How can a land-grant school be private?
There is no reason other than the simple fact that it mostly is. New York state runs some prestigious programs through Cornell like hospitality management that that is largely separate from the traditional Ivy League model but you are mostly looking at two different but slightly interconnected things under the same name.
Yes, but he did he not get in because the school “was full”, or did he not get in because whoever makes that decision simply decide he wasn’t Harvard material?
I’m extremely curious as to how you came up with your rankings. Would you mind explaining?
All I can tell you is that I’ve seen other kids with credentials in the same ballpark get into Harvard/Yale/Princeton. It’s a damn near perfect resume.
Parts of Cornell are endowed (Arts & Sciences is the biggest school; the others are are Hotel, Engineering, and Architecture, Art & Planning). The land grant parts are the Ag school, ILR, and Human Ecology. The tuition for in-state students is lower at the land grant schools than it is in the private ones. I think it’s lower in general, but NYS residents get a big discount. I got a half tuition scholarship to NYU but full price Cornell land grand school was still cheaper. It’s a hell of a good deal for New Yorkers.
They aren’t ranked per se. It is just commentary. You can’t rank the Ivy’s like that (I think I made that clear in that post) because there are all different and are other schools that are better overall or better at certain things than most of them. Stanford, Duke, Rice and several flagship state schools kill the Ivy’s in many areas. Hell, MIT is not an Ivy and its next door neighbor, Harvard, drools at its grandeur in science and engineering. Caltech is spectacular as well.
My commentary was just based on the fact that I went to Dartmouth, I used to hang out at Harvard, Brown is an easy drive from here, and I know all of the rest of them through friends. They have different personalities like all schools do.
Cornell alumnus Colibri had an interesting post the other day that tends to contradict the above (unless the passage of time has changed things a great deal):
There is no perfect resume for any elite school. The admissions people are looking for diversity, they would never accept an entire class of people all the same. At some point they have a pool of people who would all make good candidates, and they try to create a mix for the class. Too many similar people do not make for a good class of students.
I know. Trust me, this time of year I hand out a lot of tissue and pat a lot of shoulders and give that same spiel. Wee Barin is asking if any perfectly qualified kids don’t get in even though they are qualified. I am saying I have known perfectly qualified kids who did not. Which is fine. Perfectly qualified kids always get in somewhere, they just don’t get in everywhere.
What Colibri says isn’t true for all the land grant schools. The ILR school has a LOT of requirements and very limited credits free for electives; if you took more, you had to pay extra for them. Freshman year is pretty much all required courses. The Ag school is more generous with their elective credits and has more offerings within itself because it’s a bigger school. However, you do have to choose a major within your school, and can’t choose one from the Arts & Sciences school. Thus, you cannot be a land grant student and a theatre arts major, or a Spanish major, or CompLit, for example. It’s not just the exact same education, and you only have to take one elective from the Ag school per semester, at least not in the first couple of years, IME.
Also, I would disagree with Shagnasty’s assertion that Cornell’s prestigious reputation comes mostly from its endowed schools. The land grant parts of the school are highly respected.
This year, college admissions are especially competitive, as described in this article from the New York Times. It mentions, “Harvard College, for example, offered admission to only 7.1 percent of the 27,462 high school seniors who applied — or, put another way, it rejected 93 of every 100 applicants, many with extraordinary achievements, like a perfect score on one of the SAT exams. Yale College accepted 8.3 percent of its 22,813 applicants. Both rates were records.”
So there’s no shame in not getting into Harvard, Yale, Stanford or any other school. And lots of people go to other schools and are still happy, productive, members of society.
The traditional reason that a university might admit a legacy is that the family tends to be more generous with its contributions to the alma mater. It seems a bit ridiculous for this to be a consideration at Harvard, given the size of its endowment. It’s at about $35 billion, so even a $100 million gift is going to be a tiny fraction of the earnings on it.
Also, while i realize that it’s unlikely that Harvard will tell its alumni to donate elsewhere, the fact is that someone with $100 million to give could probably do a lot more good, on a benefit-per-dollar basis, donating it to a less financially secure institution. There are plenty of universities where $100 million could have an immediate, drastic effect on the quality of education, and/or the number of faculty, and/or the amount of financial aid offered to low-income students.
Slight hijack, regarding having to show your parchments…
I just applied for a job with a small city–not saying which one, but it’s an enclave in L.A. and they have the odd film studio or two. They asked me to include actual copies of my degrees and certificates. This is the first time anyone has asked for this.
The head of Stanford admissions once said that they could admit ONLY 4.0 and above, 1500 and above SAT, and top 1% of their class - and they would STILL turn kids away who hit those 3 qualifications.
I have been on record as defending legacy admits, and I was NOT one.
- There is the donation issue. I paid for school partly through university scholarships that came from donors.
- Not all legacy admits NEED the help. It is only a small number of legacies that truly need an edge.
- Legacies do provide some of the atmosphere of the school. When my now-wife’s father came to campus, he took me around to some of his old haunts. It helped make the campus feel more alive to me. There is value in history, and legacies help with that history.
Lots of good information is being shared here. Elite college admissions are something of a black box, but I can weigh in with my experience working in admissions - yes, at “harvard.” I also recommend reading Jacques Steinberg’s The Gatekeepers for fascinating insight about how the process works.
As Algher notes, the nature of competitive admissions is such that very “qualified” students are rejected quite often. I use “qualified” in quotes because each institution has a different idea of what makes a candidate strong. Sure, almost all think that good grades are very important - but that’s probably the only generalization one can make. Some schools value risk-taking and idealism among their students. Others value “well-roundedness.” Still others place a very high value on test scores. And that criteria changes every time a new person joins an admissions staff, or someone leaves. Think of how absolutely boring it would be to be at a school where everyone was admitted based on two or three criteria. Isn’t it better to have some hippies, some conservatives, some liberals, some absolute geniuses, and some “different thinkers” around?
