I notice more and more that, if you search for a particular LAC, AI will inevitably weigh in on whether or not the college is a “Little Ivy“. This used to be anathema to a lot of selective small colleges that found the diminutive term condescending, but now I’m wondering whether it’s a little like fighting a losing battle to ignore it entirely and perhaps makes sense to use it as a shortcut?
I will not be using that term.
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The worst!
I meant strictly as a search term, although I can understand the argument that it would be feeding the beast.
I feel like the problem with “little ivies” is that there’s constantly a new article about the new list of “little ivies”. Once there are so many schools on it, I’m not sure what it means anymore. Even a genAI search will just be riddled with schools that will be difficult to sort through.
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I use selective LAC. Isn’t that just the easiest thing?
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I literally fed the following sentence into my AI search engine:
“What are the selective LACs?“
and basically it spat out a refinement of the phrase into “selective liberal arts college“. Then, a definition of what it meant by “selective“ (“generally admitting less than 40% of applicants“) Then it listed six “examples“ (Pomona, Swarthmore, Colby Amherst, Williams, and Wesleyan). If you follow the prompt to “dive deeper in AI mode“, you will get three or four more paragraphs that basically repeat what was just said, but with citations and a somewhat bigger list of between 12-15 colleges that will change slightly each time you repeat press the “deep dive“ prompt.
It is noteworthy that the algorithm never actually creates a list of every college with less than 40% admission rates but will stop - almost intuitively - at roughly the number 12 or so, sometimes alphabetically and sometimes in order of admit percentage.
YMMV, but when I punch in the phrase, “What are the Little Ivies?“, it arrives fairly quickly at a list of pretty much the same 12 colleges but will include Tufts and omit any school not on the east coast (already, I can see why this might not be a popular phrase.
)
Why are you asking AI this question anyway?
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Where would you suggest the average person start their research?
For me to answer your question, you would have to be more specific about what kind of research you are talking about.
I see.
I would not expect non-east coast schools to show up in a “little Ivy” list. Setting aside my general misgivings about the phrase at the moment, the Ivy League is a northeast league. It would make little sense for west coast or south to be included in “little Ivy” when they aren’t part of the actual Ivy. My casual understanding was that the term actually referred to the NESCAC schools, as they were a similarly organized athletic conference who valued academics balance with athletics similarly, but in a small school context. Calling Pomona or Carlton or whatever a “little Ivy” would just add another layer to the inherent weirdness and non-descript nature of the term than already exists. If untethered to NESCAC, “little Ivy” seems to become a shorthand for some vague unagreed upon notion of eliteness or something that seems likely to mean different things to different people.
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If you change the question to “what are the highly selective liberal arts colleges?” does that better get at whatever you are trying to shorthand for? I imagine you are trying to find the group at more like 15%ish or less admissions rate rather than 40% or less. This thread is a bit challenging because it’s not clear what you are trying to achieve. Also, if true that if you search for a LAC like Occidental, or Lewis&Clark or St. Olaf or Centre College and AI is telling you whether or not it’s a “little Ivy” that seems more a sign of the uselessness of the AI answers than anything else to me.
This. I don’t think anyone really trusts AI at this moment in time. The answer you get, seems to depend entirely on the answer you want, and this is not how we are accustomed to treating an authoritative source. It’s a little like the old law school joke: a mathematician and a lawyer walk into a bar. The bartender asks the mathematician, “How much is 2+2?“. He replies, “4, of course.“ The bartender asks the lawyer the same question and after pondering it for a moment, he answered, “How much do you want it to be?“
It’s the same thing with words and phrases that get used in a tight-knit community like CC. We think we all know what we mean by an acronym like, SLAC or a phrase like, “liberal arts college“ until we encounter a newcomer who we realize is using the same terms in ways we don’t quite agree with. And that’s even before we get to anything including the word, “ivy“ in it.
Things were much simpler when all we wanted to know was, “what’s the most prestigious college I can get into?”
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AI is more useful when you provide it more information. For example – give it some specific parameters.
“I’m looking for a college in an rural(suburban/urban) area with less than 5,000 students and a admission rate under 20%. Must have political science major with a strong academic reputation. Geographic region - northeast, central Atlantic, great lakes region. Ask me additional questions if needed before answering.”
If you do that - not only is AI more useful, but your list is more useful.
If you really JUST want prestige - you could google and use Niche or Princeton review lists of top SLAC (and not waste resource).
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I just tried “which lacs have less than a 25% admissions rate” and it did a similar thing where it gave me a bit of a discussion and a list of colleges that it did not claim was comprehensive, but it said were included on that list. That list did include colleges outside the Northeast, like Pomona, HMC, CMC, Davidson, Grinnell, and Carleton.
“which lacs are little ivies” then returned an answer that said they were specifically in the Northeast and it also specifically referenced NESCAC.
Looking at the sources for that second output, and then just googling Little Ivies, it seems to me to the extent there is anyone pushing the Little Ivy concept these days, it is various for-profit college counseling websites/firms. It is interesting to ask why AI might be seeing these as notable sources, but maybe it is just a matter of who is putting a lot of easily usable content online in a way that helps an AI answer prompts like this.
But I would not personally assume that means in the real world, everyone is talking like that about LACs. I see that as people and firms with a financial interest in potential customers seeing LACs like that promoting that view.
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If you are trying to get a list of selective LACs, use the USNews ranking and filter by the acceptance rate that you want.
Alternatively, use IPEDs to sort for all 4yr schools with less than 3000 (?) students and acceptance rate below whatever you consider selective.
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If this is your premise, then I literally do not understand why you started this thread. What were you even trying to find out?
It is not the same as that at all! That a community has a shared understanding of the definition and meaning of a word, and then newcomers use or understand it differently is just how language works. It is a normal part of language. Meaning of words is derived through context, explanation that is shared, etc. It is one of the reasons why foreigners (even same language speaking ones) are often confused by words when they try to just apply a literal or logical meaning. And, AI cannot reasonably be compared to said newcomer, unless the premise is that said newcomer is an omniscient idiot. AI has instant access to virtually all of the information, and still says things on a topic that have zero to do with it or completely makes up “facts” that are 100% false.
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I see.
My premise was that “AI is a useful tool in finding out information”. My conclusion was what you just quoted. There’s a difference.
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Got it. Thanks.
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