<p>Saying Cornell is the worst Ivy is like saying the 3-Series is the worst BMW (sorry, I can’t help a car analogy). </p>
<p>Seriously, the analysis is that flawed.</p>
<p>Instead of Cornell dropping it’s Ivy league status, how about making the college a better place. How about bringing in people like Hans Bethe and Feynman (Both are dead now) to teach? That would bring our reputation up so much.</p>
<p>I agree with Battlecruiser. Dropping out isn’t the way to raise appreciation of Cornell. Even the people who call Cornell the “worst Ivy” know how good a university it is. However, admittedly, Cornell can put more work into improving itself so it doesn’t have to be called the “worst Ivy.” </p>
<p>Just like the students who attend Cornell didn’t drop out of difficult high schools to be #1 at less competitive ones, Cornell shouldn’t drop out of the Ivy League to be “top ranked.”</p>
<p>I would say that it is the state-funded part that tend to bring cornell’s numbers down. Cornell Arts and Sciences reject people ranked #1-5 in my school, then, in the same year, the state-funded colleges accept students ranked in the 30’s (out of 150).</p>
<p>Plus, we all know Brown is the worst ivy. The kids there take any classes they want. Come on, just look at USNews :p</p>
<p>exactly right.</p>
<p>If people really care about rankings and comparative social perceptions so much, let’s just all find ways to raise Cornell’s ranking in USNWR. Currently, its 7th in the Ivies in front of Brown, so let’s try to raise its endowment by donating all of our money. Let’s email other universities to raise its peer assessment score, let’s tell every single person we know to apply and do their essays for them so they’d be willing to, so we can lower Cornell’s admission percentages, and (this is for those already at Cornell) be sure not to enroll in too many classes: let’s keep our percentage of classes with less than 20 students high!</p>
<p>We’ll do it just like UPenn did. About a decade ago, UPenn and Cornell were always believed to be the worst of the Ivy league, not even that great of national universities. Now, UPenn is 5th in the nation. It doesn’t look like it’s going back in rankings any time soon.</p>
<p>[/sarcasm]</p>
<p>Being in the Ivy League has no real significance, other than the fact that it is a terrible athletic conference.</p>
<p>If people want to perceive the League as anything more, then all the power to them.</p>
<p>Either way this debate is pointless. Is someone going to propose to move Cornell to Mexico so that we can be the best university in the country</p>
<p>You can’t compare Cornell to Dartmouth. Cornell is a research university, Dartmouth is essentially a LAC. Dartmouth has probably one of the three best undergrad educations in the country. In terms of grad placement, resources/ spending per student, recruiting, research spending per student etc Dartmouth leads the Ivies.</p>
<p>Why don’t we just stop comparing things altogether? Seriously. When you pick a college you SHOULD do so for which one fits best and the one you feel you’d get the most out of it, which ranges incredibly from person to person. I personally love to be able to take a large variety of courses, which Cornell easily offers simply by having so much variety that other schools lack.</p>
<p>If we continue to put others down to try to make ourselves feel better, we’re simply feeding into what USNews wants us to. Systematic ranking. Cornell stopped caring about the rankings – look at the [this</a> article from the Sun](<a href=“http://cornellsun.com/node/27837]this”>http://cornellsun.com/node/27837), where our provost stated Rankings are based on wealth and manipulating data. We can worry about our ranking or we can be who we are and take advantage of what makes Cornell unique. Let us take advantage of our uniqueness, in embracing “Any person, any study,” and let us forget about this infernal ranking business.</p>
<p>well said ishmaelstrom</p>
<p>Stop being an Ivy?!</p>
<p>Let’s think for a second about one of Cornell’s admissions pitches: Elite, but not Elitist. Looking at their admissions statistics, this actually seems true. Sure, the stats for those ACCEPTED tend to be lower than other Ivies, but what about the stats for those who APPLY? I know an Ivy League acceptance is not a guarantee for anyone, but at the other Ivies, having a 4.0+ GPA, a 2400 SAT score, and tons of ECs makes you a candidate for admission, but at Cornell that’s not true, because they accept people with all kinds of statistics, making it impossible for anyone to really feel confident about their admissions statistics. Also, think about how many high school seniors will be going to college in America alone. Now, think about how many will be going to an Ivy Leauge School. Only about 10,000 people will actually enroll. Considering the massive quantities of people that apply to colleges, I think it’s safe to assume that most of the people not going to Ivy League schools either didn’t get in, or didn’t apply because they thought/knew they wouldn’t get in. When you tell any one of these other hundeds of thousands of people that you go to Cornell, I seriously doubt their first thought is going to be “oh, so you couldn’t get into the others, huh?”