If not pursuing IB, finance, MBB, are Ivies undergrad really that much better than schools like Rice, Swarthmore, CMU?

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:How good is Brown when it comes to post grad opportunities compared to the other Ivys? DD is deciding between Brown or Rice.

Both a great schools but Rice is regional/local in a way that Brown is not. Look at percent of students from Texas and also focus on Texas related industries, like oil and gas.

Rice is not local!?! Not even regional.

Depending on which source you use 35%-49% of the students at Rice are from Texas. That is what makes it regional, its network is highly concentrated by region and industry due to this. In contrast at Brown, all of the New England states combined, MA, CT, RI, NH, ME, VT on the high side add up to 23%.

36 percent of students at Stanford are from California. Does that make it a regional school? Texas and California are huge states with tons of stellar students. You can't compare some school in Rhode Island or New Hampshire with Stanford or Rice on those terms. Brown and Dartmouth and the other Ivies are perfectly good schools. But they are in tiny states with small pools of top students. There are more than 70 million people in Texas and California alone.

That 70 is not evenly split, California is 39m to Texas' 31m, Rice is more heavily weighted to local applicants than Stanford. Yet, having said that Stanford is more regional than its peers.

I think you both are missing how important geography plays in college decisions.

89% of kids don't travel more than 500 miles for college. If you are in CA and want a top 20 school, you have UCB, Stanford and UCLA. If you are in TX you have Rice, and then UT Austin is in the hunt. The neighboring states to CA and TX have relatively small populations, so CA and TX will be the dominant population centers.

If you live in say DC, well you have basically 15 top 20 schools within this radius.

While that is true it is not applicable to the applicants applying/truly competitive for the Ivy+ privates. And the public's are different, depending on the State they are limited to taking only a small percentage from OOS or mandated to take some percent of the top HS grads from their states. Look at this data from Rice on where it alumni live, of the 70k living alumni 21k+ live in Metro Houston, another 33k+ live in the rest of Texas, a mere 10k+ live in the rest of the US and 3k+ live abroad. https://ideas.rice.edu/report/geographic-distribution-summary/
That screams regional

[Anonymous]

+1. Excellent point. 1 in every 5 Americans is a Texan or Californian.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If you think your kid is going to start a tech or biotech company it's probably worth it to go to an Ivy.

If they just want to work as a scientist or engineer in academia or industry then you should look into what opportunities the different schools offer for getting research/industry experience during undergrad as that will matter more for grad school/job applications than the name of the school. For example, can they get a job working in a professor's lab assisting with their research?

Tech does not care about Ivys. For big law, medicine or finance, Ivy. Otherwise where your kid will be happy.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:How good is Brown when it comes to post grad opportunities compared to the other Ivys? DD is deciding between Brown or Rice.

Both a great schools but Rice is regional/local in a way that Brown is not. Look at percent of students from Texas and also focus on Texas related industries, like oil and gas.

Rice is not local!?! Not even regional.

Depending on which source you use 35%-49% of the students at Rice are from Texas. That is what makes it regional, its network is highly concentrated by region and industry due to this. In contrast at Brown, all of the New England states combined, MA, CT, RI, NH, ME, VT on the high side add up to 23%.

36 percent of students at Stanford are from California. Does that make it a regional school? Texas and California are huge states with tons of stellar students. You can't compare some school in Rhode Island or New Hampshire with Stanford or Rice on those terms. Brown and Dartmouth and the other Ivies are perfectly good schools. But they are in tiny states with small pools of top students. There are more than 70 million people in Texas and California alone.

That 70 is not evenly split, California is 39m to Texas' 31m, Rice is more heavily weighted to local applicants than Stanford. Yet, having said that Stanford is more regional than its peers.

I think you both are missing how important geography plays in college decisions.

89% of kids don't travel more than 500 miles for college. If you are in CA and want a top 20 school, you have UCB, Stanford and UCLA. If you are in TX you have Rice, and then UT Austin is in the hunt. The neighboring states to CA and TX have relatively small populations, so CA and TX will be the dominant population centers.

