The 12 Top Rivalries

Historically Black: Howard vs. Morehouse and Spelman
Students interested in an education that focuses on African-American culture often give these three schools a close look. Coed Howard in Washington, D.C., has about 7,300 undergraduates. If they were one school, all-male Morehouse and its Atlanta next-door neighbor, all-female Spelman, each with about 3,000 students, would come close to Howard's size. For all three, their prominence in American higher education derives in part from their active and famous alumni. Nobel laureate Martin Luther King Jr. went to Morehouse; Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Alice Walker, Spelman, and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, Howard. Many other intellectual, social and economic luminaries attended the schools, and those alums are quick to network with the latest crop of graduates.

The sense of competition is there, but undergraduates at all three schools say they're bound by a respect for the power of the social and political organizations that unite them. Howard sophomore Natasha Metts, walking quickly across the Yard to get to a Spanish class, mentions her work with the Alpha Phi Omega national service fraternity. Morehouse student-government president Chad Mance says his and his college's success "stands on pillars of community service and academic excellence." Former Spelman student-body president Adeola Adejobi, who is now at Cornell's law school, says she gained much from her school's insistence on developing her sense of the world through community service.

Travers Johnson, former managing editor of the Morehouse student paper The Maroon Tiger, credits that emphasis on real-world connections for his internship at the Clinton Foundation and his new job in New York with Random House. All three schools, he says, leave their students with "a consciousness about black issues and a sense of pride," something to share even while they argue over which college is best.

Cinematic Enclaves: NYU Tisch vs. USC Film School
These institutions, both part of larger universities, are formally known as the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. But people in the business usually just say they went to NYU or the SC film school. Both have lists of graduates that feed the fantasies of applicants yearning for shelves full of Oscars. USC claims George Lucas and Robert Zemeckis, among others. NYU includes Oliver Stone and Martin Scorsese.

Recent graduates say the differences between the schools are clear. USC is bigger and more commercial, a Hollywood blockbuster. NYU is smaller and grittier, an indie film. Jason Shuman, class of '96, loved the opportunity to work while he studied at USC. "If I had class three days a week, I spent the other two days interning at Warner Brothers," he says. He worked for big-time filmmakers and began to accumulate a string of his own producer credits, including "Darkness Falls" and "Daddy Day Camp." Jane Renaud graduated from NYU in 2005, and is where she wants to be, in New York producing news features on education for PBS, while directing a short film in her spare time. Shuman has friends from NYU. Renaud knows USC people. In the end, rivals get along just fine.

Mathews, a longtime education reporter at The Washington Post, is the author of the upcoming “Work Hard, Be Nice: How Two Inspired Teachers Created America’s Best Schools.”

© 2008