I’d put CMU over both. And I’ve given a guest lecture at Case, worked with a professor there and mentored a grad student. Excellent place, but not the very top.
Case is better for nursing than engineering, IMO. But yes, I’d put Case as very solid but not in the same world as MIT CalTech CMU Mudd. Even Ollin has more cache, just from novelty.
Have you? Purdue has a 59% acceptance rate. That’s not elite. It’s an excellent engineering school, but it’s not even the best engineering school in the state - that likely goes to Rose-Hulman.
According to US News, the acceptance rate at Rose-Hulman in the fall of 2017 was 61%, and Purdue is 56 among the US News rankings of national universities.
Ok? I wasn’t suggesting Rose-Hulman was elite either. Purdue is a public school that accepts well over half of all applicants. Berkeley accepts 17%. MIT 8.3%. Cal Tech 8.8%. Those are elite numbers.
I’m a bit wary of using acceptance rate for “elite” - only because I know some schools game that by trying to get applications from people they’d never accept to keep their numbers artificially low, while other schools don’t.
Then there’s perception verses reality (I’d agree with others about Harvard as the big name, then Yale and Princeton and MIT - I know some others that are very good, but they don’t have the same reputation/cultural shorthand among those who don’t really know anything about it).
Then there’s how you can (at least theoretically) have two equally good schools, but one that accepts 1,000 students a year and one that has 10,000, but if the exact same 50,000 apply to both one is going to have a higher acceptance rate. So one may be more selective, but not necessarily better. But if will have more brand cachet because fewer go there. Unless it’s so low on the totem pole as to be called a “nothing school”, I guess.
None of this has anything to do with Purdue, which I know nothing about.
The acceptance rate at Rose-Hulman is misleading: they don’t get a ton of applications because 1) no one has ever heard of them and 2) they have shit financial aid (Purdue, being public, isn’t much better). Rose-Hulman is ranked first in the country–among engineering programs with no doctorate program, which is a weird category–but it’s the same rank as Harvey Mudd. Rose-Hulman is so small and so specialized and so, so expensive that it’s really hard to know where to put it. But among people in a position to know, it’s certainly a very, very good school. I have a personal bias because I sorta associate it with rich snots, but my sample size is really small.
I graduated high school in 1984 and I’m fairly certain that Rose-Hulman sent a mailing basically pleading to consider the school, and offering to waive the application fee. (Now, I was in Connecticut so it’s possible they weren’t getting many applicants outside their home territory.)
(BTW, if you’ve got a kid applying to college, you might enjoy watching the movie How I Got Into College. The director is the same guy who made Better Off Dead and it’s got some of the same sensibility. The movie is thirty years old so some of it is dated but much of it will seem familiar.)
To expand on the deal with Rose: I’m at a STEM high school. We had 15 or so apply to MIT (6 got in! Yesterday was a Good Day!), 20 apply to Harvey Mudd, at least a dozen apply to each of all the other schools mentioned here–and not one single person apply to Rose Hulman this year. We have several that would get in, but they don’t offer need-based aid, and they don’t seem to solicit that many applications. We have more kids apply to Reed and Pomona than Rose-Hulman.
What they don’t do is offer need based aid. Everyone who gets in is going to be asked to pay close to full price. In 2018, that’s $70k/year. This may well not have been the case in 1984. Rose-Hulman is no longer affordable for lower or middle income students.
I have over a 100 kids applying to college! Every year!
We can have a whole other conversation about college affordability (or lack thereof). I graduated from college in 1988 and as I remember, the total cost of attendance was about $15-17,000. I got about $5,500 each year from the two government student loan programs and got about $5,000 each year in scholarships. The rest my parents paid. I liked to think that the cost was split more or less evenly between me, my parents and the college itself.
From what I’ve heard from my brother who still has his younger one in school, the government student loan programs still max out at only about $5,000 each year, but now that covers maybe ten percent of the cost, rather than a third. I don’t know how people do it.
Not too long ago, maybe 30 years, Bennington was THE most expensive undergrad degree in the country, and regarded as a great spot for bright wealthy kids who wanted to study 17th century French poetry, get a degree, and then live off their trust fund.
Surprised not to see it mentioned in over three pages of posts here. Even though it doesn’t seem to be one of the “Little Ivies,” like Amherst, Williams, Hamilton, and Middlebury.
Donna Tartt’s first bestselling novel was about six Nietzchean (aka criminally insane) Bennington kids who pull off a number of murders in some of the dumbest ways possible, and end up all fucked up. I wonder if that hurt the school’s reputation in the eyes of those bright wealthy kids and their parents, and they elected to direct their money elsewhere?
Bennington is pretty new–founded in the 1930s–and it has tiny little endowment ($33M, according to Google). By comparison, most of the “little Ivys” you mentioned have an endowment a little north of $2B. So they can’t offer the financial aid that would make them interesting to me–or, frankly, a lot of rich kids, who look for diversity. They also will not be able to offer a lot of other things that elite schools use to set themselves apart, or to move past the Boarding School 2: Electric Boogaloo reputation.
Some of Bret Easton Ellis’s novels were also set at a thinly disguised Bennington. No surprise, though. Both went there and apparently at the same time. A friend from college also went there in between semesters at our nerd school (ending up with two bachelor’s degrees from two schools). Apparently the “Dress to Get Laid” party was real.
And as for its minuscule endowment, that’s a big problem for many schools. It costs a lot of money to maintain even a small campus and tuition payments (even at $50,000 per student) aren’t often enough to do it. I’ve heard the prediction that a lot of smaller private schools are going to have to close in the next few years or decades.
It is a common story, and it’s okay. Not everything lasts forever. But the question was “Why isn’t Bennington elite?” and the answer is “Because it’s poor, relatively”.
And thank you for the answer. I didn’t realize Bennington was so (relatively) indigent.
The “Little Ivies” also overlap the Patriot League schools (which include West Point, Boston University, Bucknell, Colgate, Holy Cross, Lehigh, Lafayette and Annapolis). While all good schools with a strong “scholar/athlete” culture, rich (in both senses of the word) alumni heritage and elitist culture, I don’t think you can put them in the same league as the top 5-10 schools like Harvard and Yale.
And thank you for THAT. I’d never heard of the “Patriot League.”
Howcum Colgate is Patriot League and Hamilton is generally considered one of the Little Ivies? They’re about 30 miles apart in upstate NY and have historically been rival colleges.
(Sorry, I find U.S. college culture and folklore fascinating!)
After a little googling, I find that the Patriot league is generally considered the most “elite” college conference after the Ivy League.
Odd, because it leaves Stanford, Duke, Chicago, etc., out in the cold.
I think this may be a view held most strongly by people who went to a school in the Patriot League.
Like I said, once you get past HYPSM, it’s all a mess. I have spent a LOT of time thinking about this. College Access to private schools that offer great funding to poor kids is literally half my job. We’ve had this wild success, and it’s so hard to explain to people why it’s a big deal that you got a kid into Middlebury, Hamilton, Williams, Pomona–fuck, CMU. It’s so hard to turn it into exactly the kind of elevator pitch I need to get more funding to do this even better.
I have tried so many ways to quantify it–but there’s no black line you can draw to delineate “elites”. The closest I can come is like “X% of kids had demonstrated need met”, but then they are like “how many full rides?” and you get bogged down trying to explain that, honestly, having a school like Hamilton ask you to take $2500 in subsidized loans/year and cover another $1200 through work-study is not a “full ride” but it’s a DAMN GOOD DEAL and you’d have to spend that money to eat if you stayed home anyway and at that point their eyes have glazed over.