coureur

>>It is a good year for Yale. But, not so lucky for the Nobel Prize, out of 9 individuals in the world who won the Nobel Prizes this year, two from Stanford.<<

...and two Harvard alumni as well.

kellybkk

Permit me to debunk this comment. When you are interviewed for the Rhodes, you are interviewed by a committee of previous Rhodes winners in your district. In the USA, naturally, these would all be Americans. The British have absolutely NOTHING to do with selecting the Rhodes. Now, when you think of all the prior Rhodes scholars who came from the Ivies, and you know then that the preponderance of interviewers would then be from the Ivies, can we not understand that there might be some Ivy bias within all of these committees? I think so. Indeed, it is obvious.

cltdad

I have not fact checked, but there appears to be a lot of bad arithmetic in this thread: 4/26 = 15%

and when Harvard's total would be 6+4 = 10

All of the boosters here need to brush up on the basics.

kellybkk

I agree. The Rhodes is another one of those punch-the-ticket, check the boxes kinds of awards that you see on FastWeb all the time. The political correctness just makes one want turn blue. It used to be you had to be a pretty good athlete (another ticket punch), but this qualification has been dumbed down to almost nothing. The Ivies really do have a lock on this award with the self-reinforcing nature of the committees being primarily Ivy and the applicants being strongly Ivy. The Rhodes interviewers are usually lawyers or doctors or other "servants" of the people, and very very few are actual businessmen. If you look at the names of the previous Rhodes scholars, only a very very very few have had any impact any different that any who weren't Rhodes.

ewho

Sorry for this. A result of not showing work, and a reflection of how much I care about H.

Alexandre

Good point gunkanjima. I do not know why those universities do not dedicate more resources to the Rhodes scholarship. As you point out, those schools have the resources to make it happen. I suspect it is because universities always ask a basic question; "is this the best use of our resources"? Endowing a couple of chairs and an office for one scholarship will be considered wasteful by some.

goldenboy8784

Its not just the Rhodes scholarship Alexandre; the top 10 private schools dominate when it comes to helping students win other prestigious fellowships like the Marshall, Truman, Churchill, Mitchell, and the Cambridge Gates. There's just an overall theme of excellence when it comes to the undergraduate program at these universities.

RML

^^^ Was there a reason why you omitted Fulbright?

BuBBLES FoR SALE

Rhodes Scholars are hardly the same thing they used to be. Most use it not as a badge of honor to pursue scholarly research, but as a ticket to a lucrative wall-street job. That being said, I dont care that some schools were grossly overrepresented.

shadow99

Marshall >>> Rhodes. Much more meritocratic selection process.

If Harvard and Yale really had candidates that were that much better than those of other schools, why aren't they also dominating awards like Marshall and Truman? The Rhodes process is the most BS of all of them, and it shows.

xiggi

Here is one reason.

Start with the admission that many schools are mostly local or regional. Compare this schools such as Harvard and Yale that recruit and enroll from much farther distances than their own states. In the case of the Rhodes, this is important as only two students emerge from each of the 16 districts.

Well, back to your mega-sized state university ... how do you justify the creation of a department that will perhaps "deliver" a couple of successful candidates each decade. How does that work in relation to the size of your enrollment and also in relation to your ... stated mission.

Blind hogs and acorns come to mind!

warblersrule

Marshall 1954-2012
Harvard 256
Princeton 126
Yale 113
Stanford 87
MIT 65
Brown 46
Cornell 33
Columbia 30
Duke 27
Dartmouth 26
Rice 24
Chicago 23
Georgetown 21
Northwestern 20
Johns Hopkins 15
Penn 11

Marshall 2002-2012
Stanford 27
Princeton 19
Yale 18
Harvard 15
MIT 15
Brown 6
...(others)...

Truman 1977-2012
Harvard 62
Stanford 61
Yale 56
Duke 41
Brown 34
Princeton 32
Chicago 27
Columbia 26
Georgetown 25
Dartmouth 23
Cornell 22
MIT 21
Penn 18
WUStL 14
JHU 14
Northwestern 13
Rice 10

Truman 2002-2012
Harvard 15
Stanford 14
Yale 11
Brown 10
Chicago 10
Georgetown 9
MIT 8
Cornell 7
Penn 7
WUStL 7
Duke 6
JHU 6
Princeton 6
Columbia 4
Dartmouth 4
Rice 3
Northwestern 1


Numbers courtesy of Northwestern's OIR.

While laudable, it still raises questions. This is what, the 5th or so winner in the last 50 years? This despite Berkeley actually having MORE top scoring students than Harvard or any of the other Ivies.

I strongly agree with gunkanjima...public universities need to provide more support to students in snagging top fellowships. Indeed, some (most notably UNC, UVA, USMA, and USNA) already do. I don't buy the spreading of resources excuse; these universities spend buckets of money on bureaucracy and red tape, and I think money could be found.

Many say that students win because they attended Harvard. I wonder if it's perhaps equally fair to say that some win despite attending a large public.

Michigan Daily | The real reason you didn't win a Rhodes scholarship

I don't think it's all about winning fellowships. I think programs and offices like the ones mentioned at Harvard are indicative of the resources thrown at undergraduates in general.

While I won't speak for Goldenboy, the Fulbright poses many problems when comparing numbers.

• Graduate students and even faculty can win them.
• Some countries are FAR more competitive than others. Winning a scholarship to Cyprus, well, that's pretty good. Winning one to the UK...that's impressive indeed.
• Colleges do not always distinguish between the multiple Fulbright programs (i.e. research and English teaching). Again, some are much more competitive than others.

Alexandre

Warblersrule, I do not have Marshall figures for 2011 and 2012, but I do have the official totals from 1954-2010, and they look different from yours, which oddly enough, does not include LACs and public univerities. Perhaps Northwestern was just including private universities in their list, but even then, some of those numbers seem inflated (I doubt Harvard had 21 winners in 2 years, Yale 10, Duke and MIT 7 each, Chicago and Rice 5 each etc...):

1954-2010
Harvard University 235
Princeton University 118
Yale University 103
Stanford University 79
Massachusetts Institute of Technology 58
Brown University 44
United States Military Academy 33
Cornell University 30
University of California-Berkeley 28
Columbia University 26
Dartmouth College 26
United States Naval Academy 24
Tulane University 23
University of Texas-Austin 22
University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign 21
Duke University 20
Georgetown University 20
Rice University 19
Bryn Mawr College 18
Northwestern University 18
University of Wisconsin-Madison 18
University of Chicago 17
University of Michigan-Ann Arbor 16
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill 16
Williams College 16
Indiana University-Bloomington 15
Arizona State University 14
Michigan State University 14
Johns Hopkins University 13
Occidental College 13
Pomona College 13
University of California-Los Angeles 13
Vanderbilt University 13
California Institute of Technology 12
Kansas State University 12
Wellesley College 12
Smith College 11
United States Air Force Academy 11
Swarthmore College 10
University of Pennsylvania 10 (for some reason, Penn lags when it comes to Rhodes and Marshall scholars)

http://www.marshallscholarship.org/a...forwebsite.pdf

rjkofnovi

"Originally Posted by rjkofnovi

Was there a reason why you omitted Fulbright?"

Gee, I don't seem to recall typing the above statement in this thread Warblers. Care to elaborate?

warblersrule

^
LOL! I seem to be getting careless in my old age. That statement should be attributed to RML.


Alexandre, I make no claims about the accuracy of Northwestern's data; it was simply the only list I had available. I am more willing to trust the official list, obviously.