Reply to The Absurdity of U.S. News College Rankings

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Yeah what the ill-informed and nasty PP doesn't realize is that the schools that have benefited from rankings the most are the non-Harvard/Yale Ivies. The Ivy League went from being an old-school athletic conference to having the level of prestige they enjoy today. But sure, take it out on these other schools. The confident stupidity and lack of self-awareness truly knows no bounds.[/quote]

What a ridiculous post. The Ivies have been the Ivies and ergo have been synonymous with prestige and top academics for a long time, whether deserved or undeserved. This is true in the US and it is true internationally.

The smaller Ivies - Brown and Dartmouth - are less recognized by name alone internationally but rather their affiliation to the Ivies. However in the US they have always been prestigious nationally and particularly in the Northeast - the economic and political center of the US.

Cornell in particularly is very popular internationally despite Americans desperately trying to compare it to a state school.[/quote]

The Ivy League is an athletic conference. USNWR entrenched their status as prestigious schools; they weren't all considered prestigious beforehand.[/quote]

+1. The prestige of the Ivy League used to be more about social class and wealth, but USNWR changed that to something more “meritocratic.” In quotations because it’s really not, anyone who thinks USNWR is about merit must be kidding themselves.

Had the more academics-based ranking of the ‘50s and ‘60s stayed, the only ivies that deserved meritocratic prestige would have been Harvard, Columbia, Yale, and Princeton. Cornell would also have been in the same grouping and no one would ridicule it as a state school. Penn, Brown, and Dartmouth would have been in the shadows of schools like Chicago and Johns Hopkins.

But USNWR’s dubious metrics made it seem that not only are ivies the best schools, but also that undergrad is the only part of a university that matters. [/quote]

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