“The conference will get significant increases from its 10-year, $1 billion deal with ESPN/ABC for football and basketball and 6-year, $72 million pact with CBS for basketball; It also has a 25-year, $2.8 billion deal with the league-run BTN that extends through 2031-32.”
^ Apparently the B1G can do a little math 
^I guess that means there’s not realistic hope for the swarthmore model.
I don’t think its possible to make very fair comparisons among the schools across the two leagues. With the exception of Northwestern, the B1G schools are typically 3-4 times as large as the ivy’s, and in many comparisons, much larger. Dartmouth has about 6,300 undergrads, and Ohio State has about 44,000.
You can find plenty of able students on B1G campuses, and you can find plenty of not-so-able students as well, many of whom are on the revenue athletic teams. My suspicion is that the engineering and science departments are actually more competent at some of the B1G schools than at some of the Ivies. Harvard and Yale have conceded this indirectly, with campaigns over the past 15 year to beef up their engineering (although it wasn’t the B1G that they were focused on…more like MIT, Stanford, and to a lesser degree Princeton).
OK, I see that the OP is an international grad student who didn’t grow up in the US or attend an American college for undergrad, which explains why the Americans in this forum couldn’t figure out why the heck he bothered to make this post.
So one thing you have to understand, @Catria, is that undergrad and grad reputations can be quite different for Anerican schools, and it may be very different by field as well, so there’s no one “academic reputation”.
When it comes to research, however, the CIC/B10 can certainly be seen as just a tier below the Ivies with a strong middle class. With 14/15 CIC members in the AAU and 11/15 in the top 40 American schools by research (according to the 2014 ARWU rankings), the Ivy League is the only other league that can boast those numbers (7/8 in the AAU and 6/8 in the top 40 in research; though the UAA is close and the UC’s have about the same range). Comparing the CIC with other groups using its weakest members is a bit disingenuous. No, Nebraska, Iowa, and Indiana aren’t world powers in research (though Iowa has a renown writing program and Indiana has a respected b-school and one of the best music schools in the US) . . . but Dartmouth and Brown aren’t exactly leading research powerhouses either. Neither would be in the middle third of the B10 in research, in fact.
I wonder if you are biased by the field you are in as well. In physics, the Ivies are on average better, but in engineering (which has far more faculty and students than physics), the B10 has 3 in the top 10 of the USN engineering grad schools rankings and hold 5 of the top 15 American ARWU engineering spots vs. 0 Ivies.
If you want to compare the academics of different conferences, then I think it is fair to say that the Ivy League is the best conference, and the Big Ten is probably the second best conference overall.
Perhaps that is what you were asking?
^^ unfortunately, that would be wrong for such useless metric. That dubious honor has been going to the … ACC for a few years.
@xiggi, as I mentioned, that would depend on what is meant by “academics”. If it is research and depth of the league, it’s the B10 behind the Ivy League and everyone else behind the B10. Use other criteria, and obviously your ordering may change.
Here a website that shows academic rankings for the five power college football conferences
https://infogr.am/2014-power-football-academic-rankings
B1G and ACC are tops, but there is a larger differential between the top and bottom schools of the ACC vs B1G.
^A whole additional set of refutable rankings. I don’t think anyone wants to go down that road. I’ll probably find out I’m wrong on that though. [-(
@wayneandgarth, agree. Even if you accept the premise that SAT scores, acceptance rates, and student-faculty ratios constitute “academic quality”, how fair is it to compare the entering freshmen test scores and HS freshmen acceptance rate of schools that take in 50% as many transfers compared to freshmen (USC) or where a significant portion of the undergraduate student body is in General Studies, with its more lax entry requirements (Columbia), with schools where the USNews test scores and acceptance rate apply to nearly the entire student body? And @bclintonk has pointed out that different schools use different definitions of “student” and “faculty” to calculate the s/f ratio.
The Pac-12 and ACC are both pretty strong at the top, but are not quite as deep with quality as the B1G. And in terms of research spending and output, the B1G blows them away, especially among the schools considered to be in the lower half of the conferences.
It would be fair to say that the ACC and Pac are competitive with the B1G at the undergrad level, but not at the grad/PhD levels, except perhaps for Business and Law.
Interesting. I decided to look at some numbers. The most recent data I could find say that the B1G schools have a combined total of $8.3 billion annually in research expenditures, compared to $6.6 billion for the PAC-12, $5.6 billion for the ACC, and $4.2 billion for the lowly Ivy League.
Of course, these conferences are of different sizes. On a per-school basis, the B1G average is $593 million per school, the PAC-12 average is $546 million per school, the Ivy average is $521 million per school, and the ACC average is $372 million per school.
The ACC has the lowest bottom (2 schools not in top 200) and the lowest “middle class” (10 schools less than $400 million), but it’s very strong at the top (Duke $1.018 billion, Pitt $880 million, UNC Chapel Hill $763 million, Georgia Tech $671 million). But even the ACC’s top four ($3.332 billion combined) can’t match the B1G’s top four (Michigan $1.213 billion, Wisconsin $1.023 billion, Minnesota $824 million, Ohio State $794 million, for a combined total of $3.854 billion)
The PAC-12 is also quite top-heavy, with Washington ($1.113 billion), UCLA ($942 million), Stanford ($868 million) and UC Berkeley ($671 million) doing most of the heavy lifting. Arizona ($598 million) and USC ($580 million) are also above the conference mean and median, but from there it’s a sharp drop-off, with 5 schools below $400 million and Utah ($410 million) just barely above that mark.
