A 'New Ivy'

GAMBIER, Ohio (August 14, 2006) Kenyon is described as one of the 25 "New Ivies" in The 2007 Kaplan/Newsweek 'How to Get Into College Guide.' The article counts Kenyon among a list of "world-class schools" featuring "great academics and first-rate faculties," appealing to students looking beyond Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.

The article opens with an observation from Kenyon admissions dean Jennifer Delahunty Britz that "Kenyon 'has shifted from a backup school to a first choice. We tend to get very intellectually diverse kids-students who want to major in biology and English,'" for example.

The authors, Barbara Kantrowitz and Karen Springen, draw attention to the distinctive combination of intellectual rigor with an atmosphere that emphasizes collaboration rather than competition among students. Also mentioned are the College's low student-faculty ratio and small average class size. Kenyon gets high marks for its sense of community. "Kenyon is often called a writer's college," they report, noting that authors like E.L. Doctorow (The March, Ragtime, and other books) and Laura Hillenbrand (Seabiscuit) attended the College. As a plus, "Students can stay fit in a $70 million athletic center that opened in January."

Kenyon is the only Ohio institution featured in the article, which focuses on a variety of public and private institutions, including liberal-arts colleges, research universities, and technical institutes.

In the same week, Time magazine published an article called "Who Needs Harvard?" in which they encourage students to look at top-notch institutions beyond the Ivy League. The article praises Kenyon's practice of writing individualized acceptance letters to admitted students.