic Education and Fitness" course for freshmen, which is basically a military-style boot camp designed to instill respect for authority. When Colin Kaepernick started taking a knee, they made a public show of banning Nike uniforms for their athletic teams.

Students who miss the nightly curfew get locked out of campus and often sleep in their cars outside the gates. In 2018, a male and female student who missed curfew were abducted from their car at gunpoint and forced to have sex with each other while their assailant watched.

College of the Ozarks with the "very selective" admittance rate of 9%. Acceptance rate is but one measure of selectivity and "elite status" - Stanford the most selective with a 4% rate. But all these measures need to be taken in context. UCLA has the lowest acceptance rate of all large public universities.... but that's because so many apply there vs. the places available. UCLA is not 4% better of a school than Berkeley (at 16%). Similarly College of Ozarks is not better than Cornell, Amherst, West Point et. al. because it has a lower acceptance rate.

R409, hence his "Skull and Bones" admission.

What’s wrong with Penn? I thought the campus was vibrant and Philly has a cool vibe too. Unless, of course, you are a “Next Door” mom.

I really think the association with Trump has hurt Penn. I'm not kidding.

A lot of the information on this thread is out of date. (And last year's admissions were truly crazy because of COVID.)

So, here's the deal, for the Ivies you need exemplary grades and test scores AND you need a hook. The number of AP classes only matters in comparison to the other kids at the same school. If the average number of APs taken at a school is three, then you need six. You don't need 10. But if the average is higher, then you do. Cornell is the one exception to this--it's big, out in the boonies, and low-enough ranked that it actually does have to compete with non-Ivies for its students.

The hooks are being a legacy, an athletic recruit, some sort of glossy extracurricular, rich parents willing to donate or being an URM. (Underrepresented minority--i.e. not Asian.)

Since 2008, rich kids whose parents can pay full tuition have a distinct advantage. Kids who fall just under the cut-off also have an easier time--the schools like to pay out as little as possible while keeping up the illusion of having lots of kids on scholarship. It is very, very hard to get a full scholarship.

The schools say that being a legacy doesn't make that big a difference, but if you're hitting the grades/test/class-ranking metrics, that little thing will make all the difference.

Duke, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins tend to hang together in the rankings--near the bottom of the top 10, but always in the top 20. Rice, Vanderbilt, USC, Emory, Georgetown are below them--reliably in the top 30. NYU, Berkeley, UCLA as well. Cornell, Brown and Dartmouth tend to place between those two groups. Penn is hanging on, but I expect there will be a shock switch with, say, Duke, one year.

Stanford and MIT are a cut above and vie with Harvard, Yale and Princeton for top dog status. University of Chicago and Columbia maneuver their way in there on occasion, but Chicago just doesn't have the same appeal. And, yeah, Brown is known for taking dumb, rich kids and making it easy for them to get through. (Sounds way more fun, though, than, say, Columbia.)

That said, the elite non-Ivies probably have the better students just because there's less of an issue with legacies and athletic recruits, at least for UofC and Johns Hopkins. Duke and Northwestern do do the legacy/sports thing. Northwestern tells legacies to do early decision--admit rates for early decision are 20 percent, for regular decision it's around 5 percent. Athletic recruits are also pushed to do early decision.

It is *much, much* easier to get into any of these schools as an URM, which, ironically, ends up reinforcing stereotypes. Yeah, the Asian kids are at the top of their classes because it's so fucking hard to get into these schools as an Asian kid. The dumb jock stuff continues because, yeah, as an athletic recruit, you don't need the same grades and scores as an unhooked kid from the burbs. Meanwhile rich kids, who don't have to worry about financial aid, applied early decision, when it's easier to get in and, yeah, compared to the little unhooked grinds who got in regular decision, they come off as pretty lazy. They literally didn't work as hard to get there and they know it.