. The only people who would ever think that are SOME of the 7,000 or so people that got into the other Ivies, and that thought will fade as soon as it comes time to apply for graduate school and they realize we’ve all got the same chance. In fact, when I tell people that I’m going to Cornell next year, if they know anything about colleges, their reaction is usually “Wow, that’s amazing. That’s an Ivy League school”. When my friends who got into WUSL, UChicago, and Tufts tell people where they’re going, their reaction is usually something like “Well that’s a good school.” Also, when I suggested to one of my friends who’s applying to a couple of Ivies (not Cornell) that some might think Cornell isn’t that great, her reaction was “Are you crazy, it’s an Ivy!”. Believe it or not, the Ivy League name carries a lot of weight, and makes Cornell even more prestigious than it would be if it wasn’t a school. In fact, there was a publication that I saw from a school that is comparable to Cornell that said something like “Ivy even grows in [insert region name here]”, and mine and my friends first thought was “it’s an Ivy League wannabe (sp?)”. It may seem like Cornell is drastically easier than other Ivies to get into, but I think our dissillusionment comes from the fact that we base a lot of that on what we see here on CC. To be frank, college admissions are a game, and if you know the rules, secrets, and science behind the game, you’ve got a better chance of winning. The people that post/read these boards are often obsessed with getting into a particular school, so we learn everything we can from each other, giving us an education in an area that others with better stats than us don’t have. This gives us a HUGE advantage over those people. I had friends who had better numerical statistics than me (and just as many hooks) who got flat out rejected from Cornell, and I honestly think it’s because they didn’t know the game well enough. In terms of comparing to the prestige of the other Ivies, sure Cornell hasn’t put any presidents into office and their generally aren’t movies about pretty blonde girls who want to be lawyer to win back a boyfriend going, but look at how things have turned out when another Ivy League school has produced a president, and movies about the other Ivies tend to make bad sequels anyway. I would say the number of people who would ever dream of classifying any Ivy as “the worst” is somewhere close to 10,000 out of every graduating class of high school seniors. Compare this to the number of people that age, and it seems rediculous. Like it or not, Cornell’s Ivy League status puts Cornell on a sort of pedistal. I love the fact that I’m going to an Ivy next year, even if it’s one that 1 out of every 1,000 people I ever meet and talk too will say it’s the worst of the best.</p>
<p>Cornell could very easily boost their numbers. Simply cut enrollment.</p>
<p>Considering the Ivy League is nothing more than an athletic conference, Cornell might be dropping out any way. Now that some of the other schools are offering free tuition to students, they are inadvertently defying the Ivy pact. </p>
<p>Before, Cornell could say they would match any financial package at any other school in the league for athletes. Now, with free tuition, Cornell can’t make that offer and is going to start losing athletes. Cornell will stop being able to compete while these other schools such as Harvard, and Harvard will be able to attract more and better student athletes. It may just be a matter of time.</p>
<p>But - many think the Ivy League has to do with some mythological academic royalty. In that regard, I don’t think anyone can claim Cornell as the “worst” anymore. Admission rates are an absurd stat. Harvard has far fewer slots for roughly the same number of applicants as Cornell gets. If Cornell got more applicants - qualified or not - they’d drop their admission below the current 18% and suddenly people would say “Oooh - look how selective Cornell is!” To compare what Cornell offers to what any other school offers is absurd. Only elitists who think they’re better than people who work with their hands and their minds look down on Cornell.</p>
<p>It’s an absurd game - go there if it’s right for you. Don’t if it’s not. Competition is a primitive value, anyway.</p>
<p>The [Annapolis</a> Group](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annapolis_Group]Annapolis”>Annapolis Group - Wikipedia) correctly criticizes rank obsession and the critical-deficient thinking it belies.</p>
<p>It’s disheartening to see so many succumb to the fallacy of a [zero-sum</a> analysis](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-sum]zero-sum”>Zero-sum game - Wikipedia) and the sisyphean arguments that a school’s academic excellence comes at another’s expense.</p>
