Ivy league colleges: what's the difference with public state universities?

Ivy League: literally an athletic conference of private schools.

Not necessarily the best schools, or the oldest, but an athletic conference that carries a lot of bizarre presteige in the American Media.

 

No : that carries a lot of prestige in the entire world.

 

Yes, it does carry a lot of prestige. But in case our Belgian friend is still reading this thread, it's worth pointing out that Ivy League schools are not the only excellent private colleges/universities in the United States. For undergraduate purposes, places like Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, Carleton, Macalester, and other small colleges are comparable in quality of education to the Ivies. For graduate studies, probably only Chicago and Stanford measure up across all fields.

 

If by measure up you mean "trying to catch up to Berkeley", sure.

 

I was talking private schools.

 

Undergraduate purposes ? Do mere undergraduates possess any civil right in USA ? Has american academia fallen that low ?

Ok, jokes notwithstanding, I was talking about fame only, and not quality of education. You can't say US liberal art colleges have an international reputation. I won't even say that Dartmouth, Cornell, Brown or Penn, in Ivy League, have a world wide reputation.

But when you say Columbia, Harvard, Princeton or Yale, that rings a bell. And, obviously, Stanford and Berkeley too.

Of course, this is an humanist point of view. I guess a scientist will call names with a lot of "tech" or "lab" in them.

 

Yeah, but how many of them actually teach the course? Many of these professors spend more time doing research than teaching.

 

my point was that most people think that the ivys are THE best schools in the country with no exceptions for program or otherwise. (Caltech, and MIT would beg to differ).

And as you said earlier, William and Mary is the second oldest school in the country. the 8 ivys are not the 8 oldest schools (again, another common misconception).

In no way was I dissing the ivys.

I'm a current (though tempoarary) ann arbor resident, and I hear way too many undergrads around here talk about how "UM is as good as any ivy league school". So I quiz them:

Do you know what an ivy leage school is?

- umm yeah, they're the 8 best schools in the country
- yeah, they're the first 8 schools in the US

Can you name the 8 schools?

- ummm, .... Stanford.... Northwestern... Amherst.... NYU... and other correct or incorrect answers....

when I tell them that the ivys are an athletic conference of private schools, no one believes me.

 

I'm sorry but both Penn U and Cornell are at least more prestigious than Columbia.

OK maybe not according to the US News rankings.
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/brief/natudoc/tier1/t1natudoc_brief.php
Penn is higher and Cornell is close behind.

 

Columbia is clearly more prestigious than Cornell or Penn. Part of that is because its more exclusive; its far harder to get into Columbia than the other two.

 

true, but my point was about the perception of ivys to the public more than anything. Students at a top 30 or so university are so impressed by ivy league presteige, yet dont actually know proper facts about the schools they hold in such high regard. For all the presteige given to the ivys by the less educated general public, quite a bit of misinformation is swirlled around.

/2nd tier LAC student, btw...
//still going to med school in a year's time.
///what's a teaching assistant?

 

I guess Cornell is very popular in Ithaca , but not in Europe.

 

That's true. The Ivies are more famous, no doubt about it. The point I was trying to make is that if the Belgian who started the thread is considering higher education in the United States, it would be a mistake to limit his search to the Ivy League schools. They may be the best known, but they're not the only options for good learning. That's all I'm trying to say.

 

The Ivies can be separated into two tiers
Harvard
Yale
Princeton


Cornell
Columbia
Penn
Dartsmouth
Brown

One thing about Cornell though that no one really seems to take into account is that it is really around 7 colleges stuck together into one University. A couple of these "colleges" are state funded and thus they are not private institutions per se. They have very high acceptance rates NY state students and thus tend to skew the numbers when it comes to US News statistics.

In actuallity the A&S college and Engineering college are the two that are highly competative to get into. (something like 14%-17% any given year)

Also when it comes to prestige you will be hard pressed to find a hotel school that is better than Cornell's.

 

agreed. You'll save yourself a lot of $$$ too if you find a school in the midwest.

any of the big-ten schools are great publics with good reputations (northwestern is private, but expensive...great school though. I'd love to get into thier med school).

For small schools, Oberlin, Kenyon, Carleton, Macalester, Kalamazoo, and a few others...

 

what is the best out of all the ivy ?

 

lol

What you said about Cornell is right, but according to most peer rankings right now, U of Penn is better than Princeton, Princeton is of course more prestigious.

I'm pretty sure Cornell accepts fewer students than Columbia but I might be wrong, Columbia is huge. Either way I guess it's foolish to assume that people outside of the US (where I've lived at least) don't know about Cornell or don't consider it to be a great university. But you're definetely right in asserting that it can't compared to Yale, Harvard or Princeton.

 

It isn't very popular in Europe, but it is popular.

 

They kinda do... But I unserdtand what you're getting at. Some European universites like: Strasbourg, Paris-Sorbonne, Heidelberg, Cambridge and Oxford are more prestigious.

 

Well, of course, everything depends what kind of fame we are talking about : among broad audience, or among world academia only ? I guess most scholars in Europe know Cornell, Brown, Dartmouth and Penn. But I'm sure that ordinary people don't.

Ohh, I wish that Strasbourg were a famous university. My Phd would acquire some sparks and glitter. Unfortunately, we're nowhere near Cambridge, or any of the Ivy (at least not in humanities).

And the Sorbonne ? A little stat here : Sorbonne's budget per student is 33 times lower than Princeton's. Yup : 1/33 of the Princeton budget. The fact that some research is actually done in France today is a miracle.

 

Columbia should not be lumped in with Dartmouth, its more prestigious. Penn is a good school as is Brown, but they're not as prestigious as Columbia. (I've never attended a private university, so I don't have any biases here.)