The reality is that most admissions committees are constructing a class rather than admitting individuals one-by-one. So the OP was likely competing with students very much like him/her - racially, socioeconomically, similar interests, and so forth. Within that pool of students any number of factors may have given one person the “bump” up, or down.
I support affirmative action and I support legacy admissions. Harvard’s loaded in large part because alumni correctly assume that their affiliation and contributions to the institution will be repaid in giving their offspring a bump in their admissions criteria. Like affirmative action, legacy admissions policies can be misused. But most institutions are not willing to admit students who clearly fall so far out of the range of admitted students that they’ll be unable to compete.
The reality is that very few of the 3,000 institutions of higher education in the US have selection criteria and competitive admissions at the level of Harvard, or even a Carnegie Mellon - which is a terrific school. Most institutions are open enrollment, so getting up in arms about how a small subset of institutions selects their students is a little out of whack. As many posters have noted, each subspeciality of each field has criteria they use to evaluate the worth of candidates, and not every field afford Harvard the weight the OP seems to think they do. And there’s no need to sandbag Harvard, or a selective school, by claiming that every Harvard grad one has met is a blithering idiot. I’m proud of the fact that blithering idiocy is fairly well distributed among the population as a whole - Harvard’s no exception.
I suspect the OP will be quite happy with the experience close to graduation. That’s a finding in the research literature that’s been persistent across institutional types. There’s also the idea of peer effects. You’re a little better off at a school where a good number of the kids are smarter than you, because you benefit from their knowledge. If you’re the smartest kid there, not so much. I suspect the OP will be just fine at C-M.
It’s also a little presumptuous to pretend to know all there is about the student who was admitted. He might come across to his peers as a dolt, but there could be some depth that he articulated in his statement, in his reference letters, etc. I imagine some kid who didn’t get into C-M might say the exact same thing about the OP.
I think the point was that as a Biology major, CALS-Biology and A&S-Biology are essentially equivalent. No one is arguing that you can be a Spanish Major in CALS any more than one could be a Spanish Major in the Engineering School. Intro Biology is full of A&S Biology Majors and CALS Biology Majors. All the A&S Bio people are Out-of-state because you would have to be insane or insanely wealthy to do Biology in A&S if you could swing state tuition in CALS instead. Even for out-of-staters, CALS is cheaper than A&S.
I also disagree with the assertion that Cornell is prestigious for the endowed schools. Heck, most people don’t even know there is a difference. One could argue that Human Ecology and ILR don’t particularly lend themselves to flashy prestige, but only because the field of study is less mainstream. My understanding is that degrees in those programs from Cornell are well respected in their field.
Since William and Mary was founded by colony charter like most of the other ivies, how did it wind up public while they wound up private?
Cornell academic policies and requirements are confusing even to those of us in Cornell. Here’s what the CALS FAQ says:
Here’s a link to the Biology major requirements, which as previously stated are the same whether you are enrolled in CALS or A&S.
That’s a good question. And one I can’t really answer. I know we were chartered by the King and Queen, and originally started out as a College. However, during the American Revolutions there were many changes put about by figures such as James Madison and Tommy Jefferson to to college. We were the 2nd oldest created institution in the US, but as said above, when the Revolutionary War occurred there were quite a few governing changes made to the University*. And since I was curious, I looked up “Public Universities” in Wikipedia and got this tidbit: In the United States, most public universities are state universities founded and operated by state government entities; the oldest being The College of William & Mary, founded in 1693.
So since the definition of a public U is that the State government takes over it, this is very logical for W&M to fall under that way rather than staying private like the other Ivy leaguers, since during the revolutionary period for W&M Wikipedia states: “Williamsburg served as the capital of Colon
ial Virginia from 1699 to 1780. During this time, the College served as a law center and lawmakers frequently used its buildings. It educated future U.S. Presidents Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, and John Tyler.”
These would be the men who would later change the policies of the College, and turn it into a full grown university in 1779. Thusly, since the “new” government at the time was in Williamsburg, it seems logical to have the local major institution of higher learning follow under that government as well (in fact they booted out one of the former presidents for being a loyalist: * A 1771 graduate of the College, and an ordained minister in the Church of England, Reverend James Madison was a teacher at William and Mary as the hostilities of the American Revolution broke out, and he organized his students into a local militia. The same year, [the] Loyalist sympathies of the College President, Reverend John Camm brought about his removal from the faculty. Reverend Madison became the 8th president of the College of William and Mary in October, 1777, the first after separation from England.* (Wikipedia).
So that would probably be my hazard of a guess to why W&M is a public institution, as it was close by to new developing form of government, and the therefore was more likely to diverge from the private (English) charter over to the new system of being a public institution under the newly formed government.
*The College of William and Mary is actually a University, since it has graduate schools and programs as well. But they kept the original name. But William and Mary is technically the FIRST university of Virginia. But we’ll let the Cavaliers have their name. After all, t’was a W&M Dropout that tried to create the new UVa to match the awesomeness that was the College.
Along with establishment of new, firmer financial footing, the creation of the graduate schools in law and medicine officially made the “College” a school meeting the contemporary definition of a “university” by 1779, notwithstanding the retention of the original name as set forth in the 1693 Royal Charter. Also thanks to Jefferson’s reorganization, the College adopted America’s first elective system of study and introduced the Honor System, which remains an integral part of the College today. (Wikipedia)
Anyways, that’s enough of a thread jacking from me. I’d much rather spend my time outside of the Pit. But those are my thoughts on why Public and not Private.
Maybe that’ll help to try to clear up some fuzziness.