<p>Has anyone else noticed that the original article referred to by the OP is almost three years old?</p>
<p>Not to mention, schools like WUSTL, Rice, and UChicago do not fall under the category of “buying” students (and taking away financial aid from the needy students). This is because even though they give out a few merit scholarships, THEY STILL MEET 100% OF ANY STUDENTS FINANCIAL NEED and have equal or higher average financial aid packages as compared to HYPSM.</p>
<p>It schools like NYU who do give out merit scholarships but guarantee on average to meet only about 68% of a students financial need, that require reevaluation in their finaid department.</p>
<p>Duke offers merit aid and so does Northwestern bank1019. Duke offers scholarships to top students to lure them away from its competitors. Northwestern offers aid to National Merit Scholarship winners to lure in top students, some scholarships based on a combination of need and merit (from what I understand), and scholarships for students wishing to pursue the performing arts.</p>
<p>windy23, you actually make my point. Non-HYPSMBCCDP schools that offer scholarships to steal students essentially based on numbers and yet STILL lose cross-admit battles to the lower ivies is a really unbecoming practice. My point was essentially that it is impressive that the ten schools I mentioned still win cross-admit battles despite these merit-based offers from other institutions considered peers.</p>
<p>^I acknowledge the drawing power of the schools you mentioned, and rightfully so because they are tops in the nation. But why do you use language such as “steal” to describe what non-HYPSMBCCDP schools are doing? I’m not necessarily arguing your point, I just don’t understand how certain universities are entitled to certain students or vice-versa.</p>
<p>I don’t understand the fixation with the ivies. Caltech and Duke can certainly outcompete lower ivies like Cornell, UPenn, and Brown. </p>
<p>HYPS might be in a league of their own, but the rest of the ivies do not have a leg up against the top 10 schools.</p>
<p>^^i second windy23. using words like “lure” and “steal” makes it seem like the colleges are all in a giant pond fishing for the prime catch. saying that uchicago “steals” students from yale is both disrespectful to uchicago AND to yale.</p>
<p>If I ran a school like U.Chicago or Northwestern, I would very consciously try to increase the prestige of my school. I would do that by trying to attract (lure, steal, whatever) the best students and the best faculty. I would do that with improved programs and facilities, PR, and merit aid. Why wouldn’t I want to do that?</p>
<p>Contrary to popular belief, college admissions is not a battlefield.</p>
<p>I apologize if I mislead anyone in some of my posts, but the larger point was NOT to prescribe some sort of moral judgment on schools for offering merit aid to lure students away from HYPSMBCCDP, but as another poster mentioned, to emphasize the impressive drawing power of those ten schools despite attractive financial offers coming from peer schools like Washington U in St. Louis, Duke, U Chicago, Emory, etc., etc. I do think those substantial merit aid offers are bad policy though and intended to steal students with top numbers and accomplishments from schools whose institutions tend to lose cross-admit battles with, which I think again is an unbecoming and desperate practice. It’s like bribing top students to come. </p>
<p>In addition, I think these practices have some impact (the degree varies by institution) on the demographics in terms of the economic or class differences between the student bodies. Because of WUSTL’s admissions and financial aid policies, for example, a much greater percentage of their students are middle class or upper middle class because of their merit based scholarships than someplace like Brown. Middle class students who get weak financial aid offers from HYPSMBBCDP may choose one of the peer schools I have mentioned because they qualify for little need-based aid but have significant merit based aid offers while ordinarily they may NOT have chosen a non-HYPSMBBCDP school.</p>
<p>My point was not to denigrate schools that are not HYPSMBCCDP but instead to point out why HYPSMBCCDP differ from other top schools in terms of their admissions and financial aid policy in an important respect and how the fact that they maintain the highest yield rates among elite schools and consistently win cross-admit battles with schools ranked similarly deserves some sort of recognition. </p>
<p>To inform some of my own bias I did come from a prep school environment that was a large feeder to HYSPMBCCDP and I know at my high school Washington U in St. Louis was considered a significant step down from Cornell or Brown, U Chicago was certainly a step down from Columbia or Dartmouth, Emory/Vanderbilt/Rice/CMU were nowhere near Penn, and Georgetown and Duke were almost always were more desirable options for top students than Northwestern or Rice (though obviously Georgetown and Duke are not from the group of ten I mentioned). I think U.S. News and World Report has really changed the reputations of schools in the minds of the typical young public school elite college applicant today by ranking lower ivies right next to say Johns Hopkins, Rice, or WUSTL, but I don’t think adults (the ones doing the recruiting and hiring), who aren’t familiar with the published pecking order, think of these non-HYPSMBCCDP schools as equivalents.</p>
<p>The Ivy/Non-Ivy distinction really only matters in the finance world.</p>
<p>Luckily for everyone else doing SCIENCE, the prestige of your school weighs nothing in the scientific world, only the prestige of your own work.</p>
<p>It’s really only a concern for shallow financier-wannabes, really.</p>
<p>Actually, galoisien, your statement is incorrect. Academia loves prestige as well, inclduing such non-Ivy (but still prestigious) grad programs at Cal-Berkeley and UMich.</p>
<p>Yes, and if you do not have a PhD from a prestigious Uni, then your papers are much less likely to be published, and if they are, they will not be published by a journal like Nature. This is documented, studied, and statistically significant (IE, there have been a few studies noting how the same paper submitted to a range of journals was only published by the good journals if the writer of the paper was PhD from prestigious uni.</p>
