This is very interesting and wonderful to see!
I read this article…and there were absolutely zero surprises about the public universities listed. These have been highly regarded and competitive for admissions for a while.
It’s almost like the Forbes writer just wanted to diss the elite schools they mentioned (Ivies plus Stanford, MIT, etc).
ALL of the colleges in this article, including the Ivies and the like are well regarded.
Interesting article, but really not news…
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I think that for people who keep up with higher education, this is not news. But you may be surprised at how many people do not, and are especially unaware of how hiring decisions are made. The shift is mainly in last the five years, and it is heartening for many to see. CC is a wonderful resource but hardly representative of the public at large.
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I agree that it’s not really news, but it’s refreshing to see a major media source deviate even slightly from their obsession with Ivy League institutions (even though they are careful to mention Ivies a lot in the article).
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And they all them…”public ivies” which lets me know that they do still think this is important…
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The article’s methodology:
- Disqualified Ivies and Ivy-lus (Stanford, MIT, Duke, & U. of Chicago)
- Screened for schools of 4k or more students
- Screened for high test scores where at least 50% of applicants supplied test scores
- Screened for selectivity (below a 20% admission rate at private schools or a 50% acceptance rate at private schools)
- Took remaining 32 schools and surveyed hiring managers about them
My biggest issue with the methodology is #4…why does selectivity matter? For instance, Missouri S&T probably would have qualified for everything except the selectivity factor. Why does the need for exclusivity make a difference in the quality of the education?
But for those who want to know the usual suspects:
“The Public Ivies”
- Binghamton
- Georgia Tech
- U. of Florida
- UIUC
- U. of Maryland
- U. of Michigan
- UNC
- U. of Texas
- UVA
- U. of Wisconsin
“The New Private Ivies”
- Boston College
- Carnegie Mellon
- Emory
- Georgetown
- Johns Hopkins
- Northwestern
- Rice
- U. of Notre Dame
- U. of Southern California
- Vanderbilt
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I will add that since test scores were used none of the UCs were included and they are obviously fantastic schools with terrific hiring.
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I’m feeling grumpy about this sort of thing this morning, but I really wish major outlets could tell stories about stuff like this without making everything sound like a zero-sum game.
What I actually think is happening is not so much the longer-standing “top” colleges (privates and publics) losing anything, it is that over time various other colleges (privates and publics) are leveling up in terms of adding to their financial resources, improving academic and non-academic facilities, expanding and deepening academic programs, drawing more applications (particularly more “national” and international applications), and so on.
Because none of these things has a fixed “pie” that can only be sliced different ways, it is entirely possible, and I think in this case true, that the overall size of these pies is growing. So the slices of these colleges are growing without the slices of more long-standing top colleges shrinking.
This is excellent news for the minority of college students who can qualify for and afford these sorts of colleges. It does not necessarily address the concerns of the vast majority of college students who can’t. But for the former group, I think things just keep getting better and better in terms of the range and depth of options they can consider.
OK, so one really useful practical takeaway of all this is that IF you are the sort of person who can qualify both for admissions and a lot of aid at least at some of these colleges (need, merit, or a combination), you do NOT need to ruin your childhood or put yourself and your family in a bad financial situation just to go to one of the more long-standing “top” colleges.
Of course if you can have a healthy, well-balanced childhood, get admitted to one of those traditional “top” colleges, and your family can comfortably afford it–great! But if not, you can go to any one of many other great colleges and frankly get a better experience than those of us who went to one of those fancy colleges an (undisclosed) number of years ago actually got. Because the whole system, at this general level, has leveled up.
But that message can get lost, or flat out contradicted, by these zero-sum sort of framings. Indeed, implicitly the way these articles are framed your options can never get better, they can only shift around. And I think that is both wrong and bad for kids, because it just perpetuates a sense of artificial scarcity of great college opportunities.
Anyway, that’s my two cents.
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Actually, I think an argument can be made that the Ivy + schools have strayed from the academic foundations that established their reputations. They are now being called out on that while other schools rise in reputation.
