Reply to To you, what's the bottom of the "elite" colleges?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My mental list:

1 - Harvard
2 - Yale
3 - Stanford/Columbia
5 - MIT
6 - UPenn/Chicago
8 - Northwestern/Duke/Cornell

Not exactly informed by rankings, but by my 20+ years in MBB consulting and relatives in academia. Make of it what you will.[/quote]

Princeton was omitted.

23 Elites:
1 - Harvard
2 - Yale
3 - Stanford/MIT
5 - Princeton
6 - Columbia/UPenn/Chicago
9 - Caltech/Duke/Dartmouth/Brown/Cornell/Northwestern/Hopkins/Berkley
17 - Amherst/Williams
19 - Rice/UCLA/UVA/Georgetown/Michigan

Should there be more?[/quote]

Elite stops with row 9. The rest are not relevant to the general population or globally. [/quote]

Elite is relative so it is pretty meaningless and there are multiple areas in which a school may be considered elite (undergraduate, graduate professional, other graduate, research and publications, athletics, etc.). [b]There are really only a few schools where there is a reasonable likelihood that most enrolled students are really attending their absolute top choice if all options are open to them, and those are Harvard, Stanford, and MIT.  [/b]The other possible ones there, but less likely are Yale, Princeton, and Caltech.  (Caltech is still pretty attractive to a small set of students that want a more theory-driven and pre-academic option compared to MIT.)  If a student is interested in military service, then West Point, Annapolis, and the Air Force Academy would join the list.  Beyond that, all the schools listed above are second choice and down.  At the graduate level, there is too much variation to contemplate, as PhD students often pick on who they may be studying with in their field of interest.

In my view if you are extending to LACs as the above shows with Amherst and Williams there are a number of others that should be included like Pomona and Swarthmore, but they are obviously only potentially elite in the undergraduate education context.  Likewise, if you look at some of the schools above like Dartmouth, Brown, Rice, UVA, Georgetown, they are far from elite across the board in research, influential papers, graduate and undergraduate STEM, etc.  Schools like Washington, Texas, Wisconsin, UCSD, and North Carolina are generally stronger than they are in a number of these areas.

I would also say there are quite a few schools that have similar or better stats than say UVA.  Emory and Notre Dame are examples.  I am not sure what the basis is for excluding them.[/quote]

There are a lot of students who would be competitive (or as competitive as those who apply) at Harvard, Stanford, and MIT who set their sights on other elite schools, at least at the undergraduate level.  Harvard has a reputation for arrogance and ignoring undergraduates, Stanford is on the West Coast, and MIT is a niche school with a STEM focus.  [/quote]

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