I got five of the ivy league's just from The OC, Gossip Girl and A Cinderella Story (which was a terrible movie but they mentioned Princeton) - tried every other college I remembered hearing of and none of them came up...
No -- the Ivy League is essentially a sports league of some old schools in the northeast. Because those schools are academically strong, the term has tended to be applied colloquially to all academically strong schools (MIT, Stanford, etc.) but they don't compete athletically in the Ivy League.
The Ivy League is, at one level, just a sports league. MIT has never competed at that (middling) level of athletics, at least in the major sports. Also, the Ivies are all traditionally liberal arts schools with strengths in a broad variety of disciplines. MIT has always been tech/engineering centered. Great school but not an Ivy.
MIT is often ranked as the best school in the world bar none, but that doesn't mean it's part of the Ivy League. There are a ton of great schools in the USA that are not part of the Ivy League. Just because all the schools in the Ivy League are also great schools doesn't mean that if you're a great school you're in the Ivy League...
I've never seen MIT ranked as #1. Not sure which source you're using, but MIT is very specialized. Almost certainly the best engineering school along with Caltech, but when all factors are considered Oxford, Cambridge, University College London, Harvard, etc., usually score better.
Just Google "MIT #1 in the world" you'll find multiple articles over many different years citing several different sources and rankings. I've seen Harvard, Yale, and Oxford all ranked first in the world before. Don't think I've ever seen University College London with that distinction. I even googled it to see if I could find out if I was wrong; didn't find anything.
I agree. MIT, while a great school, is not number one. Its even questionable whether its #1 in engineering. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Oxford all are universally named #1 far more than MIT.
"Best school" is too fluid to truly be useful anyway. If you want to study journalism, you're better off at Northwestern or Syracuse University than you are at Harvard or Yale. University of Iowa has a truly elite English master's program that outranks most of the Ivy League's. When people say "best school," they're talking about the university as a whole (all professors, endowment, prestige in the common parlance, etc.), but if you're a student, your primary concern should be which program you're in and what the resources for that particular program are. Yale may be the best school in the world generally, but its business school is ranked like 18th. So you have 17 better options if you want to study business. Can you really say you're at the best school in the world if you're an MBA student at Yale just because Yale has the best law school? Doesn't add up to me.
Also, shoutout to the University of Chicago, which also gets overlooked in these conversations, but is one of the true global intellectual powerhouses. It's rarely number one in anything, but it is consistently near the top across every discipline. If you measured "best school" by averaging the rankings of each school's individual programs, I suspect U. Chicago would be right near the top.
Well said over the last two posts. Still, while Chicago's Economics department has been hyper influential over the past half-century, that's a terrible shame.
Two women were in a Boston supermarket watching a student with a full shopping cart standing in the "20 Items or Less" checkout line. One woman turned to the other and said, "I wonder if that is a Harvard student who can't count or an MIT student who can't read?"
It's a good thing you did. The correct answer is Penn (short for the University of Pennsylvania, located in Philadelphia, PA), not Penn State (short for Pennsylvania State University, located in State College, PA).
I've met lots of people who attended most of these. Trust me, they won't shut up about it. I've only met a couple who've attended Dartmouth. Does anyone actually attend Penn? If so, where are they now?
I assume that’s because 40% of takers get 100% correct. So missing only one still puts you only at the 60th percentile. But missing 3 should only get you 2 points so that part doesn’t make sense.
I also like the gag from ander though.