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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
This has pretty much been the case for a very long time.  And so maybe it always will be the case (especially at country clubs in the Northeast...) 
But......in my opinion, it's happening...it's really happening....The Ivy League and even HYP are starting to leak some of their cachet.  Is anyone else sensing this?   I have my theories as to why, but I believe it's happening.   Maybe it won't grow or continue, but in the meantime, schools like Chicago are benefitting.    [/quote]

We're a young country.  Even the most prestigious of universities in the U.S. would look anything like they do currently if you went back too far.  Princeton was only named Princeton in 1896.  Stanford was founded in 1885.  The Yale gothic college buildings that look the oldest were constructed in the 1920s and 1930s.  Same for the Harvard houses.  Compare the oldest existing building at Harvard, a simple building from about 1720 with the soaring King's College Chapel at Cambridge, which was finished 200 years earlier. [/quote]

I suspect this is a very big part of it. Another important thing to consider is that the U.S. is HUGE, as someone on the first page of this thread pointed out. Let's see, if we were to compare ourselves to the "second" world leader in higher education, the U.K., the numbers make sense. The U.S. is about 6 times larger the U.K. in terms of population. Even if we were to take JUST the two tippy top representative universities from the U.K., Oxford and Cambridge, and adjusted to scale, it would mean we have about [u]12 elite-tier universities[/u] here in the states. That should make sense. If we were to expand the comparison pool to other prestigious U.K. universities like UCL, LSE, KCL and Imperial, that would mean we have more than 36 strong, world-class universities in the U.S.

This all tracks. The folks who are only pre-occupied with 7 or 8 of America's top universities, or think they're inherently more special because they happen to belong to the same sports league as Harvard, are misguided and living in the past. Yes, social prestige is a factor, but outcomes from the other Ivy Plus schools are just as strong. But even arguing for that should be a non-issue - anyone who thinks the aforementioned colleges are NOT prestigious is a complete and utter dunce.[/quote]

Oddly this is perhaps the most lucid post on this forum.[/quote]

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