Education
How to Get Into College Guide
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Aug 10, 2008 - 12:21:25 PM

Newsweek's 25 Hot Rivalries: Intense Competitions Between Schools Still Important In College Admissions

(HealthNewsDigest.com) - New York—Ask colleges about their celebrated feuds with other colleges and they brush them off as irrelevant in an age of national unity, writes Contributing Editor Jay Mathews in the current issue of Newsweek. “Sir, we do not consider ourselves rivals with our sister academies except on the fields of friendly strifes,” says West Point spokesman Francis J. DeMaro Jr. Annapolis spokeswoman Deborah Goode has the same earnest message: “We support each other and our nation on the front lines of the global War on Terror.”

In academia, such seeming hatreds are no longer fashionable. But intense competition between high-quality institutions—what most people would call rivalry—still has importance in college admissions, Mathews writes in an excerpt of the Newsweek-Kaplan “How to Get Into College Guide,” which appears in the August 18-25 double issue (on newsstands Monday, August 11). These rivals (OK, pick a friendlier word: counterparts?) are continually trying to differentiate themselves for applicants who wonder which of similar, elite schools might be best.

We picked 11 pairs and one trio of colleges whose strengths are so great and resemblances so compelling that careful comparison is necessary to sort out which work best for which applicants. It’s also a bit of a guilty pleasure to marvel at how deeply embedded the rivalries are, Mathews reports. In every case, “no matter what the schools’ press releases say, students, faculty and alumni feel as if they’re in competition with one another. Like most successful institutions, that turns out to be one of their strengths.” The top 12 rivalries at U.S. colleges:

Old Ivies: Harvard vs. Yale Science Magnets: Caltech vs. MIT
Bay Area Giants: UC Berkeley vs. Stanford Big Hoosiers: Indiana vs. Purdue
American Warriors: Annapolis vs. West Point Midwest Stars: Michigan vs. Ohio State
For Women Only: Smith vs. Wellesley Historically Black: Howard vs. Morehouse
Social Activists: Guilford vs. Oberlin and Spelman
Catholic Powers: Boston College vs. Notre Dame Cinematic Enclaves: NYU Tisch vs. USC
Consortium Jewels: Amherst vs. Pomona Film School

Also in the excerpt, Miami Bureau Chief Arian Campo-Flores reports that Harvard’s major restructuring of its financial aid, aimed at easing the strain on middle-and upper-middle-income families, overwhelmed by the spiraling cost of higher education, that led other Ivies and well-endowed schools to publicize their own aid overhauls aimed at the same target.

Harvard’s initiative had three parts, Campo-Flores reports. The first, dubbed the “zero to 10 percent standard,” decreed that families making between $120,000 and $180,000 annually would now be expected to pay no more than 10 percent of their income. For those earning less than $120,000, the percentage would steadily decline until reaching zero for incomes of $60,000 and below. That means a family making $120,000 would be expected to contribute about $12,000, compared with $19,000 before. The second component: all loans would be replaced by outright grants (a policy that Princeton was first to enact, in 2001). And finally, in most cases Harvard would no longer consider home equity in determining a family’s ability to pay.

“It was really clear we were just not getting the very good middle-income students to even think about Harvard” because it was perceived as too expensive, says William Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid. “They were almost automatically going straight to the great flagship public universities.” Moreover, Harvard’s leadership fretted about what Fitzsimmons calls the “upstairs-downstairs syndrome”—that the student body was polarizing into rich and poor, with little in between. “We had a great fear we were becoming unaffordable and inaccessible.”

While some education experts find much to praise in the financial-aid revolution, the reaction from leaders at less-wealthy institutions, however, hasn’t been nearly as upbeat, Campo-Flores reports. “Some of their grumbling surely stems from Ivy envy. But they make a substantive point: that Harvard has placed them in an untenable position—unable to match the Ivies’ munificence, yet facing families who’ve heard the news and now want to haggle. “We got calls from students right away saying, ‘Harvard did this. Are you going to match them?’ ” says John Burdick, dean of admissions and financial aid at the University of Rochester in New York. “My concern is the larger signal to the marketplace about what education should cost.”

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