<p>davida1, you shouldn’t disregard schools like WUSTL, RICE, and JHU.</p>
<p>The fact is, employers and grad schools would gladly take an engineer from JHU than an engineer from YALE. People place far more respect for Med School students from JHU, and WUSTL than from schools like Brown, Cornell, and even Columbia Med School. People give more respect to International Relations Students from JHU and Georgetown than schools like Brown or Cornell. Academia also places more respect for a Journalism major from Northwestern than one from Dartmouth or even Harvard or Princeton. </p>
<p>You have this perception that, somehow, the ivies are untouchable and that they are all THE highest institutions in the world. Well, they are ONLY to HIGH SCHOOL students, which, apparently, is what you are. When you enter the REAL WORLD deary, and you graduate with a degree in (hypothetical) Public Health from Brown, you’ll watch students from Johns Hopkins get the preference over you. When you graduate from Cornell for International Relations, you’ll face tough competition from those SFS Georgetown students. When you graduate from Harvard, you’ll be turned down for engineering spots in favor of students from Carnegie Mellon, Duke, JHU, Northwestern, WUSTL, Rice, etc. not to MENTION MIT, Caltech, and Stanford.</p>
<p>What is prestige in your mind, exactly? The size of the “OOOH or AHH” you get from a person when you tell them? HA. That only matters to the superficial. In the real world, you’ll realize that Ivies often don’t even compare as well as the other non-ivy schools out there. Imagine asking a Dartmouth or Brown student to compare Research-experience to a student from Johns Hopkins? Imagine trying to tell a Columbia student to outmaneuver a WUSTL student in Biomedical engineering???</p>
<p>The fact of the matter is that each off the top 25-30 schools are relatively similar in terms of prestige, but each has their own niche and special spot. The ONLY schools that are prestigiously untouchable are Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and MIT. Even caltech is not really THAT prestigious in most parts of the country.</p>
<p>Also realize, schools like Amherst, Swarthmore, etc. regularly out-produce these Ivy schools in sending students to THEIR OWN top grad schools! lol.</p>
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<p>I’m not talking about disregard about prestige, just the difference between Ivy prestige and non-Ivy prestige.</p>
<p>First, a little intro: I’m a high school senior from a midwest public high school who has applied to the top schools in the country, including some of the non-ivys. </p>
<ol>
<li><p>This debate is about UNDERGRADUATE education only. How someone views a med school degree from JHU v from Columbia is irrelevent.</p></li>
<li><p>Poster’s insecurities are not important. If what they say is false, prove it, don’t whine about them being insecure. Same with bias.</p></li>
<li><p>This is about YIELD, not prestige (although they are linked), so no stupid comments on someone being a prestige whore please.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Now the real stuff: as a senior, I do view the mentioned 10 schools as being better than WUSTL, Duke, Rice, Emory, etc. I do not have any real reason behind this view, but I believe through talking to friends etc, that this is not uncommon. Thus, WUSTL, Duke, Rice, Emory, etc would HAVE to give much more FA/merit for me to go there, assuming that I get into an ivy. I don’t want to search for data, but I believe my views are quite common and are reflected in cross-admit situations.</p>
<p>Why should it only be about undergrad prestige? Because the sheer majority of finance people, even at the Ivies, have no intellectual souls and stop their education at MBA?</p>
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<p>I am curious why you keep ignoring the fact that the Ivies offer better FA on average than others (post #9)? Didn’t I and other posters already point that out? Your point holds only if those schools that offer merit-aid already match the Ivies in the need-based aid and that’s clearly not the case. Let me make this clear and simple:The merit-aid is attractive to a tiny fraction (hence small impact on yield) of those who get it at the non-Ivies schools; but overall (much larger impact on yield), the FA packages from non-Ivies are stingy compared to what the Ivies offer. By the way, how do you know whoever gets the merit-aid from, say, WashU/Duke don’t get the full-ride need-based scholarships from Harvard? Duke offers no more than 75 students full-ride scholarships and even if we assume all of them got very little from other schools (ridiculous assumption of course) such that, say, all of them go to Duke because of the merit money, it would make a very small impact to the overall yield. That fact is you have no detailed data to prove your point and have many implicit assumptions (though actually very obvious) that you totally failed to account for.</p>
<p>The funny thing is at one point, you did seem to realize the Ivies offer bette FA and wrote the following:
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<p>Your point earlier was Ivies were impressive despite not offering better aid. But according to this statement from you, Ivies are better because they provide better FA. So which point are you trying to make?</p>
<p>honestly, money and geographics explain why schools like Cornell, Dartmouth, etc get better cross-admit scores than schools like Uchicago, Duke, etc.</p>
<p>IF all of you little high schoolers would try venturing into the REAL world instead of depending on all your little high school friends for your “knowledge,” you would know that it’s the stupidest idea in the world to turn down a spot at the University of Chicago for one at Cornell in order to study Economics, UNLESS for money/fit reasons.</p>
<p>I don’t get what’s so hard to understand about the non-HYP ivies not dominating EVERY field? lol. schools like JHU and WUSTL will get you SO MUCH more credit with an undergrad degree than BRown or Dartmouth for just about ALL the sciences. And that IS the real world right there.</p>
<p>Stop trying to limit the real world to the high school world because eventually, all of those little high school kiddies grow up and realize that outside of HYP, the Ivies often are outmatched in specific areas by peer non-ivy institutes.</p>