Big Ten: Ivy League-lite academically?

[BobWallace]

@bclintonk

Uh, BobWallace, did it occur to you that these are public institutions whose educational mandate is to educate large numbers of their state’s residents?

Honestly, from reading your posts I thought their mission was to drum up as many research dollars as possible so they could claim superiority to Princeton …

And in case you hadn’t noticed, pretty much every state with a large population base has large state universities. That’s pretty much just a given; the B1G schools are certainly not outliers in that regard. (And it’s no accident that the two smallest public universities in the B1G are Iowa and Nebraska, the flagships of the states with the smallest population base).

Your capacity for selective reasoning is impressive - so the size of a state should be related to the size of its universities, but the size of a university should according to you be in no way, shape, or form related to the volume of its research?

Why did you feel the need to make up a fictional gigantic university in New York? I guess your point is that weak. The largest public in New York is Buffalo, at ~29,000, not the 88,000 student campus you invented.

I see some pretty high quality universities on your list that somehow avoided your presumed inevitability of bloating up to 40,000 or 50,000+ students … UNC, UVa, Ga Tech, Pitt … and if we follow your logic that the size of the state should relate to the size of the university, there is a huge variation in that ratio, from New York at 655 pop/student to the apparent king of bloat U of Minnesota at 100 pop/student. That’s a huge variation (no wonder you wanted to fudge NY) and not at all a confirmation of your rationale that gigantic colleges are inevitable.