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<p>I absolutely believe that to be true, around here. Those schools would be perceived as being “for rich people” and the thought that a middle class student would actually wind up paying less for Harvard than for U of Illinois wouldn’t occur to them. They don’t know it. Again - both the level of “worship” and the level of actual knowledge are different outside the east coast.</p>
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<p>Gravitas2, we’re trying to have a serious discussion here – nonsense like “Cornell is not top tier” does not belong in this thread. The only people who think that way are unsophisticated high school seniors with no lives.</p>
<p>^^Please…ivys are not all created equal…</p>
<p>…just like Northwestern in the BIG-12 conference is very different than Ohio State or Illinois…don’t you think…they are all in the same conference but very different…</p>
<p>…as Stanford in the PAC-12 conference is very different than Oregon or Arizona or even UCLA…</p>
<p>…might I remind you the ivy league is an athletic league…</p>
<p>PG, I am not promising anything, but if we ever get to do it. What college do you suggest we should start comparing HYP’s out-of-state/out-of-region applications with? UCB? Northwestern? Michigan? Illinois? Vanderbilt? U Texas?</p>
<p>If we define “top tier” as the schools providing the very best educations in the country, we can only speculate about what the top tier schools are, since no one measures if Harvard students learn more than Cornell students do (I suspect they do not, especially after adjusting for incoming scholastic aptitude) – and Harvard likes it that way.</p>
<p>A possible operational definition of top tier would be “school X is in the same tier as Y if at least 33% of the students admitted to X and Y choose X”. By that definition I think Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and MIT are probably top tier, but Cornell likely is not. Maybe someone has data.</p>
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<p>I’m not sure that’s a great operational definition of top tier, based on several criteria:
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<p>State schools obviously exist to serve their state’s students above all, so that’s an unfair comparison. I don’t really care what schools you pick – I just want to see the data normalized / indexed against the % of the country that region accounts for. I’m tired of seeing statements like (made-up number) “The Mid-Atlantic accounts for 20% of Harvard applicants” without having the context that the mid-Atlantic accounts for x% of the overall country’s population, which is the only way that the 20% can be said to mean anything. And please don’t do what collegehelp used to do, which was base it to the home state’s population - gee, let’s compare what % of Harvard applicants are from outside MA versus what % of Stanford applicants are from outside CA, without ever once considering that the % of the overall population from MA and from CA are different.</p>
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<p>Your statement is still completely silly. The Ivies are all top-tier, highly selective private schools that draw a more-alike-than-dissimilar student body. The other leagues are a combination of a handful of top-tier highly selective private schools, top-tier highly selective public universities, and less selective public universities. If you took a very bright high schooler and had to drop them sight unseen into one of the leagues, they’d hit an excellent school every time if you dropped them into any Ivy League. You couldn’t say the same if you dropped them randomly into the B12 or the PAC12.</p>
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You’re right about the first point–I must have misread something. But as to the second, no. Cornell is not quite as super-selective as HYP, but it’s still super-selective. See <a href=“https://bigfuture.collegeboard.org/college-university-search/cornell-university[/url]”>https://bigfuture.collegeboard.org/college-university-search/cornell-university</a>. I think the difficulty some people have is realizing that there are at least 30 super-selective schools when you include universities and LACs.</p>
<p>And I’ve gotta say, if you want credibility in these discussions, don’t remind us that the Ivy League is an athletic league. We’ve heard that one a few times.</p>
<p>@Beliavsky. Here is some data from mathacle. It may be somewhat outdated but gives a taste nevertheless…</p>
<p>Also this years yield rate for Harvard (82%) and Stanford (77%) has been getting closer and closer in recent years with MIT (73%) not far behind. Princeton and Yale have pretty much stayed in the 60s range…</p>
<p>…and remember no one expected Stanford to be the first school to surpass Harvard in having the lowest acceptance rate…</p>