As for the UCs--The top UCs are heavily Asian--Berkeley, UCLA, UCSD, Irvine (the latter two lack the prestige of the first two, but are strong in STEM) The bottom UCs (Merced, RIverside, Santa Cruz) are heavily Latino. White kids dominate the middle--Davis, Santa Barbara. The UCs end up with the Asian kids with excellent grades and scores who don't have enough of a hook for the Ivies and other private elites. Since the savings are substantial for in-state residents who don't qualify for big-time aid, people are okay with it. (The real bitterness comes from the kids who are good students, but who still don't make the cut for any UC other than Merced. Seriously, if you're a good enough student to get into UCLA, you're good enough to get into a higher-ranked private (at least if you're not Asian).

We're poor, sort of working class, and white. Oh God, my nephew is going to get into a better school than my son, isn't he?

Someone please explain AP classes vs. honors. Shit, I do have Alzheimers. I couldn't remember the word honors. Honors has more to do with your grade point average, right?

Oh, and our schools are not great but the high school is pretty big. The in-laws go to a hillbilly type high school in Southern NJ. Our school is in Central NJ and is very diverse. We have blacks, whites, latinos, regular Asians, South Asians, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Muslims, you name it. Like, truly diverse. My son is taking plenty of AP classes. This is all true. His grade school teachers would always say he was best in the class. He had a really shitty English teacher in 6th grade who hated him, I'm convinced because he is shy and not theatrical. I'm not going to say it was because of his race and gender but some have said that. She was just the very dramatic type and he is not. Seventh grade I think they made up that award for him (best writer). They gave it to the other grades but one was a tie (two kids). Eighth grade was going to be great and they were going to read Shakespeare at the end but covid hit and he fell apart, as did a lot of people. Before covid fully hit I scoped out the Princeton Public Library and found this nice Princeton student to give my son math help. He met with the tutor on zoom but ended up having to retake geometry in ninth grade anyway because he didn't turn in any work except what he did with the tutor. Ninth grade was fine, totally online. I need son to be honest about whether or not I should get in touch with the math tutor again. He is writing something about Imperialism for AP or honors history this summer. I said something this morning about "why don't you say some positive stuff like maybe the USA should have stayed in Afghanistan. He said this is not about modern stuff and being positive about Imperialism would get him nowhere. I didn't know he was so grown up.

Is the Princeton Tutor hot?

R415: Like most of the posts here you conflate popularity with quality. There are different pools of applicants for many of these schools The pool of applicants for U of Chicago is probably a more liberal arts counterpart to MIT or CalTech than like most of the Ivies and it's more of an academic hothouse. Northwestern and Johns Hopkins are more heavily weighted toward pre-meds than most universities which makes them more like Case Western than the Ivies.

Colleges and Universities change very slowly---the investments in new programs take years to really demonstrate worth, esp. in the sciences. Programs have to build. Unless you're one of the top schools in a particular field, cherry picking people often gets you big fish who don't want the pond to grow---that strategy is one reason why Emory is very uneven academically and still a safety school. Faculty turnover also can take time and if a university can't hire the caliber of people who retire, that's how entire departments fall apart. It's easier to create deficits than to build a department.

The outcomes of where you attend often are more qualitative than quantitative---the competitiveness of admissions and prestige of schools have little correlation with lifetime salaries. Wall Street goes for places like the Ivies, but otherwise, the main advantage of a high status university probably is for entry into graduate education that puts people on an academic or similar track and there the prestige within a field may matter more than the overall status of the place, although relationship among faculty members may actually matter even more.

The posts about law school here are hilarious. there's a whole ecosystem devoted to the "law school scam". Law schools are used as cash cows by universities and the investment made by students often isn't paid back by salaries after graduation. Schools that once supplied the local work-a-day private practitioners and municipal judges no longer lead to reasonable chances for employment because there are too many schools and they take too many people. Even with the demise of a number of schools and reductions in incoming classes, there continues to be an oversupply of lawyers. Most of the schools that have closed have been fly by nights, but some have been in existence for decades, and in one case over a century and associated with credible universities.

