Yale among the Ivies

posterX
Tue, 29 Jan 2008 00:32:32 +0000

Ilovebagels,

Actually I have been to and sat in on classes at all of those smaller colleges you mentioned, as well as places such as Wellesley, Haverford, Bowdoin and other great schools. None of them have the deep undergraduate focus, 1000s of seminars, widespread fellowship and advising opportunities, and unlimited resources of a Yale, Caltech or Princeton. Although it is true that they have fewer students, in my opinion they simply don’t have the resources to compete at the same level, even just in terms of the number of small classes available.

As far as college towns, I agree with you that it depends on what you prefer, but please don’t make assumptions based on what you see on paper or what the “conventional wisdom” is, because I don’t. I have actually visited and literally spent weeks in every single Ivy League college town, and know many alumni from each of the Ivy League schools. My point was that the area around Yale (downtown New Haven – the only Ivy League school located in a major city downtown) has become the best Ivy League college town, by a huge margin. Feel free to disagree, but don’t insult me for it. In my opinion, Morningside Heights, West Philadelphia and Harvard Square are horrible college towns that are not at all centered around students, are flooded with boring chain stores, and require remote subway rides which draw campus life far away from the campus, killing the 24/7 vibrancy of the school. They may look good in theory, but they really don’t allow the campuses there to function in a way that is vibrant and diverse – when you have to take $30 cab rides to get home from your weekend party spots, you start seeing a lot of segregation among the student body, and nothing going on on the main campus. Ithaca, Princeton and Hanover are more like traditional “college towns”, but are extremely remote and frankly, quite boring when compared to places like New Haven, Boulder, Austin, Cambridge, Athens, Madison, Charlottesville, Ann Arbor or even Northampton, Evanston, Chapel Hill, Auburn and certain other “college towns” that have larger populations (again, all places I have been to extensively). Yes, they have “rural attractions,” but the college towns I listed above (with exception of Cambridge and Evanston) are also located within 10 minutes of hundreds of miles of hiking trails, beaches, farms and other great rural features.

As far as the quality of biomedical research goes, Yale tops both Harvard and Penn and is leagues ahead of the other Ivies (which don’t even have major medical complexes, or have them but, in the case of Cornell, are located 300 miles from the undergraduate campus). For other sciences, Yale is also among the top universities nationwide – ranking #1 in the ScienceWatch chemistry and engineering rankings, for example, just above Harvard and Caltech. You could argue endlessly about this, as we have on other threads, but the bottom line is that Yale is easily one of the very top institutions in the sciences, and by several available measures, #1 in the United States.