Rank the Top 20 Schools by Campus Quality

moooop
Fri, 03 Mar 2017 23:09:07 +0000

@Thankyou, While this hair splitting is an entertaining pastime for those of us with apparently too much time on our hands, we should always be aware that there are people who actually take this nonsense seriously. In recent weeks, I’ve read on CC about someone whose parents want to force-feed a high-ranking university on her despite her preference for LACs. I’ve read that ivy students are MORE special than students at a comparable non-Ivy. There is the usual stratifying of the Ivies (poor, poor Brown & Cornell). All of which is fine nonsensical chatter, but there really are people who think they are failure if they don’t get in a top 20, who transfer from non-Ivy top 20s to Ivies just for the name, who pick Chicago over Northwestern because it’s a whopping 6 places ahead (or whatever). My kids even went to high school with a girl who was disappointed that she didn’t get in Harvard (poor kid had to settle for a place called Princeton…Yuck!).

A premise of this discussion is that there really is a difference between #20 & #21. So I was just trying to point out that all these divisions people make (top 20/non-top 20, Ivy/non-Ivy, HYPMS/other elite, upper Ivy/Lower Ivy, etc) are artificial distinctions, and should not be assumed to have actual significance in the real world.