calim

Can someone tell me what makes each ivy league school special and unique. I am not looking for "oh harvard is number one in everything." I am looking for something like "Brown has a tight knit feel and everyone knows each other. Their dorm system is great because [insert reason]. It is the only ivy league school that does not have any distribution requirements..."

Please only write about the schools you really know about. I am particularly interested in hearing what you guys know about HYP because all I ever hear about them is that "they are in a league of their own."

Thanks so much everyone!

kwu

Harvard: Prestige
Yale: Residential System
Princeton: Woody Woo
Columbia: NYC
Penn: Wharton
Brown: Open Curriculum
Dartmouth: Frats
Cornell: Cornell

Ny0rker

Harvard: Grad School
Yale: Harry Potter; Humanities
Princeton: Undergraduate; Math
Columbia: NYC; Core
Penn: Wharton; Fun
Brown: No requirements; Liberal
Dartmouth: Frats; Liberal Arts
Cornell: Engineering; Gorges; Agriculture

tk21769

Princeton: Eating Clubs

bjomountsi09

Harvard: Harvard, the epitome of prestige
Yale: Gothic architecture, residential system, skull and bones
Princeton: Beautiful campus, Woody Woo, eating clubs
Columbia: NYC, "The Core", socialites
Penn: Wharton, Philly, state school? (joke)
Brown: Open curriculum, liberal, diploma mill
Dartmouth: Animal House, small, liberal arts
Cornell: Tons of majors, rural, engineering

modestmelody

Before I make any assumptions, what do you mean by "diploma mill"?

paradoxical

Brown has ridiculous grade inflation.

Gordon_Gekko

Harvard: Top Med school & Business school; largest endowment.
Yale: Top Law School, WASPy Elitism, Secret Societies
Princeton: Nice campus, tuition assistance, best endowment per capita.
Columbia: ?
Penn: Wharton
Brown: ?
Dartmouth: Tuck (to some extent at least)
Cornell: Beautiful campus & Ithaca

modestmelody

I've been over that in other threads, but you do realize 4 and 6 year graduation rates across the Ivies are almost identical.

tk21769

Cornell: unique mix of Ivy League college of arts & sciences and public land grant university (with a top agriculture school, excellent engineering and architecture programs, etc., in addition to liberal arts)

Dartmouth: isolated, rural New Hampshire location. Outdoor Programs, Winter Carnival. Unusually small for a university with 19 graduate arts & science programs, plus medical, business, and engineering schools.

Harvard: relatively seamless integration into a relatively safe, walkable urban environment. Step through the gates and you are in the middle of Cambridge, a more attractive setting for students than what surrounds the other urban Ivies. (Yale, by comparison, is more like a castle fortress inside New Haven.)

Princeton: no medical, law, or business school; relatively limited range of grad school departments compared to Harvard and Yale.

gthopeful

I feel bad if only because modestmelody has to constantly defend Brown and so I'll add in my two cents. Given the aptitude of the average student there, wouldn't you argue that it would almost be unfair to not grade inflate? No doubt these people would have earned A's if they had attended state U.

modestmelody

gthopeful-- I appreciate the comment, and that one fits into the sea of many reasons to talk about why grade inflation maybe isn't the "problem" people see it as (depends on your concept of what a grade is and means), however, when it comes down to it, most of the grade inflation exists at Brown due to no +/- and the S/NC grade option under which 1/5 of our classes are taken pass/fail. If you assume that even only 25% of those people would have earned Cs, 50% would have earned Bs, and 25% As, you end up with an average GPA around that of our peers (it recovers something like 60-70% of the .2 tenths we're off from our peers).

That being said, the entire concept is strange because Brown doesn't calculate GPA.

That also being said, that doesn't really make Brown a diploma mill, suggesting that 1) It's much easier to get a diploma and 2) That it is a systematic process and 3) That students go to Brown to go in the factory one way and come out the other side with their diploma and that's it. All three would be a gross mischaracterization which is why I'm wondering what is meant by that comment.

IBclass06

It's worth noting that in the last NRC ranking, Harvard and Yale had 30 programs represented; Princeton had 29.

In the new NRC ranking, Princeton and Harvard have 33 and 35 programs represented, respectively. While Harvard may have more specialized programs (e.g. Celtic Studies), Princeton has all of the major fields.

ken285

The previous comment should have been rephrased. Princeton lacks professional programs (med, law, etc), not graduate programs.

hmom5

Dartmouth: The undergrad focused ivy where profs teach you with almost no TAs.

Penn: Wharton, Wharton, Wharton.