This is very similar to why large successful companies fall - they take their positions for granted, stray from the basics, and eventually fall to their more customer oriented competitors.
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I agree 100% with you that many of these schools have strayed from their missions and others are rising to fill the gap.
However, keep in mind that the 8 Ivies did not gain their reputation initially from being academic powerhouses. They were simply schools that the sons of the well heeled went to, because they provided the social environment and connections they sought. That is still a factor for many applicants/students, although of course they are all academically strong institutions now.
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Agreed! Resting on laurels has never improved any situations. Many public schools have consistently been dismissed in general while Ivies always lauded. It’s good to see that is changing in a real way that actually benefits outcomes for students.
But there is still is a classist attitude out there. For instance we know kids at UT (among others) who were offered prestigious job offers in consulting after their freshmen and sophomore years. Ivy League friends were genuinely shocked about this because those offers used to be an exclusive pipeline from the ivies.
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But as evident just by reading or watching the news, something feels distinctly off on Ivy League campuses.
How could anyone argue with a rock-solid data point like that?
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Purdue is also a public ivy.
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But it did not make the list of this article. I was basically giving a high-level summary of the article’s main points for those who didn’t want to read the article.
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The traditional Ivies will never win another football title…
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Left off Emory in your list of new private ivies.
Well, I know some people are making that argument. Again.
Personally, I don’t see it at all. Just looking at the academic programs in detail, I don’t see any “straying” from what was offered back when I was at one of these fancy colleges, and if anything I see all sorts of obvious investments in improving various programs.
Of course my perspective is also colored by the fact that when I was at one of these fancy colleges, people were already making the same arguments! I graduated college in 1993, and by then we were approaching the peak moral panic over “political correctness” at fancy colleges. It was all the same sort of complaints about how back in the day these were serious academic institutions but now they had all sorts of goofy classes and student protesters and “PC police” and how no one who wanted a real education should go to one of these fancy colleges.
And then over the next 30 years they just kept getting more and more applications, their academic standards for admittance got higher and higher, and so on. The things kids have to do academically to get into one of these colleges today truly puts to shame what I had to do back in my time.
So personally, the fact certain people have always liked to make these arguments about the moral decline and academic fall of these colleges wears a little thin when that decline and fall doesn’t seem to be actually deterring highly qualified applicants from valuing them more and more as the years go by.
Yeah, the actual best overall model to explain the success of these colleges over the last century or so is that they are places where kids from families with very high economic, social, and political capital can mix with kids with very high intellectual capital to their mutual benefit in a competitive, innovative, capitalist system.
Again, not to overly personalize, but that was true back when I went to one too. And actually, what has mostly changed since then is that the academic requirements even for the high SES kids have gone way up! Gone are the days of “gentlemen’s Cs” and legacies potentially being a significant academic cut below. Even those kids, sometimes to the shock of their families, have to at least have very high academics to just be considered, and then all the high SES stuff MAYBE helps get them actually admitted.
Anyway, if academic standards at these colleges have slipped, I sure can’t see it in admissions. More the opposite.
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Thanks. It made my list but I guess I didn’t press enter hard enough after Carnegie Mellon. About to fix it.
And those people are usually wrong. Until, that is, when they are right.
It takes time for decay to take a hold on any endeavor, but when major donors start backing out or calling for change or claiming they will not hire graduates, that’s an indication that all not all is well. Donors voices can be ignored only with risk.
The number of applications received by any school is probably a lagging indicator. Sometimes the smart money (and students) is on the contenders.
I do hope that I’m wrong.
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If you look at the first USNews “Best Colleges” report from 1983, there were 3 public colleges in the top 10 with Berkeley at #5. And then several more in the next 10. I don’t think anyone back then would have been surprised by this.
As you move through the 80s into the 90s you’ll see the public schools quickly drop out of the top 10 and 20. So, what happened? Did the public schools’ academic strength and reputations suddenly plunge in less than a decade? I doubt it.
Interestingly, this change coincides with a shift in political views that took hold in the 1980s whereby “private” was considered good and anything “public” was not.
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