Florida named "New Ivy" by Forbes

What if it’s not in a STEM field though? Duke, Davidson, and Wake are superior schools, period. Moreover, if we are just comparing publics, add Georgia Tech to the list, especially for STEM. But I take your point among good women’s xc programs.

on the private new ivies, stanford is a weird omit (and USC an odd replacement), as is MIT, plus Duke, the better NESCAC (tufts williams amherst), swarthmore, some UAA (NYU chicago washu rochester), some SCIAC (pomona Caltech).

Stanford, MIT, Duke and U Chicago were ineligible for this as they are already considered close enough to Ivy's by the public at large according to Forbes

They could call it the Kudzu League.

Wake (5,500) and Davidson (2,000) have a very small number of students, and can be more selective, boosting their avg SAT. NC State has 37,000.

Duke has a very small/limited engineering dept of only 1,300 students. NC State has 10,000 engineering students. unc-chapel hill barely has any engineering. NC State is the FAR superior school for engineering in the state of NC.

the average scores for the second list of privates (almost all over 1500) together with the general quality of the ivies being compared (>1500), the list of omits in that neighborhood, then underlines how weird it is to include the 2 GOP state schools under 1400.

They excluded schools with enrollments (undergrad) of under 4,000 which excludes all top LAC's. They also didn't count Stanford, MIT, Duke, UChicago

Yeah, strange that the Forbes article omits the UC schools, particularly UC Berkeley and UCLA.

“Help! Help! We’re being replaced!”

Of course it isn’t my choice. But, just from that list alone, if my kid gets zero from Wake but $50,000+ per year from a Furman or Clemson, just looking at the Carolinas only, then the choice is easy. Nobody should pay $85-90k+ per year for any school. Period. Who cares if your degree says Harvard?

Btw, I do have a kid in this neck of the woods who got a full ride from a good private school in TN. It was her choice not to go there. But I also wasn’t going to pay $90,000 per year for Duke or Vanderbilt, as good of schools as those are. If I’m going to do that, then I might as well let them emancipate fully, buy them a house in trust, and let them pay their own way through a U of Tennessee. I’m serious.

Whites and white adjacents should commit more carjackings and more murder to reduce disparities in the justice system.

okay, sure, whatever. i am making a list of "non-ivy" ivies and i leave off the first chunk of those understood as ivy-plus. the direct equivalents and the immediate second tier.

and yeah, they said in the fine print no LAC no consensus ivy-plus. at that point your list of quasi-ivies isn't really ivy level then, is it?

it's a weird mix of pretending to be scientific then making odd exclusions, no UC, no ivy-plus. setting aside the elite LACs and MIT/CalTech are the schools seen as admissions neighbors. but if you're trying to push an anti-snob thing then williams and CalTech don't fit, UF does.

I'd say that a school like that could be worth it if you're not a diversity hire (i.e. fulfill absolutely 0 quotas) and are dead-set on going into IB or consulting. If you're from a normal family, even a normal upper middle class family making $400k per year or more, getting a full ride or near full to be an athlete at Stanford or Duke would be worth it over Harvard.

But if your family is worth $10 million or more so the cost would be relatively negligible (especially if there aren't 4+ kids and if they've been saving in a college fund that grew a good amount over time), I can totally see someone picking a school based more on grade inflation / fit: e.g. paying full tuition at a top Ivy vs paying $10k per year to go to even a very slightly lesser school like Duke

seriously? the average ivy grad makes 10s of thousands of dollars more a year than some SEC grad. particularly when many of the ivies have gone tuition free below a parent earning threshold, being obsessed with "expense" over "revenue/ROI" there would be silly.

people come on here pimping juco all the time. and it is a good way for marginal or really poor students to keep costs down. but cost is only one factor. what happens when a job is available and some dude slaps down harvard and you slap down juco+second rate state. exactly. you have kept your debt down but also not maximized income or job odds.

Ok, I take your point. If I still lived in NC AND I had a kid who was oriented toward engineering or similar (and was a top caliber runner), then NC State is a solid, competitive choice. I agree.

But for any other field and if any of the other NC schools offered $50,000+, then the others are more elite and have a better name brand. Duke >>> NCSU. But, again, paying $90,000 per year to attend any school is silly.

I’m coming at this from the POV that you make too much money to qualify for financial aid but are not so independently wealthy that you can just pay cash for an IVY, most of which are overrated anyway.

So, under your scenario, yes, a Duke or Stanford with some athletic or, possibly, merit aid are much better decisions. Or schools like Ga Tech and Wake. Or really any top 30 private that gives that $50,000+.

Why would I pay $360,000 for a bachelors when I can pay $120,000 and invest the rest for law school or med school? I get the “ROI” of Ivies, but, once you get your first job or into a good grad school, then it’s on you, not your “brand.”

There's way too much snobbery associated with posts about college admissions. While it's true that getting great grades from a top university when applying to graduate and professional programs gives you a leg up on lower ranked schools top students from "lesser" schools continue to get admitted to top grad programs.

When I was in high school a shot putter from a neighboring high school was derided as a dumb jock. He didn’t have the grades to get into a four year school, so he went to the local community college. There he found his footing academically, transferred to a decent four year college and today has a thriving dental practice. His story is a bit of an outlier but nevertheless there are many similar stories of kids with lower grades finding themselves and going on to successful academic and professional careers.

re supposed "grade inflation," this is a hobby horse of the ill informed. arguing for a curve at a school full of near-perfect SAT is absurd. "well, the folks without degrees are moaning that someone has to get a 'c'....so here you go, you could have included a step more on that math proof, even though you got the answer right......"

it also smacks of elitism. you moan about elitist ivies then want for their grading to select out a chosen few on nitpick grounds, rather than reward high quality work superior to most other schools, with the "A" it earned on merit. it's a legit debate of whether grades are curves or reflect quality, and if so, quality within the broader world?

personally i think this is boring culture warfare or paens to awful grading for the sake of being harsh. the sort of "C for the sake of giving out Cs" shabbiness that usually makes the giver look bad in retrospect.