Talk:Big Three (colleges)

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Agreed, this article is rather suspect?[edit]

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.

Karabel also shows, however, that Harvard's Jewish population was around 30% in 1925, somewhat giving the lie to this article's Hollywood version of HYP's traditional 'WASP exclusivity' in the 20th Century (See 'The Chosen', p.105). As another among many such examples, Karabel notes that over 1200 Jews entered Yale during the period between 1900 and 1930, when anti-semitism was allegedly rife (p.55). (Among many other campus leaders, Milton Winternitz led the Yale Medical School as its dean from 1920 to 1935.) And in most years, Jewish students were outnumbered by Catholic students (see Marcia Graham Synnott, "Student Diversity at the Big Three" (pp.87-88) ConradArchguy (talk) 12:46, 12 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

"In the past?"[edit]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

Moving too-speculative comments on naming order.[edit]

I'm provisionally removing:

  • The order might also be a reflection of each university's status in popular opinion.[citation needed]
  • Yet another possibility is that only the name HYP sounds acceptable when said out-loud. Other letter combinations, such as PHY, YPH, PYH, etc. are either not pleasant to the ear or do not make the letters making up the acronym clear.

The first could be reinstated if there were supporting evidence.

The second puzzles me because I've always heard HYP used as an initialism ("H-Y-P"), not an acronym. Is there a reference for its being used as an acronym? If so, it pronounced like "hip" or like "hype?" Dpbsmith (talk) 00:57, 29 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Restoring section on historical status[edit]

This section is well referenced to reliable sources. The entire section was deleted, without any edit comment and without any discussion here. I've restored it. Please discuss major changes here before making them. Dpbsmith (talk) 19:40, 8 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

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Union College?[edit]

Forget the footnote. Hill School has better claim to mention in same sentence w HYP than Union College. I see vandals at work. 127W111 (talk) 02:59, 23 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

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