回复：回复：回复：回复：回复：回复：Ivy and the rest of elite colleges

I sincerely apologize if I did not contain my temper well.  Your highly biased opinion of singling out Yale is just not supported by the facts. Yes, I did read your comments well.  I am not going to do a point-to-point rebuttal to your opinion.  You can have a hundred reasons to believe Penn is better than Yale and I can find a thousand of them to prove otherwise and we are not going to convince each other.  “there is really not much worth to be mentioned for Yale in the fields HYPathway emphasized” so Yale does not deserve the ranking is just a twist of logic though the claim is not true at all.  We all agree that most of us here are talking about undergraduate education and HYPathway just introduced some highly regarded schools in science and engineering to prove some schools are better in some other ways.  The perceived reputation of a school is probably a combination of undergraduate education and some specialties, which is why he put HYP in the very top and some strong tech schools right under HYP.  You can disagree but unfortunately you are the minority.  Reputation does not come from nowhere.  The schools earned it through hundreds of years of accomplishments.  Reputation is one of the most important factors in ranking schools.  Reputation attracts most talented students and huge amount of money and the latter provides better financial aid and again attracts more talented students.  Talented students build the future reputation of the school.   You are contradictory to yourself by ignoring the rankings that put HYP on the very top but listed all those rankings to prove Penn is better.   There is no question Penn is a great school but it’s just not in the same league as HYP.   Yale is particularly well regarded in humanities and arts but it does not mean that Yale does not have good science programs.  The reason some people think Yale’s sciences are not strong is because when we compare them to its first class humanity programs.  Yale is putting multi-million dollars to expand it science programs and recruit top faculty members.  I believe with its huge endowment Yale will be even better in science.  Another myth is mixing science and engineering.  None of the liberal arts colleges have very strong engineering program because it’s not their priority.  Without strong engineering program does not mean they do not have strong science programs.  One of the criteria to assess the quality of science programs is by looking at the lists of members of Natural Academy of Sciences.  You can see it by yourself if Yale or Penn has more members even in physics though Penn is a much larger schools:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_members_of_the_National_Academy_of_Sciences

 

Penn likes to boast the earning of their graduates.  You can find the list of billionaires from each school though you have your beloved Wharton included and Yale has a larger percentage of graduates going to non-profit organizations and again is a much small college but has very respectable number.  Harvard has more as we expected because it’s strong and larger.

http://www.forbes.com/2008/05/19/billionaires-harvard-education-biz-billies-cx_af_0519billieu.html

How do you explain that?  HYP do not have an undergraduate business major for a reason.  Penn has to emphasize Wharton and all other joint programs to compete but does not necessarily gain a big advantage if there are any.

 

The fact is Americans just take liberal arts education as priority and highly regard those colleges.  HYP are more in the liberal arts side and Stanford, Penn are more in tech/professional training side.  There are 3 levels of understanding in American higher education in my opinion: 1) in laymen’s eyes, it’s just pure reputation and HYP are on the top; 2) in more educated, they like to rate their specialties because they are what matter to them.  So many other schools have stronger programs in professional fields; 3) in more advanced educators eyes, HYP are on the top again.   

 

Again, for undergraduate education, school reputation trumps that of departments.  Department reputation reserves for graduate studies.   When talking about college rankings, we are talking about overall ranking.  Unfortunately reputation is one of the most weighted factors, like it or not. 

 

Another big advantage for Yale: Yale students have more opportunities than other schools due to its large research facilities but smaller student body. 

 

When I wrote this post, I saw HYPathway’s comments and can not agree more.  Our posts supplement each other.  In the hypothesized two-way ranking, Yale is just second to Harvard.  Penn is in no way to compete.  Penn is more of a professional school and is relatively weak in fundamental sciences.   In terms of student quality, Penn’s is at least half step lower if not a whole step lower.  The only student body that can compete is probably Wharton but we can not just compare a fraction of student body to that of a whole school’s, right?