Probably the first two years – prior to choosing a major and moving into it – the public B1G schools (and publics nationwide…) are not a whole lot like the Ivy League, mostly because the survey/requisite courses at the publics tend to be huge lectures with limited access to professors. Maybe the Ivy schools have a few large lectures too, but do they have any with 300+ students, as can be found at any large public school?
But once you get into your major, the lectures become much smaller. There is more direct interaction with the professor, it’s easier to set up office visits, etc. This is the time, plus grad school and beyond, when yes, the good B1G schools can be said to be similar to the Ivies. We know the top B1G schools have a lot of ranked grad programs, and once you are into your major as an undergrad, you are tapping into that quality and in a much smaller/more intimate lecture setting.
So academically:
Once you are in your major (junior/senior years typically) in a top program, or
In a strong grad/PhD program
Then, yes, the Big Ten begins to compare respectably to the Ivy League. Northwestern, Michigan, Wisconsin, UIUC and Minnesota especially, as they all have a plethora of top-notch programs. And Johns Hopkins, if we are considering them as part of the B1G. If so, welcome aboard, Hopkins!
By the way, I was using 2011 data that appeared in a 2013 report. Here are somewhat more recent NCES data on university "research and development" expenditures reported by the National Science Foundation for FY 2013 ($000):
[/QUOTE]
Johns Hopkins $2,168, 568
University of Michigan-Ann Arbor $1,375,117
University of Washington $1,192,513
University of Wisconsin-Madison $1,123,503
UC San Diego $1,075,554
UC San Francisco $1,042,841<<<
Doesn’t getting to the sixth school tell you all you need to realize how irrelevant and trivial this metric is in a forum such as CC?
What does UC SF with its dollars?
Of course, this entire thread is an exercise in futility.
@xiggi, so there are no people interested in graduate education or research on CC in your opinion? That has not been my experience.
If you think this thread is an exercise in futility, then don’t read it, much less comment. Ignoring threads on CC is a possibility. I do it all the time.
It depends on what you are comparing, @twoinanddone. You decided that, by whatever criteria you were using, NU was more like a lot of DIII schools. So you have to say that Stanford and Duke are like a lot of DIII schools as well, no? I don’t think it’s quite impartial to apply one criteria to one school and another to another. BTW, Harvard isn’t a DIII school.
Finally, you say that you were talking about academics, but DIII is solely an athletics term. Nobody talks about DI or DIII academics.
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? 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).
Here’s a list of the 21 states that had a population of at least 5 million in the 2010 census, and the enrollment of their respective public flagships:
State (population 2010 census) / public universities [enrollment]
California (37.3 million) / UCLA [40,675], UC Berkeley [36,142], UC system [238,700]
New York (19.4 million) / SUNY System – 4 research university centers [88,652]
Florida (18.8 million) / U of Florida [51,474], Florida State [40,337], U Central Florida [60,810]
Illinois (12.8 million) / UIUC [41,918]
Pennsylvania (12.7 million) / Penn State [44,817], Pitt [28,766]
Ohio (11.6 million) / Ohio State [56,867]
Michigan (9.9 million) / U Michigan [37,197], Michigan State [50,908]
Georgia (9.7 million) / U Georgia [35,197], Georgia Tech [21,557]
North Carolina (9.6 million) / UNC Chapel Hill [29,390], NC State [36,767]
New Jersey (8.8 million) / Rutgers [48,378]
Virginia (8.0 million) / UVA [23,907], Virginia Tech [31,097]
Washington (6.7 million) / U Washington [43,762]
Massachusetts (6.5 million) / UMass Amherst [28,635], UMass System [71,910]
Indiana (6.5 million) / Indiana U [46,416], Purdue [39,637]
Arizona (6.4 million) / U Arizona [40,223], Arizona State [59,794]
Tennessee (6.3 million) / U Tennessee [27,410], Memphis [21,840]
Missouri (6.0 million) / U Missouri [35,425]
Maryland (5.8 million) / U Maryland [37,631]
Wisconsin (5.7 million) / UW Madison [43,275]
Minnesota (5.3 million) / U Minnesota Twin Cities [51,853]
Colorado (5.0 million) / U Colorado Boulder [31,702]
Notice, however, that not all of those “colossal” or “gigantic” public universities are research powerhouses. I would imagine most would like to be, but some are better at it than others.
Wisconsin also has the UW system, which has another 135,000-140,000 total students (undergrad and grad). North Carolina and Texas (and maybe other states) also have large systems of underling state schools.
I never said anything about D3, except that Hopkins is only playing lacrosse as D1. Someone else said Hopkins is not like NW because it is D3, which is like saying Williams isn’t like Dartmouth, and to some it may not be but to me they have a lot in common, and perhaps more than Ohio State and Dartmouth which are both D1. Again, the OP wanted to compare academics by looking at schools grouped by athletics.
I didn’t compare Stanford or Duke to D3 schools but to others in their conferences versus Ivy - all D1. Is Stanford more like Harvard than Utah? I think it is in many ways- private, selective, expensive, FA based on need. In sports is Stanford more like Utah? Well, those schools think so because they both belong to the same conference and choose to play each other.
Personally, I’d say Nebraska is least like the others because its research profile isn’t consistent with the others, it’s the only one that isn’t a member of the AAU, and it has the lowest admission standards. But that’s just me.
