Perhaps the litigants can agree that while the student bodies (as a whole) may not be interchangeable, you will find a large number of students at major public research universities who have academic credentials that are similar to students enrolled in Ivy League and other top private universities. This is certainly true for the students enrolled in the honors colleges and honors programs at these public universities (http://publicuniversityhonors.com/college-value-public-honors-vs-private-elites/) and is most likely the case for the top 25% of the entering class at the major public research universities mentioned in this thread.
@xiggi, if you read the thread, you would have seen that I thought that counting undergrads in the denominator when doing a per capita research count didn’t make sense and that ideally, it would be faculty in the denominator.
"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 "
Please don’t drag me into this thread; I don’t care about athletics all that much. Besides, I would never use the term NW. It’s NU.
Great, if I understand correctly, you also felt the metric I found irrelevant has … little relevance. Unless I miss a finer point, I guess we might in agreement that it is not a good metric, but in disagreement about who says so. 
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 … 
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.
The more important point of discussion is whether or not there should be a denominator. I think to make a useful comparison there should be one that in some way represents the scale/size of the university.
Since a lot of people ineligible or marginally eligible for admission apply, the acceptance rate is low, meaning that the eligible students who didn’t apply also would have been rejected, since the acceptance rate is low.
We live in a state with two B1G schools, but DD has received several more pounds of brightly colored marketing snail mail from Ivies, and let’s not discuss the virtual mountain of email - all of basically saying “this could be you.” It’s brilliant, but a little shady. At $80 a pop applications about have to be a profit center - 28,000 * 80 (round Yale numbers) is pushing two and a half million dollars, most of it from deliberately targeted kids that were never going to be admitted in the first place. So these innocents, dreams in their eyes, spend a C note and get denied, and that part of the schools’ rating is safe for another year. It’s not a scam, but I wouldn’t like my kids to act that way.
But it’s brilliant because they’ve figured out a way to make money from gaming the ratings systems, and hats off to them for that.
There isn’t anything wrong with going to any one of them - but for the right reasons. B1G schools do some odd things too, just not this, at least to us.
Edit: the more I mull this over, the more I wonder if the question ought to be reversed. For 2 students of equal credentials, how do the Ivies fare? For engineering, that’s easy. For other majors, it isn’t as clear. Good thread. Needs popcorn.
@50N40W, Yale, etc. spend more than $2.5M on marketing and other admissions activities. Grinnell and other LACs spend several thousand in marketing for each new student. Likely the same for elite universities.
@PurpleTitan Makes you wonder who has the lowest marketing budget per applicant among US News’ top 100.
"lowest marketing budget " Possibly the public schools, particularly for their instate students. No need to spend lots of money on an already attractive product to many instate people. . One of my sons went to UVa (instate ED when they still had ED) and was in the top percentages of their SAT scores. He got tons of crap from places like Harvard, Duke, Columbia, Princeton, etc. I remember Washington University and USC being particularly relentless! But had basically no outreach from UVa.
Almost certainly the publics are lowest in marketing from a per capita basis.
@50N40W "
Edit: the more I mull this over, the more I wonder if the question ought to be reversed. For 2 students of equal credentials, how do the Ivies fare?"
The Ivies all have high yields. Cornell is about a 50% yield and the rest are higher than that.
Is this really so difficult for you. BobWallace? Every public and private research university I have ever been associated with has said it has a threefold mission: education, scholarship/research, and service. Obviously the three are related at multiple points and in interesting and sometimes complicated ways, but the educational mission and the research mission are also distinct in important respects. When I say that the educational mandate of public research universities is to educate large numbers of their own state’s residents, I say this to distinguish them from private research universities, whose educational mandate is generally to educate much smaller numbers of students, without regard to state residency. So not surprisingly, the publics tend to be much bigger and the privates much smaller, with some overlap in the middle. You seem to want to denigrate the public universities for their size, but if they didn’t have the size that they have, they would be failing at one of the core tasks for which they were created. Sneer all you want, but they have a job to do on the educational front, and in my judgment it’s a da*ned good thing they do what they do, because we’d be much worse off as a society without it.
The research and scholarship mandate is another matter. Some public universities take that mandate seriously and do very well at it. Others take it seriously but don’t do so well. Still others seem not to take it so seriously, or are just clueless about how to proceed. The scale and quality of their research effort is not simply a function of their size as measured by their student body, as some of the biggest simply don’t seem to produce much in this area. The same is also true of private “research universities”—some are research powerhouses, some aren’t.
And where did I ever say the ability of public universities to drum up research dollars justified “claims of superiority to Princeton”? I didn’t say anything remotely resembling that, and in point of fact, I don’t believe that. You may be confusing me with some other posters, but I never made any such claim. Again, you really ought to read more carefully. I merely posted some numbers because I was curious about whether another poster’s factual claims were correct. The numbers I dug up substantially corroborated those claims. That did not commit me to the normative claims that poster was making.
In point of fact, I think figures on research expenditures can be highly misleading. As I have stated repeatedly (but apparently falling on your deaf ears), research expenditures tell you nothing about the quality or value to society of the research being produced. One hopes that over time, research expenditures that produce nothing of value don’t get funded indefinitely, but who knows? And we also need to give scientific inquiry a large benefit of the doubt, because advances in scientific knowledge don’t always produce short-term tangible practical applications–but over the long term, we’re better off knowing than not knowing. So there’s a lot of gray area there.
I also think measuring scholarship by research grants received can be downright pernicious. I happen to work in a field where very little external grant money is available, because frankly most of the research and scholarship people in my field produce doesn’t require a lot of money. That doesn’t mean their scholarship isn’t valuable, and it certainly doesn’t mean there’s no difference in the quality and value of the scholarship produced by the faculties at various schools. It’s just that trying to measure it by research grants received is a particularly dumb way to proceed. This is true of most non-STEM fields.
So to summarize, research expenditures at best can tell us something about the scale of a particular institution’s STEM research effort. They tell us almost nothing about the quality of that research. They tell us nothing at all about the quality of the institution’s non-STEM scholarship. And they tell us next to nothing about the quality of the educational product the institution delivers, especially at the undergraduate level, but even at the graduate level and even in STEM fields. (That’s why I think trying to recast research expenditures as a per-student metric is particularly silly and pointless). That said, I happen to find the level of effort in STEM fields reflected in B1G schools’ research expenditures downright impressive—but in my book ,that doesn’t make them “superior” to other institutions, and I think it’s only tangentially related to their educational mission, certainly at the undergraduate level, but even at the graduate level.
But feel free to go ahead and continue to mischaracterize, caricature, mock, and denigrate my views. Hey, it’s a free country.
I let this slide when you initially wrote it, but you really shouldn’t go around accusing people of poor reading comprehension. “Physician, heal thyself.” You should read more carefully - I’ve not said diddly squat about undergraduate education in this entire thread.
You have ranked the colleges by research expenditures and bragged about the number of B1G!!! colleges in your Top 25, and you have stated “… some are better at it than others …” in relation to these numbers. So backpedal all you want, but the way you present the numbers and the way you refuse to consider any sort of normalization to college size (however it might be defined) contains the argument that Cal-Davis is “… better at it …” than Princeton. How is that not a “claim of superiority”?
What is this discussion about? Who cares about any type of labels? What it even means:
“Big Ten: Ivy League-lite academically?”.
Kids are attending where they decide fits them. If somebody is after certain name, so be it. If other is saying that she will do just fine at any place and a pretty campus is at the top of her criteria, so be it! If athletics / spirit is important, go for it! What difference does it make to everybody else? Why do we care?