What’s impressive about the B1G is the depth of its research capacity: 12 of the 14 schools are above $400 million annually in research spending (compared to only 5 of the 8 Ivies, 7 of the PAC-12, and 5 of the 15 ACC schools). Only Nebraska ($220 million) and Indiana ($160 million) are laggards in the B1G, but they’re in more or less the same company as Brown ($223 million), Dartmouth ($210 million), Wake Forest ($208 million), and Notre Dame ($121 million). In this regard, recent admits Maryland ($485 million) and Rutgers ($416 million) are a better “fit” with the B1G than the next most recent admit, Nebraska.
I’m not sure about Nebraska, but IU makes up somewhat for its lack of research by being very good in Business/Econ and in the Humanities. Maybe the people of Indiana figure Purdue can be the research/STEM school for their state.
Thanks for looking up those numbers! I was pretty sure I was right about the research spending, but (whew!) it’s good to know the numbers bear it out.
Yes, that’s pretty clear: there’s a definite and highly unusual bifurcation in Indiana higher education, with Purdue as the STEM school and IU as the humanities and social sciences school. Purdue has an outstanding engineering school; IU is the only B1G school that doesn’t offer engineering. Purdue also has a vet school, ag school, pharmacy school, and nursing school; it’s probably fair to say it’s stronger in applied sciences than in basic science. Besides humanities, IU is also stronger in some social sciences; its sociology department department is ranked #12 in the US News grad school rankings, political science #25, psych #26, IU also has a law school and a school of public affairs; Purdue has neither. Both have business schools; IU’s is more highly regarded (#8 undergrad business school per US News), but Purdue’s is no slouch (#21). But the medical and dental schools are technically part of IU, though they’re on a separate Indianapolis campus that is jointly operated with Purdue (IUPUI). And in the sciences. IU is more highly ranked than Purdue in bio and not too far behind in chemistry, so it’s not as if IU is completely devoid of STEM. But only about 15% of IU’s bachelor’s degrees are awarded in STEM fields, with bio making up more half of that total (8%). At Purdue, 52% of bachelor’s degrees are in STEM fields, with engineering leading the pack at 21.4%.
So far I haven’t found anything that Nebraska is particularly good at except football, but I’m probably missing something.
The Huskers were admitted for their football and because they share the all-for-one-one-for-all mentality that the B10 emphasizes.*
*That’s also why, even though they are the biggest prizes, I don’t see ND or Texas ever joining the B10.
With a population of roughly 85M in its footprint, the CIC/B10 boasts more top 40 research universities than Germany, Japan, and France combined, and those first world countries have a total population 3 times bigger than the B10’s (and total economies 2-3 times bigger).
With all that corn, Nebraska must have a decent Ag/Horticulture department. 
Well, there you go. US News ranks the University of Nebraska-Lincoln the #54 agricultural sciences school in the world. Not bad. Of course, that would still put it near the bottom of B1G ag schools, trailing #14 Wisconsin, #15 Minnesota, #16 Rutgers, #18 Illinois, #21 Michigan State, #25 Ohio State, #31 Penn State, and #46 Purdue, but ahead of #70 Maryland. Northwestern, the University of Michigan, the University of Iowa, and Indiana University don’t have ag schools.
From NYT article when Nebraska was voted out of AAU in 2011, it’s USDA research on the Ag campus did not count much for AAU metrics.
UIUC has just added a medical school with Carle Health in Urbana with an engineering-focused program as the existing U of I Med School is in Chicago.
@bclintonk, the way that IN split up its flagships between an engineering-focused school and humanities/law-focused school isn’t extremely unusual, though it does seem to be mostly a Southern thing. Traditionally, VA, NC, SC, GA, and AL all did the same thing, though UVa and 'Bama now also offer engineering and UGa has made rumblings about encroaching on GTech’s turf as well. Traditionally, UGa and GTech couldn’t even offer the same majors (outside of the basic sciences and business), so GTech doesn’t have an English major. They have a “Literature, Media, and Communication” major. They don’t have a history major. They have a “History, Technology, and Society” major.
Oh, and I think 'Bama’s football program still spends more money than all research expenditures there added together. That definitely was the case as of a few years ago.
Supposedly Indiana University is contemplating adding an engineering school to its campus, putting two flagships in that state offering an engineering major.
I recall reading that by state law Purdue is the only state U that’s allowed to have engineering programs. That’s one reason the branch campuses are mostly IUPUx, where x is Indy, Columbus, Kokomo, etc. I think IU Southeast distributes some tech degrees under the Purdue label, in spite of the name. The same might be true at Calumet only with the names reversed, I haven’t looked into it.
I suspect if IU offered engineering at Bloomington the diploma would discretely say Purdue, unless the law gets changed.