Reply to If the Ivy League had to expand, who'd join?

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[quote=Anonymous]Certain schools have surpassed any potential benefit they would get from joining the Ivy League anyways. Stanford has built an incredible brand that is recognized globally on its own thanks to the emergence of tech and Silicon Valley. At this point, Stanford is more desirable than the entire Ivy League outside of Harvard so in many ways joining the Ivy League would be a disservice to Stanford. Plus, if their football becomes truly elite again, that brings a lot of culture and revenue that being in the Ivy League would ruin.

Duke is already probably better than most of the Ivy League schools academically, and it has become [i]the[/i] basketball school in the country. Basketball is a growing sport both domestically and internationally, so Duke likely gets more benefit from having a globally recognized team than it would from being in the Ivy League. Plus its surrounding area, the Research Triangle Park, has the potential to become a new hotbed for innovation as high prices continue to cause discontent in SF. North Carolina just needs to continue growing economically and not shoot itself in the foot with bad policies.

MIT is also better than most of the Ivy Leagues anyways, and some of their major traits would make them at odds with the standard Ivy League practices. For example, they don’t admit based on legacy or major donors, which every Ivy League school does, so MIT likely doesn’t want to change that. The MIT experience is meant to be highly rigorous and quantitative - it wouldn’t make sense for them to change their standards to fit into the Ivy mold. Additionally, it has an Ivy League compatriot just a 15 minute drive away - why would it need the redundancy of two Ivy League schools in such close proximity? I think the current setup for Harvard and MIT is much better, as they complement each other well.

That leaves a few options left: Northwestern, Rice, UChicago, Johns Hopkins, Vanderbilt, and WashU. Vanderbilt would benefit from being Ivy probably, but its strong baseball program makes it likely they’d refuse to join. Northwestern is probably already academically as strong as middle-of-the-pack Ivies, so they don’t stand to gain much by joining, and their football program is solid enough to prioritize over being Ivy. So that leaves 3 schools that would be a good fit for joining the Ivy League: Johns Hopkins, UChicago, and WashU. I think Hopkins would make the most sense since it’s fairly close in proximity to the Ivy League, and it would fit in nicely with what the Ivy League already offers.

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