Talk:Big Three (universities)

message: A clever hoax addition, but usage does not exist.  Not even at the citadels of obsessive UG admissions discussions (xoxohth, College Confidential.
lots of issues  | leave me a message 01:48, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  HYPSOMETRY removed 

message: Lotsofissues has removed HYPC, stating that "I can't find a single instance of use, likely attempt by Columbia student to associate school's name with big 3".  I've searched, and I cannot find anything, either.  Lotsofissues' hypothesis is corroborated by the fact that both of the IP addresses who have added this purported initialism,  and , are in the 160.39.0.0/16 netblock that is assigned to Columbia University. Uncle G 01:01, 16 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  HYPC 

message: * 
Dpbsmith (talk) 19:38, 5 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dead link removed 

message: See discussion on Talk:Harvard-Yale-Princeton#Merge proposal with Big Three (universities).  --└ Smith120bh/TALK ┐ 02:33, 27 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Merge proposal with [[Harvard-Yale-Princeton]]

message: I'd like to try to keep a clear distinction between the issue of that these three schools having, special status of some kind, based on historical connection to the WASP establishment, which is as close to being an objective fact as any such thing can be, from the endlessly contentious question of whether, in the year 2006, that status is deserved or justified. I'd also like to avoid blurring the realities of what words like "prestigious," "elite," and "selective" actually mean. 
This is made difficult because college guides, etc. tend to blur them and use them in a euphemistic way. U. S. News is not going to come right out and say "We don't really care about the percentage of alumnis who give as such, or the percentage of applicants admitted as such, we just use these as markers for what we really do care about. What we do care about is whatever it is that Harvard and Williams have, that MIT and Berkeley do not have, that would explain why alumni of the latter institutions have never occupied the White House." 
It is also made difficult because the influence of the WASP establishment a) has almost certainly declined since the Vietnam war, but b) almost certainly still exists. If so, a case can be made for non-academic "specialness" of these three schools being less important than it was. 
However, I flat out disagree with someone who made the comment on the MIT talk page that "the meme is now 'Harvard, MIT, and Stanford'" and I did a number of web and database searches that seem to bear me out. As of 2006 the Big Three are still the Big Three, whether or not they can be said to deserve it. Dpbsmith (talk) 16:08, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Keeping the less and more controversial topics separate 

message: I've been brooding myself about what to do with this section. Btm removed it. I was strongly tempted to do so myself. But I think it needs discussion. The material removed is appended below.
Now, my first reaction to it is that it is Stanford boosterism. (Members of universities such as MIT, Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, etc. often resent the status of "Harvard, Yale, and Princeton," which, from certain points of view, appears to beundeserved  Undeserved it may well be, but they have this special status whether deserved or not. I've seen editors of the MIT article insist that the meme is no longer "Harvard, Yale and Princeton" but "Harvard, MIT and Stanford," editors of the Penn article insist that the meme is "Big Four," including Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Penn, and so forth. But they have not produced convincing source citations attesting to such assertions). 
There are also problems with the statistics themselves. For example, it seems utterly inappropriate to include statistics on Supreme Court clerks and law firm hires when not all the institutions being compared have law schools. Also, given the numbers of undergrads, graduate students, and faculty of the four institutions--
*Undergraduate 6655,  5300, 4635, 6654
*Graduate 13000, 6100, 1975, 11421
*Faculty 2300, 2300, 1103, 1750
it would seem that many of the statistics reflect nothing more than the relative size of the institutions.
On the whole, I agree with Btm that this simply doesn't belong, and I'm also going to edit the section on "order of the names" to mention only founding date and relative size. Dpbsmith (talk) 00:23, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Statistical comparison...