<p>
Yeah, and keep in mind its only been in the past 10 years that Penn has risen to prominence.</p>
<p>Just go by year founded…</p>
<p>The further you are from 1636, the less prestigious. </p>
<p>Then you have Harvard, Yale, Princeton as clearly the top. </p>
<p>Penn, Columbia, Brown, and Dartmouth kind of bunched in.</p>
<p>Then Cornell much further down the line. </p>
<p>Is it really that off if you do it that way?</p>
<p>yes Amadeuic, because there have been over 375 years in the intervening years.</p>
<p>and the modern university is significantly different than the colonial colleges. most ivies were regional schools up until the 1970s and significantly composed of WASPy elites. the best universities 100 years ago would not include Y, P, B, D or Cornell - it was Chicago, Columbia, Johns Hopkins and Harvard by most accounts (perhaps Yale in there too). </p>
<p>today’s power balance will change. just as quickly as columbia fell in the 1960s, so could harvard or the others. it seems incomprehensible, but so did a massive recession in what was supposedly the post-recession era. i think just because we have lived over the past twenty years to a degree in some stasis does not suggest that prestige and therefore rankings my shift depending on what universities protect themselves from significant risk and avoid failings.</p>
<p>“is it really that ignorant to make this comment?” yes.</p>
<p>Admissionsgeek’s sentiments are the most correct.</p>
<p>People tend to ask questions like this “Which Ivy is considered a lower Ivy?” to try to see where they’re going in life (job opportunities etc.) The sad thing is that they just dont realise that once they’re into an Ivy, its more or less ALL the same. So what if you got into Yale and not Harvard? So what if you got into Columbia and not Princeton? People need to realise that once your into any of these schools (Ivies), your set. That said, there are some ivies that I would prefer over others but thats not because one is better or another one is worse, it’s just because some programs are more focused on what I want to study. For example, I want to study Economics/Finance/Business and here are MY personal preferences:</p>
<p>1-Harvard
2-Princeton
3-Penn
4-Columbia
5-Dartmouth
6-Yale
7-Brown
8-Cornell</p>
<p>HOWEVER, I wouldnt mind going to any one of them. Not at ALL!</p>
<p>Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia/Penn, Dartmouth, Brown, Cornell </p>
<p>'Nuff said.</p>
<p>Why did Columbia fail in the 60s?</p>
<p>1950s and 60s saw an unprecedented movement of wealthy and even middle class folks out of cities (read crabgrass frontier), cities saw a very sharp decline - NYC particularly. urban schools began to fall out of favor. both actual insecurity and myths of insecurity developed leading to fewer people wanting to attend (or send their children) to urban schools.</p>
<p>in this climate columbia became less popular, and the student body shifted. it had always been a primarily NYC school and as the city changed, the demographics of students at columbia changed. columbia students (like harvard as bton changed and berkeley in Oakland area) were first to grab onto changing theories of race relations, of political liberation. the riots of '68 left a stunning blow to the school, followed by a series of riots in the 70s. alumni giving went down and CU went from having the largest endowment to 10th place in a decade. it was also during this period that NYU sold its campus in University Heights and other urban universities were forced to consolidate operations or close. </p>
<p>ironically, with the movement toward globalization and the premium placed on urbanization as an ideal form of growth, columbia and cities have gained increasing popularity since the 90s. watch movies in which suburbia is praised in the 80s and its movement into the 90s and the 00s as almost an dystopic concept. urbanization is near an alltime high in the 90s and 00s in the states and probably why there is more comfort living in cities.</p>
<p>and no, rudy guiliani didn’t clean up nyc alone as most argue. it had to do with a demographic shift back toward cities, the rising wages and rents in cities that virtually destroyed the crack business and to some degree effective police action by dinkins and guiliani regimes.</p>
<p>as someone mentioned - so long as cities are popular and wealth is high in NYC, Columbia benefits immensely. or so the history shows (cu’s worst times have been when the city has lacked life or had severe conflict, 1850s, 1970s, etc.).</p>
<p>I am impressed by your extensive knowledge. What happened in the 1850s?</p>
<p>well though not a very nuanced answer - think gangs of new york, boss tweed, corruption, crime, immigration, etc. etc. columbia was in a huge rut at the time too.</p>
<p>How have you come to obtain so much info? Wikipedia would benefit from this I’m sure.</p>
<p>
I call BS, we established a new campus on Madison and 48th in midtown, in 1857. Even I know that. The 1850s can’t have been a bummer for us, as clearly we were expanding.</p>
<p>denzera, not bs, read most of the things about the university at Park Place and what happened there. read stand, columbia or watch any comments by bob mccaughey’s words out there. the uni was not in a good place by the 1850s even with the move. and even afterward. yes i said it was not a nuanced argument (and in its simplicity probably teetering on bs), but as mccaughey even says - a lot of columbia’s growth was because of an increase in industry in NYC during and after the civil war and with that the fortunes of the university expanded. yes it is a simplistic view, there were more interesting issues surrounding the relative backwardness of colleges at the time (the paths in harvard yard used to be treked by the cows and other animals of the professors well into the 19th century) and the fact that the modern university was not quite born. yes there are some positive indicators that columbia was changing (law school in 1858, the move in 1857, the school of mines in 1863), but the uni didn’t really get out of the rut for awhile. probably why you don’t hear of many famous columbia alums from dewitt clinton until well into the 1870s and into the later part of the 19th century when butler, pupin and others studied.</p>
<p>and fastfood, i watch a lot of columbia crap and read a lot of columbia related stuff. yeah, i’m a bit of a geek in that regard.</p>
<p>That’s not really a simplistic argument considering the scope of the university, whose influences - certainly at the time - were relatively straightforward and proximal. It’s not like you’re discussing the nature of New York itself.</p>
<p>/close thread</p>
<p>penn ftw lololol</p>
<p>Look at all the insecure CC kids! haha</p>
<p>so columbia is an upper ivy, just to be clear? okay, thanks for your responses. :).</p>
<p>Columbia is ridiculously underestimated. How is it possibly tied with UPenn and Duke</p>
<p>Brown too. No way it’s lower than Cornell, the worst of all Ivies.</p>
<p>There IS an upper-mid-lower difference in Ivies. I doubt anyone here would believe Harvard provides the same quality of education as Cornell.</p>
<p>Upper: 1) Harvard 2)Yale 3)Princeton
Mid: 4)Columbia
Lower: Dartmouth, UPenn, Brown
Shouldn’t be considered Ivy: Cornell</p>
<p>Educations are not “provided” to students by their respective colleges. I prefer to think that individual students shape their own education regardless of what college they attend. To that end, it is inaccurate to say that Harvard provides a higher quality of education than Cornell does, since it is the students who create their own education using the resources at their disposal. I also doubt that any student will be able to exhaust all the opportunities Cornell provides over the course of an undergraduate career.</p>
<p>There doesn’t seem to be any appreciable difference in quality between Columbia, Penn, Dartmouth and Brown. They’re different in that Columbia and Penn have stronger graduate schools, while Dartmouth and Brown have more of an undergrad focus. But you won’t be better educated by default just because you graduated from somewhere a few spots higher on the rankings.</p>
<p>All this prestige-whoring is off-putting and reeks of insecurity. Columbia doesn’t need to prove anything.</p>