Anecdotally, degrees from the Ivy Leagues are not nearly as indicative of intelligence and aptitude as they used to be. They still function as great signals for prestige and networking ability, but they no longer translate to "this person must be a genius, they went to Harvard/Yale".
The source of my anecdote are the discussions I've had with the the recruiters at my company. They've also told me that Harvard/Yale graduates are way more likely to be prima donnas and leave the company after a short time in order to advance somewhere else.
Ivy's aren't the top schools for stem. MIT/Stanford/CMU are where the stem geniuses want to be, and after that the top public schools are probably more desirable than ivys because they're so much cheaper. I went to UIUC cs over uchicago and northwestern because of the price differential. By far the largest value ad ivys provide is networking with the soon to be rich and powerful. Seems like aspiring stem students realize that's not as important in their field.
This isn't true, it's a strange assumption often perpetuated online. Looking at cross-admit numbers actually published by Stanford's Faculty Senate, for example, Stanford's biggest overlap is with Harvard, Yale, MIT, and Princeton, in that order. It's a matter of pedigree - for undergrad, where grad school subject-specific rankings do not matter, there are an high concentration of very good STEM students at HYP; Harvard likely has the biggest concentration of excellent STEM students out of any university in America based on Olympiad winner matriculants and grad school outcomes, other than MIT. HYPSM lose virtually no students to universities other than between themselves, looking at the cross-admit numbers.
Schools like CMU, Berkeley, UIUC, etc. have different overlaps.
edit: This is just cold, hard data. Undergrads do not choose CMU/Berkeley/UIUC and whatnot over Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. Despite higher grad school rankings.
Are you counting stanford and MIT as ivy? If so then sure, but at least based off my experience, cs students that were accepted to ivy as well as stanford/mit/cmu always choose stanford/mit/cmu.
I'd love to see your data about whether students choose ivy vs. top state. I wasn't aware that existed so was just speaking from my experience knowing > 10 people choose U of I over ivys, including harvard.
"must be a genius"? Did people ever think this? While I went to university many decades ago, the whole "he went to Harvard, he must be a genius" would have seemed like a bad TV sitcom trope, when I was young. And still today.
Are students at top tier schools like that smarter than the average bear? Sure. Geniuses? I guess a few are, but most of them are just pretty smart + hard working + reasonably disciplined. Which is a pretty good combination that will help most people in their life.
Sometimes I get the feeling that some people expect that if they meet someone who went to an ivy/stanford/mit/chicago and that someone doesn't blow them away with their uber-genius greatness, that those schools' reputations must be total BS. IMO, that's unreasonable.
The smartest undergrads in the county are still at your HYPSM universities.
However, the median intelligence at these schools has definitely dropped drastically as these schools are putting less of an emphasis on SAT scores and the like.
This has been obvious since 1865. We only have a United States because self-educated Abraham Lincoln picked up the pieces left by elite New Englanders like Buchanan and the justices who decided Dred Scott.
Of Buchanan and the nine justices involved in Dred Scott, only one was a New Englander and he was one of the two dissenters. Both dissenters were educated in New England but only one from the majority. On the other hand, the list includes five Southerners, two Pennsylvanians and three from Dickinson College.
* James Buchanan - Pennsylvania, educated at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania
Majority from Dred Scott:
* Roger B. Taney - Maryland, Dickinson
* James Moore Wayne - Georgia, educated at what later became Princeton in New Jersey
* John Catron - Tennessee, self-educated
* Peter V. Daniel - Virginia, one year at Princeton, then self-educated
* Samuel Nelson - New York, Middlebury College in Vermont
* Robert Cooper Grier - Pennsylvania, Dickinson
* John Archibald Campbell - Georgia/Alabama, University of Georgia
Dissenters in Dred Scott:
* John McLean - Ohio, Harvard
* Benjamin Robbins Curtis - Massachusetts, Harvard
Ivys have always prioritized diversity over merit. The diversity they valued used to be wealth and power instead of just merit, now they've expanded that to include cultural diversity too. But make no mistake, these universities were never just looking to accept the smartest students.
The source of my anecdote are the discussions I've had with the the recruiters at my company. They've also told me that Harvard/Yale graduates are way more likely to be prima donnas and leave the company after a short time in order to advance somewhere else.