Gaetz went to W&M law school. I question that one.

Both UCLA and UCI are *majority* Asian.

University of Caucasians Lost among Asians

University of Chinese Immigrants

At least Berkeley and UCSD do not have any ethnic majority, but are close to half Asian.

R419 don't keep us in suspense, oh wise one. What 100 year old Law School bit the dust?

Jersey city state teachers college

R418 he's not what you're picturing. Not tall, very skinny, sort of curly hair. Mathy type.

Focused on your future. Arizona State University prepares students for success with research opportunities, internships and entrepreneurial endeavors. In fact, ASU was ranked one of the best in the U.S. for preparing graduates for jobs, ahead of MIT, Columbia and UCLA.

R425 Bwaha ha ha ha! This is the kind selective promotional stuff where universities strategically try to game the US News and World Report's ratings. See what USC has done in the past decade or so.

ASU - for kids that couldn't get accepted into U of A, not to mention MIT, Columbia or UCLA. But great prep for 12 Step Programs.

ASU is popular with rich California kids who had dreams of USC.

I had a peripheral connection to Hanover Research - would hire out to universities to create a strategic plan whose whole purpose was to raise the school's USNWP rankings. USC, I believe, has a whole office whose job descriptions were to raise the university's position in the rankings.

I bet R421 is one of those people who rails against affirmative action and how only the most qualified should get into a school...then whines about Asians.

A friend just started teaching at Arizona State. He said that the students are for the most part not nearly as bright as where he was teaching before (Michigan) -- not even close. He added that in every class, there were always a few really bright kids -- probably in-staters who couldn't afford to go elsewhere. But overall he was surprised at the poor level of their high school education.

R430:

Guys at ASU are as hot as the temperature though.

I've worked with out-of-state students who were admitted at Arizona State with B/C grades and slightly above average test scores. I've seen several of them; once I was floored by the decision. I couldn't believe he was admitted; there was no special story there, no hook to make him more attractive. He quit school after two years.

Back to my family. Me me me! Are schools more likely to admit kids from NJ because they know we have decent schools here?

Resurrecting this thread - the annual USNWR rankings of colleges out this week. (A horrible, manipulative, product placed in our vulnerable ideas that such things can even be ranked).

Princeton, again, #1 - and a data point that impressed me: graduation rates for low income students (Pell Grants) match that of higher income students. That's a real accomplishment. Also the faculty:student ratio is crazy. 4:1.

Also the five top public universities ranked:

1 UCLA 2 UC Berkeley 3 Michigan 4 Virginia 5 UC Santa Barbara

Notable that although "California is falling apart", 3 of of the top 5 public universities are UC (and UC San Diego and UC Davis also in the top ten. And more to the point of this thread... the top public University, UCLA, is only #20 on the list.

(Cue the MAGA trolls to now talk about homeless shitting on the streets of SF)

R435 how many years (decades now) has Princeton been #1? For good reason, I think.

I think Univ. of Chicago is better than all five of those, R435.

R437 Attention! Careful reading! Can accomplish much.

University of Chicago is not a public university. It was tied with Stanford for #6 on the overall list. UCLA, #1 public university was #20 on the overall list.

R438, my mistake. I was still thinking in terms of non-Ivies.

The rankings are determined by factoring in data which have no bearing on a student's decision, such as peer assessment from other schools. Some people are so pissed off the didn't get tenure at a school they give it the lowest possible score when they find work at another institution.

R440: Those people are a small enough group that they won't influence rankings. Reputational surveys tend to reinforce herd mentality and history---it takes years for a change in reputation to catchup with a place unless it's had newsworthy problems like scandals or deaths of high profile people---I've seen departments that never recovered from having deaths at a time of normal turnover. It's difficult to rebuild. Small, regional colleges probably have the same problem.