Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Coming across the JHU thread and it’s clear there are some people unfamiliar with American colleges who think Ivy League = the best. It is worth repeating that there are just as many universities NOT in the Ivy League that are just as good and just as prestigious as the Ivies.

Stanford, MIT, Chicago, Cal Tech, JHU, Northwestern, Duke

If we expand to LACS, add Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore and Pomona.

If these schools were to just start their own separate academic “league,” they would rival the Ivy League, easily.

Duke v. Williams men’s basketball would be interesting, Northwestern v. Swathmore football would be a massacre. Do you think Northwestern would be eager to give up the $50 million plus a year big 10 tv payout?

Anonymous wrote:Coming across the JHU thread and it’s clear there are some people unfamiliar with American colleges who think Ivy League = the best. It is worth repeating that there are just as many universities NOT in the Ivy League that are just as good and just as prestigious as the Ivies.

Stanford, MIT, Chicago, Cal Tech, JHU, Northwestern, Duke

If we expand to LACS, add Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore and Pomona.

If these schools were to just start their own separate academic “league,” they would rival the Ivy League, easily.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Coming across the JHU thread and it’s clear there are some people unfamiliar with American colleges who think Ivy League = the best. It is worth repeating that there are just as many universities NOT in the Ivy League that are just as good and just as prestigious as the Ivies.

Stanford, MIT, Chicago, Cal Tech, JHU, Northwestern, Duke

If we expand to LACS, add Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore and Pomona.

If these schools were to just start their own separate academic “league,” they would rival the Ivy League, easily.

No one thinks only Ivy League is the best. It's a straw man in your own head. But Ivy League is a real grouping that conveys prestige for lay people. MIT and Stanford are also widely accepted as being in the top 5 prestigious schools in the country. T5, HYPMS is a real grouping.

The rest of them are all good schools. But they are not prestigious.

This is the dumbest comment. T5 or HYPMS is no more a “real grouping” than this list here. And to claim that any of these schools aren’t prestigious is uneducated, by which I mean in academia and among the educated elite in this country, these schools certainly do carry prestige.

Anonymous wrote:Are people in this thread actually claiming schools like Brown and Dartmouth are more prestigious than Chicago or Duke or Northwestern? That doesn’t seem right to me. Would be more impressed to hear someone went to Caltech than Penn. And so the list goes.

Anonymous wrote:Coming across the JHU thread and it’s clear there are some people unfamiliar with American colleges who think Ivy League = the best. It is worth repeating that there are just as many universities NOT in the Ivy League that are just as good and just as prestigious as the Ivies.

Stanford, MIT, Chicago, Cal Tech, JHU, Northwestern, Duke

If we expand to LACS, add Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore and Pomona.

If these schools were to just start their own separate academic “league,” they would rival the Ivy League, easily.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Coming across the JHU thread and it’s clear there are some people unfamiliar with American colleges who think Ivy League = the best. It is worth repeating that there are just as many universities NOT in the Ivy League that are just as good and just as prestigious as the Ivies.

Stanford, MIT, Chicago, Cal Tech, JHU, Northwestern, Duke

If we expand to LACS, add Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore and Pomona.

If these schools were to just start their own separate academic “league,” they would rival the Ivy League, easily.

No one thinks only Ivy League is the best. It's a straw man in your own head. But Ivy League is a real grouping that conveys prestige for lay people. MIT and Stanford are also widely accepted as being in the top 5 prestigious schools in the country. T5, HYPMS is a real grouping.

The rest of them are all good schools. But they are not prestigious.

Anonymous wrote:OK, OP. I partly agree with you. But you don't go nearly far enough. You want to maintain the façade that there is a strict hierarchy, but you want to quibble about the order. I would say that there really is no hierarchy.

First of all, there are probably around 500 schools in the US with high enough overall quality that even the brightest kids cannot learn everything and cannot exhaust the opportunities presented to them. The job market in academics is so bad that the professors at secondary and tertiary public colleges got their PhDs right alongside the professors at Ivy League schools. There just isn't room for all of them at the most selective schools, so they go where they can get jobs.

Secondly, I dispute the notion that there is such a thing as "prestigious" undergrad. I care about where people went to grad school, where they did their post-doc or fellowship (though even then, it is more about WHO they trained under, than where they did it), and subsequent work experience. Unless they were trying to make conversation about people we might know, or football rivalry, I would find it sort of pathetic if they tried to brag about undergrad. Like bragging about graduating high school. Sort of expected. Any field where a bachelor's degree is terminal is not really particularly "prestigious". Any field where a higher degree is required, people only care about your higher degree.

