What are the ivy peers?
"Dad 2: My daughter goes to Duke.
Dad 1: I don’t consider Duke an elite east coast school.
@bluebayou Me neither. Duke is in the South."
I had not realized that a place had to be either on the east coast or in the south. Is that really “a thing”?
Is Hilton Head on the east coast?
I call them “high-end schools.” I also call high-stat, very accomplished applicants “high-end students.”
“Funny dialogue between two dads of high school students at a party I attended about elite schools:
Dad 1: I would never send my kid to one of those idiotic elite east coast schools.
Dad 2: My daughter goes to Duke.
Dad 1: I don’t consider Duke an elite east coast school.”
I was once in a similar dialogue back when D1 was enrolled at H.
Other Parent: “We are touring colleges. And my son has decided not to apply to Harvard or those other awful schools like that. Where does your daughter go to college?”
Me: “Harvard.”
Other Parent: (stunned silence)
Me: (scrambling to relieve the uncomfortable moment) “But of course your son knows what’s best for him. Not everybody fits in every school. Everyone needs to find their own best choice…” etc. etc.
@scipio lol awkward!
Boasting you’re not applying to a college with a 5% acceptance rate… quite gauche.
Nah, its in South Carolina. 
All of my southern friends – perhaps a fringe group? – don’t claim to be easterners.
I think we’re confusing geography with cultural identification. My kid is looking at schools all up and down the east coast, but we live in the South.
Brian Wilson clearly thought that the “East Coast” and the “South” were two different places. The East Coast girls are hip, he really digs those styles they wear, while the Southern girls, with the way they talk, they knock him out when he’s down there.
For some, cultural identification is all that matters.
I call these The U10 League based on their admit rates. Current Members include: Brown, Caltech, Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, MIT, Penn, Princeton, Stanford and Yale.
Duke and a few other schools are at the gates and may very well become League members soon.
The 10% admit rate is psychologically significant and is a worrying trend in college admissions.
We also have a U5 League starting to take shape. Currently it only has two members, so nothing interesting happening in this league yet 
but who knows…
Why is that a concern? (yeah, I do contribute to thread creep.)
But the U10 league is so small in number, as a % of all college students, why should we care if HYS gets down to 1%? (That’s a serious question, bcos I have no idea.)
I like the idea of U10 league. Next year, Duke and Dartmouth should be in.
U10 isn’t a bad idea. Can we trade on U10 futures? I think we got lucky because when my son was admitted to Chicago in 1996 the admit rate was something like 30-40! His stock has really gone up. Such a deal.
5 and 10% acceptance rate means little to me. Between mailers and other marketing, I’d bet over half of the applicants these days send in boiler plate essays and are swift rejections.
As I mentioned before, I’m not a fan of using admit rates to tier as that pretty much discounts the actual education in college.
Back when UChicago and Northwestern had admit rates higher than certain other schools, they were still getting a higher percentage of their grads in to elite preprofessional schools and PhD programs (as well as winning more prestigious national awards/scholarships) than those other schools.
If you want a simple numerical scale, I would suggest using something like test scores which are “standardized,” rather than admit rates… so maybe you’re talking about the “2200 club”?
@colfac92, however, that is also input-focused and completely discounts the actual education. There are certain schools with lower average SAT scores who get a greater percentage of their grads in to elite preprofessional schools and PhD programs than certain other schools with higher SAT scores.
@PurpleTitan Your analysis above is correct, and that’s what we looked at: the quality of education as reflected in things like percentages who went on to PhD’s. This is also why, as I mentioned in my first post on this thread, one should consider LAC’s and other colleges and universities “beyond the Ivy League” if one is looking for strong academic programs.
Based on his record and on the admit rate, I KNEW my son would be admitted to Chicago and that if he chose to attend it would not be a mistake at all for his career and life. (I had also taught at UofC as an adjunct for one quarter – commuting from my regular place of university employment. Also I knew the “neighborhood” from a project I’d been involved with at the National Opinion Research Center.) Applying there was something of a slam dunk.
@mackinaw, yep. Sadly for the discerning smart kids of today, relatively undervalued elites pretty much don’t exist any more among the tippy-top private RU’s or even the tippy-top LACs. Even the top state schools like UMich (where the top quartile is just as accomplished as at a private elite) aren’t guarantees any more. They have to go deeper among the LAC’s, but even that undervaluation may disappear soon.