<p>[Mathacle’s</a> Blog: HYPSM Cross-Admit Data](<a href=“Mathacle's Blog: HYPSM Cross-Admit Data]Mathacle's”>Mathacle's Blog: HYPSM Cross-Admit Data)</p>
<p>Stanford’s great. It’s greatness doesn’t depend on other schools not being great. There’s no point in this kind of argument when it comes to Stanford–leave that to people who want to convince us that Berkeley is just as great as Stanford or Harvard.</p>
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<p>For computer science or engineering, maybe Berkeley is better than Harvard.</p>
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<p>Thank you, Hunt.</p>
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<p>It still doesn’t MATTER, gravitas2. This is the argument of a high schooler. What high schoolers do and do not choose does not have a thing whatsoever to do with excellence or quality. They are not tastemakers. It’s the classic dumb-way of picking something – look around and see what other people do and follow the crowd instead of having the confidence in your own tastes and criteria. It’s like standing at the ice cream parlor and secretly preferring vanilla but wanting to see if everyone else would choose the chocolate. It’s a game for losers. Have your own criteria in this world, not “what do unsophisticated high schoolers think?”</p>
<p>I want to jump in and note that, for me, the statement “Cornell is not top-tier” immediately disqualifies the person who makes it as someone to be taken seriously.</p>
<p>That’s not to say that the “Ivy” label means anything in particular. I could accept arguments that Dartmouth, say, or Brown is not “top-tier”, as long as the argument acknowledged that they unquestionably attract a top-tier undergraduate student body. But Cornell is a world-class research university across many fields. The fact that its undergraduate college is twice as large as some of its peers’ colleges, and thus it rejects a smaller number of applicants, does not make it less than first-rate.</p>
<p>This year, by the way, Cornell got over 40,000 applications – 5,000 more than Harvard (i.e., about 14% more) and 1,200 more than Stanford.</p>
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<p>Among folks I’ve worked with/know who hire engineering/CS graduates, it’s not a maybe. If a comparable Berkeley engineering/CS grad and a Harvard grad are in competition for an engineering/CS tech job, the Berkeley grad is usually favored. </p>
<p>Granted, the gap has narrowed in the last few years that Harvard has been pouring money into their DEAS. </p>
<p>However, most of those doing hiring in engineering/CS that I knew of came of age when comparing Berkeley with Harvard in those fields would be considered absurd as conventional wisdom in their fields was that Berkeley engineering/CS graduates tended to trump their Harvard counterparts in engineering/CS tech skills. </p>
<p>They’d also strongly preferred graduates from UIUC, UW-Seattle, UMich over Harvard when hiring for engineering/CS tech positions unless the individual Harvard graduate could demonstrate comparable/greater tech skills.</p>
<p>Just for grins, here’s the US News list of lowest admissions rates (from 2011, so the order may have shifted).[Top</a> 100 - Lowest Acceptance Rates | Rankings | US News](<a href=“http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/lowest-acceptance-rate]Top”>http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/lowest-acceptance-rate)
My observation from this is that a school can be super-selective even if a much less selective school (academically, anyway), has a lower admissions rate.</p>
<p>Eh, don’t get sidetracked on specific programs at Berkeley that are great. I just mentioned it because there have been many discussions in the past when people made all kinds of arguments that Berkeley over all was equal to or better than Ivy League schools, primarily because people in Asia think highly of it. This is not an issue with Stanford, which was my point.</p>
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<p>Well said. “But people in Asia think X is better than Y, so therefore!” is the same kind of stupid mentality as “But high schoolers think X is better than Y.” Either way, we’re not talking about the cognoscenti here.</p>
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<p>If those “people in Asia” are in position to hire or influence those who do, then that opinion does matter if a given student, especially one from that geographic region hopes to work there. </p>
<p>Go to a school perceived to be “lesser” than the favored one(s) in a given region and you may have a harder time getting hired. </p>
<p>It’s really no different than in some industries in the US like…Biglaw, ibanking on Wall Street, etc. Or more importantly, encountering a business owner/hiring manager with his/her own list of favored/unfavored schools based on past hiring experiences and some possible prejudices in favor/against certain schools.</p>