So, just go to a school where you will learn the most, be happy and can afford. It is not so hard.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The Ivy League is a sports category. There are hundreds of excellent colleges and universities in the U.S. It is a giant country.

It’s clear that the Ivy League has grown in the popular imagination to be more than just a sports league. It’s become a sort of designation or a shorthand for prestigious, top universities. Laypeople are rarely sure of which schools actually constitute the Ivy League, except for Harvard and Yale. Most also assume Stanford is one. I’ve met college basketball enthusiasts who thought Duke was an Ivy, and I know college football fans who assumed Northwestern was an Ivy. It’s a colloquialism that’s anchored in a slightly different reality from what most people think.

Any college basketball enthusiast would not only know that Duke was in the ACC, but would have thoughts on their likelihood of beating UNC that year and how many ACC schools might make the NCAA tourney. This is just dumb.

You’d be surprised. Lots of people primarily think of Ivy League as an academic designation, even if they follow college sports. To be fair Ivy League, though it is D1, is on the fringe and no one really pays attention to their sports.

NP but I would be very very surprised by a "college basketball enthusiast" who did not know Duke was an ACC team. If they didn't know Notre Dame or BC was an ACC team, that would be another thing...

Also, basketball is the one sport where people do pay some attention to the Ivies because they still get an automatic bid to the NCAAs and it's usually at least an interesting game

Anonymous wrote:Coming across the JHU thread and it’s clear there are some people unfamiliar with American colleges who think Ivy League = the best. It is worth repeating that there are just as many universities NOT in the Ivy League that are just as good and just as prestigious as the Ivies.

Stanford, MIT, Chicago, Cal Tech, JHU, Northwestern, Duke

If we expand to LACS, add Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore and Pomona.

If these schools were to just start their own separate academic “league,” they would rival the Ivy League, easily.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The Ivy League is a sports category. There are hundreds of excellent colleges and universities in the U.S. It is a giant country.

It’s clear that the Ivy League has grown in the popular imagination to be more than just a sports league. It’s become a sort of designation or a shorthand for prestigious, top universities. Laypeople are rarely sure of which schools actually constitute the Ivy League, except for Harvard and Yale. Most also assume Stanford is one. I’ve met college basketball enthusiasts who thought Duke was an Ivy, and I know college football fans who assumed Northwestern was an Ivy. It’s a colloquialism that’s anchored in a slightly different reality from what most people think.

Any college basketball enthusiast would not only know that Duke was in the ACC, but would have thoughts on their likelihood of beating UNC that year and how many ACC schools might make the NCAA tourney. This is just dumb.

You’d be surprised. Lots of people primarily think of Ivy League as an academic designation, even if they follow college sports. To be fair Ivy League, though it is D1, is on the fringe and no one really pays attention to their sports.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The Ivy League is a sports category. There are hundreds of excellent colleges and universities in the U.S. It is a giant country.

It’s clear that the Ivy League has grown in the popular imagination to be more than just a sports league. It’s become a sort of designation or a shorthand for prestigious, top universities. Laypeople are rarely sure of which schools actually constitute the Ivy League, except for Harvard and Yale. Most also assume Stanford is one. I’ve met college basketball enthusiasts who thought Duke was an Ivy, and I know college football fans who assumed Northwestern was an Ivy. It’s a colloquialism that’s anchored in a slightly different reality from what most people think.

Any college basketball enthusiast would not only know that Duke was in the ACC, but would have thoughts on their likelihood of beating UNC that year and how many ACC schools might make the NCAA tourney. This is just dumb.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The Ivy League is a sports category. There are hundreds of excellent colleges and universities in the U.S. It is a giant country.

It’s clear that the Ivy League has grown in the popular imagination to be more than just a sports league. It’s become a sort of designation or a shorthand for prestigious, top universities. Laypeople are rarely sure of which schools actually constitute the Ivy League, except for Harvard and Yale. Most also assume Stanford is one. I’ve met college basketball enthusiasts who thought Duke was an Ivy, and I know college football fans who assumed Northwestern was an Ivy. It’s a colloquialism that’s anchored in a slightly different reality from what most people think.

Anonymous wrote:The fact you all use the word prestige and elite when discussing Education says it all.