Talk:Big Three (colleges)

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[edit] Agreed, this article is rather suspect?

Why is the "WASP establishment" pertinent to this article? Are these three schools really referred to as the "Big Three" anymore? & how did Princeton squirm into the H-Y rivalry?

Princeton has always been there. And the WASP establishment is quite pertinent because it is that establishment that created the schools' reputation in the first place. The Jerome Karabel book cited goes into the history in great detail.

However, I have to point out that Princeton does have a graduate school of architecture as well as important doctoral programs. It is not simply an undergraduate institution.

[edit] This is the stupidest fucking article

This article personifies the silliness of wikipedia. Anyone who supposes this web of mysterious references to the "WASP establishment" and quotes from the personal musings of obscure men with ridiculous names qualifies as an encyclopedia article is daft. The page should be deleted.

[edit] "In the past?"

I'm not going to fuss too much about recent edits that have qualified everything in the article by saying "in the past." Certainly the influence of the WASP establishment in the United States has been declining steadily ever since the Vietnam War. Nevertheless, a glance at Colleges and Universities Attended by the Presidents does not show any MIT or Berkeley alums. Stanford is represented only by a single president (Hoover), no more than the "little Ivies" Amherst and Williams, despite being a far larger school.

If we included recent presidential candidates, the pattern would be similar.

I think the article currently has tipped a bit too far in the direction of wishful thinking. The United States has not become a meritocracy, and U. S. News and World Report continues to rank Harvard, Yale and Princeton highly because, in the United States, these colleges still do have a special status—indeed, the fact that U. S. News ranks them relatively higher than the international rankings do confirms this. Dpbsmith (talk) 01:45, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

Keep in mind, however, that US News uses a different methodology than most international rankings. Especially in the case of Princeton, which fares well in US News but not as well in other rankings, it should be noted that Princeton's lack of strong a strong graduate program is heavily penalized in international rankings (which place emphasis on international research), yet it is one of the primary reasons why the university performs well on the undergraduate level. No one can say that US News methodology is "correct", but differences between US and foreign rankings cannot be attributed purely to any "special status" HYP may hold within the US. TheyCallMePanda 22:31, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

There are good points. As you in effect point out, U. S. News is ranking colleges, not universities. However, as the article notes, The New York Times reported that "when asked how he knew his system was sound, Mel Elfin, the rankings' founder, often answered that he knew it because those three schools always landed on top." That pretty much lets the cat out of the bag as far as I'm concerned. The U. S. News rankings use a variety of seemingly objective measurements that correlate with and stand in for some of the social factors that are of interest to U. S. readers choosing colleges. One year they didn't do it, CalTech ranked #1, and they hastily adjusted their methodology. Dpbsmith (talk) 22:41, 17 December 2006 (UTC)