If you live in say DC, well you have basically 15 top 20 schools within this radius.

While that is true it is not applicable to the applicants applying/truly competitive for the Ivy+ privates. And the public's are different, depending on the State they are limited to taking only a small percentage from OOS or mandated to take some percent of the top HS grads from their states. Look at this data from Rice on where it alumni live, of the 70k living alumni 21k+ live in Metro Houston, another 33k+ live in the rest of Texas, a mere 10k+ live in the rest of the US and 3k+ live abroad. https://ideas.rice.edu/report/geographic-distribution-summary/
That screams regional

Well it is based on the large %age of kids from TX at Rice and CA at Stanford.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Spouse is a Md/phd educated at Harvard and Hopkins with lots of active NIH funding. We looked at some of the top slacs and he felt the research opportunities were not the equivalent of R1s in terms of basic science. Lots of analysis of common data sets and outcomes based research.

False

Dwight Schrute has entered the discussion.

Are you staring into a mirror?

Are you a moron? It’s Dwight’s favorite response “False!”.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:How good is Brown when it comes to post grad opportunities compared to the other Ivys? DD is deciding between Brown or Rice.

Both a great schools but Rice is regional/local in a way that Brown is not. Look at percent of students from Texas and also focus on Texas related industries, like oil and gas.

Rice is not local!?! Not even regional.

Depending on which source you use 35%-49% of the students at Rice are from Texas. That is what makes it regional, its network is highly concentrated by region and industry due to this. In contrast at Brown, all of the New England states combined, MA, CT, RI, NH, ME, VT on the high side add up to 23%.

36 percent of students at Stanford are from California. Does that make it a regional school? Texas and California are huge states with tons of stellar students. You can't compare some school in Rhode Island or New Hampshire with Stanford or Rice on those terms. Brown and Dartmouth and the other Ivies are perfectly good schools. But they are in tiny states with small pools of top students. There are more than 70 million people in Texas and California alone.

That 70 is not evenly split, California is 39m to Texas' 31m, Rice is more heavily weighted to local applicants than Stanford. Yet, having said that Stanford is more regional than its peers.

I think you both are missing how important geography plays in college decisions.

89% of kids don't travel more than 500 miles for college. If you are in CA and want a top 20 school, you have UCB, Stanford and UCLA. If you are in TX you have Rice, and then UT Austin is in the hunt. The neighboring states to CA and TX have relatively small populations, so CA and TX will be the dominant population centers.

If you live in say DC, well you have basically 15 top 20 schools within this radius.

While that is true it is not applicable to the applicants applying/truly competitive for the Ivy+ privates. And the public's are different, depending on the State they are limited to taking only a small percentage from OOS or mandated to take some percent of the top HS grads from their states. Look at this data from Rice on where it alumni live, of the 70k living alumni 21k+ live in Metro Houston, another 33k+ live in the rest of Texas, a mere 10k+ live in the rest of the US and 3k+ live abroad. https://ideas.rice.edu/report/geographic-distribution-summary/
That screams regional

In many parts of the country, even very top students attend in-state schools. A fun exercise is to look up the top general enrollment high school in some flyover state and find their college Instagram page. You will see that nearly all kids are headed to the state flagship or an even weaker regional school.

Ivies are basically northeastern regional schools with an astonishingly good marketing campaign. And schools like Chicago and WashU are piggybacking on that marketing campaign in an effort to attract coastal money.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I get that if you want to be on a CEO track or make big bucks on Wall Street, Ivy names could open more doors. But if you’re pursuing medical research, tech, natural sciences, are Ivies (undergrad) really that much better than schools a tier below?

With AI changing everything, is old-guard Ivy prestige still as important as it has been before?

No. It's not. I don't know why Wall Street is so Ivy-fixated, but for everything else students will do just fine at, let me think - Stanford, MIT, Rice, Duke, Vanderbilt, Notre Dame, Georgia Tech, Michigan, Chicago, Purdue, Carnegie Mellon, WashU, Emory, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, CalTech, Berkeley, UCLA, Georgetown, Williams, Swarthmore, and West Point, Annapolis, and Air Force Academy. By and large, there is zero difference in both the quality of these students and their grad school and career opportunities compared to the Ivy League schools.

