West Coast Ivy League

slipper1234
Wed, 01 Dec 2004 16:14:55 +0000

California1600 grow up. People go to Brown and Dartmouth because they are amazing undergraduate experiences. Often, people chose these schools over Harvard and Yale precisely because they want to be there. In fact it can be said that the HYP students are the ones chasing the prestige. At Columbia I found people all wanted to go to Harvard but didnt get in, the Dartmouth students wanted to be there. That is why I transferred.

The fact that Brown and Dartmouth are not highly ranked in most individual departments is due to the fact that they are semi-LACS and don’t even have grad programs in most!

The rank for grad school placement in the Wall Street Journal rankings is #7 for Dartmouth, and Brown is #9. UCI isnt even ranked in the top 50. For grad school in physics, a large university atmosphere with lots of resources is of course better, but for an undergrad experience Brown and Dartmouth are amazing in every respect.

As an alumnus Dartmouth you will be a part of one of the strongest and most successful alumni networks out there, and this pays off in jobs, grad placement, etc. We are talking about UNDERGRAD here, and Dartmouth is consistently top 10 in every ranking survey out there, Brown top 15. The UCs never break the top 20.

Once again, would I go to UCB for physics grad school over Brown, in a heartbeat. For undergrad? Not a chance.