25 New Ivies

get a life people. stop obsessing over university rankings. they're arbitrary, ok?

I once heard Rice's President describe it as an anomaly, and so it is. He said that if you spread the students and faculty evenly over the 400-acre campus, you would have one professor standing in the middle of one acre, talking to ten students. There are more seats in Rice Stadium than all-time graduates.

Also see

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/papers/1287.pdf

Here are the Princeton Review 2009 numbers with respect to two most recent posts:

John Hopkins........academic rating: 86, selectivity: 98, % acceptees enrolling: 33 Total: 217
Georgetown..........92, 98, 47 Total: 237
ND.......................92, 98, 56 Total: 246

Obviously these metrics are just one way to measure 'eliteness' and are not scientific in any sense, but hopefully the Princeton Review assessment is as good a basis as any, and I included 'acceptees enrolling' alongside academic rating and selectivity to take account of the fact that many top students will be accepted at the elite schools they apply too, so their choice to enroll does represent a strong ranking indicator.

Oh yes, Notre Dame is certainly more prestigious than Georgetown. Twice the acceptance rate from an applicant pool that is limited to the reflexively-Catholic-and-willing-to-spend-four-years-in-Indiana demographic--try BC, Holy Cross or Villanova first if looking for a runner-up Catholic school. This is a joke.

Based on a simple analysis of statistics from the 2009 Princeton Review on: academic performance/rigor, selectivity in admissions, and percent of acceptees enrolling, (only for universities and colleges of over 3000 undergraduates), here is a list of the current 'elites' with an arbitrary cut-off after the top 22 scorers:

Out on their own:
Harvard
Stanford
Yale
Princeton
MIT

Next level:
Columbia
Penn
Virginia
Notre Dame
Dartmouth
Brown

Elite, but not Top 11:
Georgetown
Duke
Cornell
Chicago
Cal Berkeley
Vanderbilt
Washington, St Louis
Rice
Michigan
Tufts
Northwestern

Surely the point is that the eight Ivy league schools do not (alone) represent the top tier of four year colleges in the USA today, and that an athletic conference membership is a strange way to categorize schools' overall credentials anyway. The title should read the Current Elite (or similar) and include all schools that offer a tier one education (not just in the traditional liberal arts either)...not just the eight schools that were overtaken in athletics back in the 1910s and sought refuge in a new league of their 'peers'. I don't care if the number is 16, 25, or 50 as long as it is based on criteria that fairly define the top tier of US academic institutions in 2008. The 16 listed are no-brainers but there are probably another 5-10 with an equal claim: Washington in St. Louis, Rice, Emery, MIT, Caltech, etc

An idiosyncratic list. Without knowing which universities the compilers consider "Ivy League" (not only, I'd suppose, those belonging to the athletic conference), it's difficult to be certain why such institutions as Duke or W&M don't appear here.

As for the comment that "Georgetown would almost undoubtably be an ivy league school now if not for their Jesuit background and the anti-Catholic sentiment prevalent when the other elite schools were founded": Georgetown didn't exist until years after the Revolution (1789, wasn't it?), long after the fourteen colonial foundations of colleges and universities. Yes, there was anti-Romanist sentiment -- the Britiish colonies were largely established and peopled by non-Romanists, many of whom (the Pennsylvania Dutch, Moravians, others) were fleeing oppression by Romanist governments in Europe -- but that would have little to do with Georgetown's later exclusion from the so-called "Ivy League"; after all, many students and teachers now at those very institutions are Romanist.

The new ivies really should reflect the schools that should already be included. Georgetown would almost undoubtably be an ivy league school now if not for their Jesuit background and the anti-Catholic sentiment prevalent when the other elite schools were founded.

If we doubled the list of the current Ivy League to 16 schools they would include
1. Georgetown
2. University of Chicago
3. Duke
4. Stanford
5. Vanderbilt
6. Notre Dame
7. Virginia
8. John Hopkins

where's duke and georgetown?

ren8690 you are completely stupid please learn to read. Swarthmore is listed at the beginning of the article as an already-elite- school. Again, read the entire article you idiot.

ren8690 you are completely stupid please learn to read. Swarthmore is listed at the beginning of the article as an already-elite- school. Again, read the entire article you idiot.

What about Swarthmore College? Why is it not on the list? What criteria did you use?

What about Swarthmore College???? Why is it not on the list? What criteria did you use? Random picking???

Sometimes I think Harvey Mudd is a little known treasure. My son, a graduate of HMC chose it over any other college and has never regretted it. I just wish it would get the accolades it deserves. It's the only college that I know of that has a very active parent association. I'm proud to say I'm a Mudder's Mother!!

I visited a friend at Tufts last weekend. It was AMAZING. Everyone there was so nice and cool... I wish I had known about it when I was applying...

I visited a friend at Tufts last weekend. It was AMAZING. Everyone there was so nice and cool... I wish I had known about it when I was applying...

I visited a friend at Tufts last weekend. It was AMAZING. Everyone there was so nice and cool... I wish I had known about it when I was applying...