<p>If you were going to categorize top schools, how would they break down?</p>
<p>For example, among the lower Ivy’s and other top schools (HYP, MIT and Stanford are probably not even worth thinking about), are some better for kids who like sports, are some friendlier, more or less eliteist, more intellectual?</p>
<p>Just looking for real generalities at this point.</p>
<p>“lower Ivy’s”</p>
<p>-Man I hate that term…</p>
<p>sports - well, just compare, for example, the Top 25 rankings of NCAA football teams with the Top 50 rankings of US News and World Report. it should give you a decent idea (though please, don’t use that to make your final decision!). off the top of my head, I can think of… USC (football), Duke (everything but football), UC Berkeley (football), UMich (football), University of Virginia (everything)… not to mention Stanford (basketball).</p>
<p>friendlier - that’s what college visits are for :)</p>
<p>elitist - same thing :)</p>
<p>intellectual - liberal arts colleges tend to fall into this stereotype.</p>
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<p>preprofessional: UPenn, Northwestern</p>
<p>intellectual: Columbia, UChicago</p>
<p>hippie: Brown</p>
<p>fratty: Dartmouth, Northwestern, Cornell, Duke</p>
<p>Thanks elsijfdl - that’s what I’m looking for. Sorry about the “lower ivy” term - is there another less offensive one?</p>
<p>“elite school”</p>
<p>I tend not to use “Ivy” or “HYPSM” because you’re always excluding one top school or another that’s a ***** to get into.</p>
<p>pre-professional/great party scenes - Duke, Penn, Dartmouth, Northwestern
Lots of kids go into finance, or professional schools, and fraternity life and partying is a big part of life.</p>
<p>Intellectual (nerdy) - Chicago, Columbia
Quieter on weekends, people like books outside of class. Both have cities for people to go out to bars and stuff.</p>
<p>Sort of a weird intellectual/hippy atmosphere - Brown.
Your lungs might hurt, but you’ll get used to it.</p>
<p>All the top privates have similar academics, and they have the same types of people, just in different proportions.</p>
<p>Stanford is a sports powerhouse, they’ll have stronger athletics then most of the Ivies, although Brown and Dartmouth are probably the ‘jockiest’ Ivies.</p>
<p>So Brown has weird intellectual hippy jocks? That must be interesting. If only they would make frisbee an olympic sport.</p>
<p>“All the top privates have similar academics”…they do?</p>
<p>As in quality.</p>
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<p>hahaha (10 char)</p>
<p>Cornell is fratty? I dunno about that. Cornell is a tough one to generalize because there are such huge differences between, say, their hotel management students and engineering students…</p>
<p>Hmm… it’s kinda hard to generalize, but I’d say (in order of most artsie to most technical):</p>
<p>Small LAC
Small University with an LACish atmosphere
Research University
Tech-oriented Research University</p>
<p>I think pre-professional isn’t a good generalization since pre-med and pre-law are all stellar at the top 20-25 schools in the nation</p>
<p>laptop, when I use the words pre-professional I’m talking about kids wanting to go to finance rather than med and law, because of the reason you just stated - all top schools are great for law and med.</p>
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<p>Seconded. This is a good way to categorize them. </p>
<p>I’d add Rice and Tufts to the intellectual list.</p>
<p>Johns Hopkins to the pre-professional list.</p>
<p>Also, most of the top LACs are going to fall into the intellectual category (such as Wesleyan, Amherst, Williams, Pomona, etc.).</p>
<p>^Wrong. Add Williams to the fratty/preprofessional list.</p>
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<p>Well, you have to identify Brown, Columbia, UPenn, Cornell, and Dartmouth as a group somehow. Can you think of a better name? BCUCD?</p>
<p>I don’t believe those schools to be in any way “lower” than HYP.</p>