[Anonymous]

The copium continues. I guess we’ve hit the rationalization stage for those who were disappointed in Ivy day.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:I get that if you want to be on a CEO track or make big bucks on Wall Street, Ivy names could open more doors. But if you’re pursuing medical research, tech, natural sciences, are Ivies (undergrad) really that much better than schools a tier below?

With AI changing everything, is old-guard Ivy prestige still as important as it has been before?

Rice CMU and Swat (and a couple others) are effectively the same boost as ivy+ schools for pHD MD tech and in some areas CMU and Rice are much better than three of the ivies

How about Amherst and Pomona? Are they as good as the ones mentioned above for PhD MD Tech boost comparable to or even better than some Ivies?

We looked at one of those, so the answer is no. I guess those kids get the experience later in their academic careers, over summer, or just aren’t hard core basic science researchers. Plenty of funded researchers are not, although outcomes medical research seems to be hit harder by the NIH cuts.

Are you talking about undergrad or still talking about your PhD husband?

Why are you being obtuse? Less sophisticated bench science at slacs, by a good margin. For undergrads and everyone else.

Nonsense

Point us to some of the cutting edge basic science research coming out of Williams and Swarthmore. We’re all ears.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I get that if you want to be on a CEO track or make big bucks on Wall Street, Ivy names could open more doors. But if you’re pursuing medical research, tech, natural sciences, are Ivies (undergrad) really that much better than schools a tier below?

With AI changing everything, is old-guard Ivy prestige still as important as it has been before?

Rice CMU and Swat (and a couple others) are effectively the same boost as ivy+ schools for pHD MD tech and in some areas CMU and Rice are much better than three of the ivies

How about Amherst and Pomona? Are they as good as the ones mentioned above for PhD MD Tech boost comparable to or even better than some Ivies?

We looked at one of those, so the answer is no. I guess those kids get the experience later in their academic careers, over summer, or just aren’t hard core basic science researchers. Plenty of funded researchers are not, although outcomes medical research seems to be hit harder by the NIH cuts.

Are you talking about undergrad or still talking about your PhD husband?

Why are you being obtuse? Less sophisticated bench science at slacs, by a good margin. For undergrads and everyone else.

Nonsense

Point us to some of the cutting edge basic science research coming out of Williams and Swarthmore. We’re all ears.

Point us to some cutting edge research coming out of R1s that undergraduates are meaningfully participating in….we’re all ears.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I get that if you want to be on a CEO track or make big bucks on Wall Street, Ivy names could open more doors. But if you’re pursuing medical research, tech, natural sciences, are Ivies (undergrad) really that much better than schools a tier below?

With AI changing everything, is old-guard Ivy prestige still as important as it has been before?

The quality and breadth of basic science research at a Harvard, MIT, Cal Tech, Hopkins is going to be pretty hard to match outside of a few flagships - Michigan, UCLA, UCSD.

At the undergrad level? There are at least a dozen schools that could offer better research opportunities than Harvard does.

Absolutely not. There are not a dozen non-ivy schools that are better at providing undergrad research experience than even the worst ivy for research.

Disagree. There are more than a dozen non-Ivy that are better than Dartmouth in terms of undergraduate research. JHU CmU for example are known for extensive undergraduate research.

No they aren't. Can you provide some back up for that statement?

Not PP. When I was at swarthmore, I had zero interest in biology. But I got pressure to assist in published research.

My attitude was: you know there’s more to life than reach right? My professors acted like they were doing me a great service giving me these opportunities, and I didn’t want them.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I get that if you want to be on a CEO track or make big bucks on Wall Street, Ivy names could open more doors. But if you’re pursuing medical research, tech, natural sciences, are Ivies (undergrad) really that much better than schools a tier below?

With AI changing everything, is old-guard Ivy prestige still as important as it has been before?

The quality and breadth of basic science research at a Harvard, MIT, Cal Tech, Hopkins is going to be pretty hard to match outside of a few flagships - Michigan, UCLA, UCSD.

