By Matt Bisanz
In one of my classes, the topic of Hofstra becoming a member of the Ivy League was recently brought up. During my four years at Hofstra, few rumors have been as resilient as the rumor that Hofstra had joined or was about to the Ivy League.
For the record: The Ivy League was created in 1954 as an athletic conference between schools regarded as the top academic schools in the nation. These schools are Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and Yale.
Historically, the Ivy League was a group of the oldest and strongest academic schools in the nation.
In the 1930s, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and the Naval Academy at Annapolis were considered unofficial members of the Ivy League due to their strong academics, athletics and history. However, these two institutions withdrew from the informal association prior to the League's formation.
In 1991, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was cited as a member of the Ivy Overlap Group, an organization made up of the eight Ivy League schools and MIT, for the purpose of comparing financial aid packages.
In its 54-year history, the Ivy League has never accepted a school into its ranks. In fact, its Web site does not even have a form to apply to join! Given this, it is extraordinarily unlikely that Hofstra would have found some way to join. But being the investigator I am, I decided to talk to some faculty about it.
Apparently this rumor dates back over 30 years and has always taken the form that Hofstra is on the precipice of joining the Ivy League. However, an informal survey indicates that if the Ivies were to open their league, Hofstra would not even be in the running, let alone a sure thing, for acceptance. Some of the national schools that are far ahead of us in claiming Ivy-like status are Stanford, New York University, Duke, the University. of Chicago, UC Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, CalTech, Emory, Notre Dame and Georgetown.
According to U.S. News and World Report, Hofstra is a third-tier university, meaning that it falls into the bottom half of national universities based on overall academic quality. And of course, those rankings only include universities, so top liberal arts colleges and non-doctoral schools, such as Amherst, Swarthmore, Villanova, and Vassar ranked separately in their own top tier.
Hofstra provides a good education, primarily (about half) serving New York students with average academic backgrounds in an expedient manner. Ivy League universities don't have "enrollment services days" where you can bring your transcript, be accepted and plan your class schedule. They don't have short winter sessions to serve students home from other colleges over the break.
Ivy League schools also don't have freshmen retention rates of 78 percent and graduation rates of 36 percent in four years and 55 percent in six years. Columbia has a 98 percent retention rate with 84 percent of its students graduating in four years. Even on Long Island, SUNY Stony Brook is ranked far higher, in the top 100 national universities, than Hofstra. So if by freak chance Long Island was allocated one spot in this imaginary expanded Ivy League, we'd already be fighting for second place.
Some things that probably contribute to our low ranking are the low admission standards. For instance, in the University's business school, admission borders on open admissions, with 85 percent of graduate applicants being accepted, a number that makes us the second-least selective business program in the nation.
Other things such as classes graded on an A-minus-to-A-scale (I've taken those) and the relative lack of financial support for faculty/student research combine to make us an unlikely aspirant to the Ivy Leagues. Of course, last time I checked, the Ivy Tech State Community College system in Indiana was receptive to expansion.
Matt Bisanz is a graduate student. You may e-mail him at mbisan1@pride.hofstra.edu.