I've seen this before, and I think it's ridiculous to assume that there's some arbitrary cutoff about top 10 colleges. Why is not percentile based?
For reference, there's 12 Houses at Harvard. With a bit of paperwork, they could each be a separate college, pushing Dartmouth all the way down completely out of the top 20. But would the education at Dartmouth have gotten worse in any way?
Rephrased, what if we instead classify the Ivy League as a single college with eight campuses? What's the difference?
It’s because for cultural reasons US people ascribe elite status to precisely those ten colleges. Or T14 in some cases.
If the US ascribed sainted elite status to the top 100 colleges to the top 100 colleges, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. By contrast in Canada if you went to UBC, McGill or UBC people assume you are smart.
That’s in the same article where they compare the value of an endowment (measured in dollars) against the GDP of three random countries (measured in a different unit: dollars per year [per country]). Analytic rigor is not high.
I've seen this comparison in a few articles. It makes no sense at all. It's like if I said Microsoft's market cap ($1.942T) is larger than the GDP of Russian ($1.7T), or Apple's Market Cap ($2.125T) is double the combined endowments of every single US university altogether (about $1T). Complete nonsense comparisons.
For reference, there's 12 Houses at Harvard. With a bit of paperwork, they could each be a separate college, pushing Dartmouth all the way down completely out of the top 20. But would the education at Dartmouth have gotten worse in any way?
Rephrased, what if we instead classify the Ivy League as a single college with eight campuses? What's the difference?