I’m in general perfectly willing to draw distinctions in between different “tiers” of universities, but I have to say, as an ~Ivy League Person~, the notion that students at Georgetown (or Northwestern, UCLA, Johns Hopkins, Duke, WashU, UMich, UVA, etc.) might generally be of lower caliber than students on Ivy League campuses has literally never crossed my mind, nor is it one I would have guessed that more than a trivial number of other people in highly educated communities would endorse. I may be wrong, but I’ve really never thought I was particularly progressive in this respect. I’ve always understood the view supported by the data/graphs in this post to be the conventional one.
Completely the opposite, though, I do think that the average student at, say, Yale is indeed smarter than the average Georgetown student to a non-trivial degree, and I never seriously considered that this might not be the case.
Like, I guess, if pressed, I’d concede that maybe the mean at Yale is a little higher than the mean at Georgetown, but I’d also assume this should be attributed almost entirely to a handful of outliers in the distant right tail of the distribution at Yale and that the rest of the two schools’ distributions overlap nearly in their entirety. [referring here to imaginary distributions of “true g,” not to distributions of standardized test scores]
I’m in general perfectly willing to draw distinctions in between different “tiers” of universities, but I have to say, as an ~Ivy League Person~, the notion that students at Georgetown (or Northwestern, UCLA, Johns Hopkins, Duke, WashU, UMich, UVA, etc.) might generally be of lower caliber than students on Ivy League campuses has literally never crossed my mind, nor is it one I would have guessed that more than a trivial number of other people in highly educated communities would endorse. I may be wrong, but I’ve really never thought I was particularly progressive in this respect. I’ve always understood the view supported by the data/graphs in this post to be the conventional one.
Huh, interesting and thanks for sharing.
Completely the opposite, though, I do think that the average student at, say, Yale is indeed smarter than the average Georgetown student to a non-trivial degree, and I never seriously considered that this might not be the case.
Like, I guess, if pressed, I’d concede that maybe the mean at Yale is a little higher than the mean at Georgetown, but I’d also assume this should be attributed almost entirely to a handful of outliers in the distant right tail of the distribution at Yale and that the rest of the two schools’ distributions overlap nearly in their entirety. [referring here to imaginary distributions of “true g,” not to distributions of standardized test scores]