At the undergrad level? There are at least a dozen schools that could offer better research opportunities than Harvard does.

Absolutely not. There are not a dozen non-ivy schools that are better at providing undergrad research experience than even the worst ivy for research.

Disagree. There are more than a dozen non-Ivy that are better than Dartmouth in terms of undergraduate research. JHU CmU for example are known for extensive undergraduate research.

No they aren't. Can you provide some back up for that statement?

"Over 80% of Hopkins undergraduates engage in research during their time at the university, often averaging 8–10 hours per week"

https://imagine.jhu.edu/blog/2024/09/30/johns-hopkins-rises-to-no-6-in-u-s-news-best-colleges-rankings/

JHU would be better than most ivies for undergraduate research. Certainly over Dartmouth which sucks for stem.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I get that if you want to be on a CEO track or make big bucks on Wall Street, Ivy names could open more doors. But if you’re pursuing medical research, tech, natural sciences, are Ivies (undergrad) really that much better than schools a tier below?

With AI changing everything, is old-guard Ivy prestige still as important as it has been before?

The quality and breadth of basic science research at a Harvard, MIT, Cal Tech, Hopkins is going to be pretty hard to match outside of a few flagships - Michigan, UCLA, UCSD.

At the undergrad level? There are at least a dozen schools that could offer better research opportunities than Harvard does.

Absolutely not. There are not a dozen non-ivy schools that are better at providing undergrad research experience than even the worst ivy for research.

There are a dozen SLACs which will provide better basic undergraduate research opportunities than an Ivy. Top R1 labs are not in place to support undergraduates and undergraduates are inefficient when you have a large supply of grad students to work in your labs. There are always some opportunities for undergraduate research at top R1s (it isn't absolute) but it's not the be all and end all that too many people believe.

Just wrong a lot of amazing projects in the R1 space that undergraduates are contributing to. These are the same labs your loser lac kids are trying to get into for their summer reu.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I get that if you want to be on a CEO track or make big bucks on Wall Street, Ivy names could open more doors. But if you’re pursuing medical research, tech, natural sciences, are Ivies (undergrad) really that much better than schools a tier below?

With AI changing everything, is old-guard Ivy prestige still as important as it has been before?

The quality and breadth of basic science research at a Harvard, MIT, Cal Tech, Hopkins is going to be pretty hard to match outside of a few flagships - Michigan, UCLA, UCSD.

At the undergrad level? There are at least a dozen schools that could offer better research opportunities than Harvard does.

Absolutely not. There are not a dozen non-ivy schools that are better at providing undergrad research experience than even the worst ivy for research.

There are a dozen SLACs which will provide better basic undergraduate research opportunities than an Ivy. Top R1 labs are not in place to support undergraduates and undergraduates are inefficient when you have a large supply of grad students to work in your labs. There are always some opportunities for undergraduate research at top R1s (it isn't absolute) but it's not the be all and end all that too many people believe.

Just wrong a lot of amazing projects in the R1 space that undergraduates are contributing to. These are the same labs your loser lac kids are trying to get into for their summer reu.

Wow. Can you hear yourself? No kids should be called losers by a middle-aged adult, definitely not ones who are trying to spend their summer doing academic research.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:How good is Brown when it comes to post grad opportunities compared to the other Ivys? DD is deciding between Brown or Rice.

Both a great schools but Rice is regional/local in a way that Brown is not. Look at percent of students from Texas and also focus on Texas related industries, like oil and gas.

Rice is not local!?! Not even regional.

Depending on which source you use 35%-49% of the students at Rice are from Texas. That is what makes it regional, its network is highly concentrated by region and industry due to this. In contrast at Brown, all of the New England states combined, MA, CT, RI, NH, ME, VT on the high side add up to 23%.

If you add in NY and NJ my guess is you get to at least 35% for Brown. I see your point but I don’t think Brown has many/any TX employers recruiting there. So both are regional in their own way. But if you prefer the northeast to TX, that is definitely a good reason to pick Brown!!!