<p>I would like to thank everyone for replying to my original post. But I am very struck at and dismayed by how many people have misread it. If you read it again closely, you will find that my main argument was not that “Cornell should stop being an ivy because it is the worst ivy.” Put simply, I argued that because Cornell is the most un-ivy-like university out of the Ivy League, it has much to lose when judged by ivy standards, and so it will benefit by crafting an independent image of itself according to its original mission and unique history and composition.</p>
<p>I understand that when browsing through CC threads it is difficult to do a close reading of a lengthy comment. However, I am somewhat disappointed that the vast majority of those who responded failed to understand the crux of my point. Perhaps this is my fault, as it seems that I chose a title that is too provocative.</p>
<p>People were arguing that it shouldn’t even matter what group Cornell belonged to. It’s pretty clear to a lot of people what you meant (exactly what you said above), and a lot of people happen to disagree with you.</p>
<p>blukorea: i understand what you are saying, but when it comes to people outside the Cornell community, most people know only the name brand colleges like Harvard. It boils down to the fact that ignorance and oversimplification go hand-in-hand. You could make the same argument about any individual body in any organization, but the fact is that organizations make it easy for the ignorant to quickly assess how to label the foreign. It is human nature to want to identify, label, and rank the importance of anything and everything. I say the Ivy League label helps Cornell greatly. however, it helps neither more nor less than for the other Ivy League schools.</p>
<p>This is in essence a question of cause and effect. Did the ivy label cause cornell to become famous or did cornell get famous through its own merits?</p>
<p>Stitchintime: i find it ironic that the annapolic group is forming a group against forming groups. it’s passively smug if you ask me.</p>
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<p>I would suggest that Dartmouth College is the most un-ivy like…Dartmouth has zero grad students in its core strengths.</p>
<p>Cornell maybe the largest, but it is still a major research Uni, just like most of the rest of this football conference. The only segment where Cornell differs is the great-deal it offers to in-state residents who attend its land-grant colleges. The real question is how many students comprise the land-grant portion, and what are their stats? Are they lower and are they significant enough to bring down Cornell’s average SAT, for example?</p>
<p><a href=“%5Burl=http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1059936273-post37.html]#37%20[/url]”>quote</a> Stitchintime: i find it ironic that the annapolic (sic) group is forming a group against forming groups. it’s passively smug if you ask me.
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<p>The observation is specious because group formation is not at issue. It’s the ranking methodology that is being taken to task. From [Liberal</a> Arts College Presidents Speak Out on College Rankings](<a href=“http://www.educationconservancy.org/presidents_letter.html]Liberal”>Presidents Letter):</p>
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<p>it would be interesting to see rankings disappear and i find it nice to see some colleges trying to put an end to it, but what i’m saying is that rankings are inevitable. if magazines don’t publish it, word-of-mouth or some less official source will then be the leading authority on where universities stand based on some standard (arbitrary or not). i’m not saying that rankings are always a good thing either. however, ranking do help people get a grasp on where certain schools have strengths and where certain schools have weaknesses. the person who uses these rankings as the sole reason in selecting his or her college is the one who needs changing. the magazines can publish whatever they want, and the magazines even claim that their rankings should only be used as a guide. people are motivated by self-interest. so when i see colleges that are not in the “top tier” coming together and forming a group, i interpret this as an act to push their name into the public for publicity and perhaps future popularity. college is a filthy, money-hungry business. only through this lense do all of their actions and decisions make sense.</p>
<p>annopolickkccssss, annapolis, annapooooolls… whatever. i think group formation is very relevant to the discussion and not superficial at all. the ivy league is a group that boosts prestige. the 100 or so colleges are forming another group because they don’t have this prestige. how much more relevant can it get? and please don’t call me elitist because i disagree with the prestige associated with colleges. i’m just voicing what i think is the way colleges operate.</p>