Is Cornell really still the "worst" ivy?

[Anonymous]

The quick answer is yes, it is still the bottom Ivy. Still a great university, and your child can get a great education there, but forever at the bottom of the Ivies.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:With Cornell consistently ranking above Brown and Dartmouth in the USNews rankings isn't it safe to say that Cornell is a middle ivy now? Also Cornell is extremely strong in STEM which will continue to grow as the primary basis for university reputation across the world. Also given a lot of the bad press around Columbia I would say the tiers now are:

Tier 1: HYP
Tier 2: Penn, Cornell
Tier 3: Columbia
Tier 4: Brown, Dartmouth

DD/friends anecdotally say the USN rankings in the last couple of years have changed things and they refer to Cornell as a T10, while Brown and Dartmouth are considered just OK T20s.

Why do we persist this nonsense? The Ivy league is a sports conference, nothing more. It has also become the lazy man's way to identify a group of very selective schools. It is a group of eight very different universities all excellent and none generally better than another group of 8-12 universities who are also extremely selective but not part of the athletic conference. For undergraduate education they are also no better than the top dozen or so SLACs (engineering and CS excepted).

Brown and Dartmouth are more like Wesleyan and Middlebury than Cornell. Cornell is closer to UCB and UMich than Columbia except in student experience. The idea that these schools should be grouped together is actually a ludicrous idea, almost as ludicrous as the idea that you can actually stack rank these schools alone or within the larger pool of schools which are complete peers of any of the Ivy league schools.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Is this the kind of conversations people in the northeast private school circles have?
This whole thing is just bizarre.
So blessed idk anyone IRL who would talk like this.

Not at all! People that ask is the Ivies well and have many in the family at them do not talk this way or create these stupid rankings. Getting into one of the 8 is very big deal at the NE privates.

No it isn't, and most do not get into "one of the eight"