<p>Having attended NU for undergrad and an Ivy for my master’s, I personally had a far more positive, well-rounded experience at Northwestern and am grateful for the opportunities that the school provided me (not the least of which was the means to get into a top master’s program, and ultimately, a solid PhD program).</p>
<p>That being said, there are certain advantages to the nuts-and-bolts education that the Ivies offer. I think that humanities students at those schools receive stronger research training than they do at NU (I found myself playing catch-up my entire time in the MA program), but the overall experience of attending Northwestern as an undergraduate is absolutely unbeatable.</p>
<p>Also, while the students at schools like NU are roughly similar in talent to those at the middle Ivies, they tend to be less pretentious and less prone to attitudes of self-entitlement and inflated self-importance (NU students are more “blue collar,” in a sense, while students at Ivies–at least at some of them–get a bit jaded). You can’t argue with the Big Ten sports scene, either, even if NU is more often a bridesmaid than a bride. The football scene is a crapload of fun.</p>