Take 1: Cornell is the worst ivy hands down. Change my mind. Would you rather go Brown or Dartmouth?

Take 1: Cornell is the worst ivy hands down. Change my mind. Would you rather go Brown or Dartmouth? After looking admissions data for 2022 you can clearly see cornell is steps behind the other ivys.

Brown 5% 2022

Columbia 3.73%. 2022

Dartmouth 6.24% 2022

Harvard 3.19% 2022

Yale 4.46% 2022

Cornell 8.7% 2021

Princeton 3.98% 2021

Upenn 5.68% 2021

Rankings off acceptance rate and common sense would be like this: Tier 1 ivy: HYP , Wharton, Columbia? Tier 2: Dartmouth, Brown, UPenn non Wharton Tier 3: Cornell

Brown over Dartmouth? Columbia over brown and Dartmouth?

27 Comments
 

cornells acceptance rate is inflated due to guarenteed TO's they offer after freshman year. Take that away and it has similar acceptance rates to other ivys

 
Most Helpful

You can't just use acceptance rate to gauge how "good" a school is. Northeastern's acceptance rate this year was under 7%. Finances aside, most kids aren't picking Northeastern over T30 schools. Columbia is a great school but it's not HYP, even if it has a lower acceptance rate than two out of three of those schools. Cornell will naturally have higher acceptance rates vs. other Ivies due to 1) significantly larger class sizes and 2) presence of state funded colleges, which on average, are less selective (but there are some exceptions like AEM, which is pretty hard to get into, especially if you're not an athlete). Certain programs there (e.g., engineering) are much stronger than at other Ivies.

USNWR (same guys that ranked HBS below Booth and Kellogg) don't rank Cornell that highly but they get docked somewhat for being a larger school (as do places like Berkeley and Michigan). Harder for large elite schools to game acceptance rates. Within academia / research, STEM, and many international circles, Cornell and Berkeley (and maybe even Michigan) are considered superior to Dartmouth and Brown. Penn gets a tremendous boost from Wharton, which most would be hard pressed not to agree is the top undergraduate business school. Princeton is among the cream of the crop despite having no professional graduate schools (law, medical, business). Bit of selection bias at play but I've been most impressed with Princeton grads.

I will say that the quality of Dartmouth's undergraduate program is quite strong. It benefits from being such a small school (only Ivy ending in "College"). It is not as well known outside of elite circles. That's maybe somewhat irrelevant ("who cares what the common man thinks?") but worth noting.

 

Following what other people said acceptance rates are not a great way to rank schools. That being said, Cornell is the worst ivy without a question (IVY! It’s still a top 20 school). All else being equal If you got into another ivy you would go to the other ivy. I’d put Cornell and brown at the bottom. Take Dartmouth over those two and Columbia over those three. This is also dependent on what you want to do but I’m guessing something in finance in which case that ranking holds.

Also don’t forget about the non-ivy schools that kick Brown’s, Dartmouth’s, Columbia’s, and Cornell’s asses and compete heavily in recruiting with the others

 

Says more about US News than Cornell. I don’t know why people use that site as the gold standard for college rankings. Look up their methodology. Also why would anyone trust a ranking that has Booth and Kellogg over HBS…? Cornell does fine on Forbes, WSJ, and international rankings.

In the real world, Vanderbilt and WUSTL are fantastic schools, but no prominent company or graduate school prefers a student from one of those schools to one from Cornell. 

 
Controversial

Assume you're just a hater or a troll, but wouldn't rule out the possibility that you're a big enough dumbass to actually believe this

 

Cornell and brown probably have a lot of dumb students that would never have gotten in if Asians weren’t discriminated against.  That have an inflated sense of self.   They failed already lol.  Now I’m sure they are strong in some areas but try to tell me you never met someone that went to Cornell that was pretty dumb in practice fwiw

 

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