Hardly. Penn has much stronger departments than Brown and Dartmouth even outside of Wharton. I agree about lay prestige though, all non-HYP ivies are similar. |
| ^^ What departments specifically are you referring to as stronger? Aside from nursing, of course. |
Yield means jack shit with all the ED and EA trickery going on. |
| Columbia and Penn have RD yields higher than Brown. That would avoid the ED complications altogether. |
+1. I know Columbia has that whole mattress girl thing. Then there was a Vice article about Columbia kids about two years ago where the kid said everyone was intense and miserable. Didn't sound like a fun friendly college at all. |
| For all you who endlessly try to compare Ivies, it is unlikely your DC will get into any of them, and very unlikely your kid will have choice among ivies. If you visit an ivy these days and actually talk to the students, they are amazingly bright, talented, and creative. |
Same at non-ivy elite schools! And to be fair, all the schools also have their share of uninteresting and non-creative kids. This unending competition about the relative merits of schools in this range is entertaining but no one should find self worth in their school's rep. |
No, the bottom half at most colleges is a sad joke. |
Almost everything really. Social sciences, humanities most of the natural sciences, engineering, law, medicine. Even the ones that are just graduate schools affect undergrad because of the caliber of faculty they attract and the research opportunities available. All Penn classes are taught by faculty and it is easy to take grad school classes as an undergrad. |
Penn, Columbia yields have consistently been higher. |
Irrelevant. Especially from an undergrad perspective. If anything famous departments can be to the detriment of undergrads as the focus is primarily on research and grad students. For grad students only the department they attend matters, the rest of the university doesn’t. Hiring managers aren’t going to pick one candidate over another because one school has a stronger history department. Penn and Dartmouth and Brown are all the same. Elite colleges. |
| Cornell has the vet school though. And who wouldn’t want to go to hotel school- sounds so fun. Seems like an interesting mix of kids. I also still have all those Ithaca cookbooks (moosewood and all). I’m going to beg my kid to apply there. |
Not irrelevant at all. Penn undergrads are taught exclusively by professors and there is a lot of access to research opps. I ll give you an example. Zeke Emmanuel. Harvard Med grad, Rhodes scholar and one of the main architects of Obamacare. Also a Penn professor. Do you think this kind of scholar would have come to Penn were it not for Penn's top medical and business schools? I don't think so. This professor teaches at least two undergrad classes and has undergraduates working with him on research. Other similar notable examples include Angela Duckworth, Adam Grant and Phillip Tetlock. Brown and Dartmouth just can't attract these kids of names. Not saying a recruiter is going to choose a Penn kid just solely the strength of the department, but these are added opportunities for Penn students. |
So what? I think that's the point. All these schools have their elite professors that it's irrelevant which is "better". Arguing that a student is better off at Penn versus Brown or Cornell or Dartmouth or Duke or Chicago is something that can't be verified. They're elite colleges above a certain threshold and that's all that matters. They are, for all practical purposes, the same. I say this as a dual Ivy degree holder, including one from Penn. There is, however, a slight difference between the Penns and Browns and Chicagos versus Harvard/Yale/Princeton. The hiring manager or graduate admissions committee's eyes will linger a bit longer on the applicant with a Harvard or Stanford BA than a Penn or Brown or Duke BA. Just as the same eyes will linger a bit longer on the Penn or Brown BA than a WUSTL or Hopkins BA. However, once anyone from any of these schools have established themselves in their careers, the undergraduate institute becomes very irrelevant. I have hired graduates from "lesser" schools over Penn or HYP because the applicant in question had stronger skill sets that I needed. |
| Zeke is probably at Penn because it's closest Ivy to DC. |