<p>“I would expect the Ivies to be more similar in ethnic makeup than between some state school or lower tier private and the Ivies.”</p>
<p>Why?? That’s kind of strange. Yes, they are all in the northeast, but some are urban, some are rural … some are in large population states, some are in small states … some have more pre-professional focus, others have less of that focus … they share an athletic conference. If you were to take, say, the top 30 universities on USNWR just for the sake of argument, take off the Ivy label, you have several different clusters of schools. Princeton would align with Vanderbilt with a certain kind of social tone and tenor. Penn and Cornell would align with Northwestern and Wash U as having a mix of pre-professional and not. Duke and Stanford might belong together. Columbia would align with U of Chicago in terms of having a core. And so forth. Why would you expect the same student to be interested in (say) Brown as Dartmouth, or Brown and Columbia? Unless they are just selecting based on athletic conference. </p>