I’m not sure what “most people” would say. I’m not sure most people know that Northwestern is private. A lot of Midwesterners don’t know that Rutgers is public, and just judging from its name, its location in the Northeast, and the fact that it’s been around a long time, many would assume it’s private (as it was for most of its history). Many moderately informed Midwesterners would say Northwestern is an awful lot like Michigan and Wisconsin in that, along with the University of Chicago and Notre Dame, it’s one of the premier universities in the Midwest. (Illinois also belongs in that group but in my experience Illinois doesn’t carry quite the same reputation). Some would say Indiana is the outlier because it’s the only B1G school that doesn’t offer engineering. Others might say Indiana is the outlier because it’s the only B1G school that historically has been more of a basketball school than a football school; Maryland also fits that profile, but Maryland isn’t as familiar to many Midwesterners. Others would say Rutgers, Maryland, and Penn State are the outliers because they’re not in the Midwest. A few might say Northwestern is the outlier because it’s in the Northwest, unaware that notwithstanding its name, Northwestern is smack in the middle of the country, in suburban Chicago. There might even be a few who would say Northwestern is the outlier because it’s the only “directional” school in the bunch, like Western Michigan or Southern Illinois or Northern Iowa.
I do think you’re right that most people on CC would say Northwestern is the outlier because it’s private–though with 15,000 students it’s hardly small. But opinions on CC are not reflective of public opinion at large.
Is that any kind of sequitur to what I wrote? People are indeed interested in graduate education and that’s why CC created a forum for them. People are indeed interested in research and that is a good subject to discuss.
The futility arises when some are determined to rely on questionable metrics to support their opinion or … agenda. What I did point out is that the research by FTE is an irrelevant metric when the realm is dominated by medical research. One could have looked at JHU to understand that but the UCSF is a dead giveaway or wasn’t?
The further futility arises from the desire to relabel schools with moronic terms such as Ivies Lite or Public Ivies. Why do great public RU --or their fans-- feel the need to rely on such stupid comparisons baffles me. The schools are different and have different missions at both the UG and the graduate level. Does it really matter if they are a little step below, a few rungs below, or way below? You tell me!
Does the point that the differences are eroding at the graduate level (for good reasons) eliminates the basic difference at the UG level? And what is that difference? Here is comes: ** 99 percent of the UG body ** at the public RU is composed from people who were NOT admitted at the HYPS of the world with most of them not having a chance.
It seems there are two separate discussions happening simultaneously here: one about athletics, the other about academics. Obviously neither Northwestern nor Johns Hopkins is D3-level in academics – they are both top-15 private universities.
Northwestern’s basketball could be said to be D3-level at times. hehe
@xiggi, yes, I was responding to your sentence:
"
Doesn’t getting to the sixth school tell you all you need to realize
how irrelevant and trivial this metric is in a forum such as CC?
"
I don’t see why discussing research amounts in a thread about research universities in the “parents forum” (where several of the participants are in research) should be out of bounds.
And whoever said that this thread should be solely about the undergraduate experience? Why should it solely be? Whoever anointed you the CC police anyway, @xiggi?
I personally do not take kindly to the repressive and intolerant attitudes of people who try to dictate to others what they may or may not discuss. There are plenty of threads on CC that I find irrelevant and trivial, but I don’t jump in and tell people that what they’re discussing is irrelevant and trivial. Why can’t you do the same, @xiggi?
99%. ? Exaggeration, certainly. This is going to come as a shock, but most people don’t apply to ivies.
Some of the self selection is as you’d expect, but a.lot of people are put off by distance, cost, perception that the student body is … How to say this delicately… people they’d prefer not to be near, and other reasons. FWIW, lots of people avoid big ten schools for.some of the same reasons, but there’s huge danger in actual believing one’s own marketing. Our mayor nearly got laughed out of a building by resorting to “I have an Ivy league MBA” during some meeting or other. Widely, but not universally respected, is probably the best way to phrase it.
Edit de auto correct
@twoinanddone, you said “NW is a lot like a lot of D3 schools”. Your exact words. How do you reconcile that with “I never said anything about D3”?
I apologize, I meant academically. It’s like Williams and Amherst and MIT in quality and academic rankings but much stronger in most sports teams because it gets to recruit as a D1 school and award scholarships. It’s like U Chicago in size, location, ranking. It is like Hopkins in the Big 10 except that they only share one sports team in common. It is like most of the high ranked LACs in costs.
Pizzagirl has said that NW is not a school of 15,000 but only of 8000, making it a medium school, not a big school, much more like Harvard than Ohio State. I do not think NW should play D3 sports if it doesn’t want to. I believe in college sports and think they add a great deal to the college experience. NW is in the Big 10 and it’s not going anywhere, but I get to have an opinion that NW is more like other private schools than it is like the big, huge flagships it battles in the Big 10. You can disagree.
You still do not get it, do you! On the first point, it was about relying on a metric of research per student when that metric is hopelessly flawed by the medical research. I am sorry I cannot make that clearer to you.
On the second point, it is has nothing to do about “policing” what is discussed, but everything about offering the opinion that the discussion about “public RU being a notch below” the Ivies is a sterile one that will not get anywhere, even if this thread goes on for another decade.
And, fwiw, feel free to ignore my comments … as you suggest I’d do about yours. Fair enough?
Makes little difference! Not applying ensures they cannot be accepted but the results would be identical as their chance of acceptance is close to nil. Not surprising when 95 percent of the students who believe to be qualified are rejected. On the other hand, safe and except a handful of public RU, the chances of admissions for competent students are sky high.
At the end it is the same: the students’ body are simply not interchangeable.
Sure, some. Cornell has an intro Psych class that regularly enrolls 1600, filling the largest auditorium on campus. The tour guides boast about it when you visit. At Harvard, Computer Science 50, Intro to Computer Science I, drew a record-breaking 818 undergrads in the fall of 2014, making it Harvard’s largest class. Second largest was Economics 10a, Principles of Economics, with 711 students. In the spring of 2015, Economics 10b, Principles of Economics, drew 619. Life Sciences 1b, An Integrated Introduction to the Life Sciences, enrolled 464, and Statistics 104, Introduction to Quantitative Methods for Economics, drew 372.