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ITHACA, N.Y. — Cornell has been a member of the Ivy League for decades, but some of its students have Ivy envy.
Daniel Cohen, a graduate student, and Heather Grantham, a senior, are co-founders of Cornell's image committee.
They did away with new logos and used marketing and public relations strategies to stress the school's Ivy League identity.
So driven by a sense that Cornell is underappreciated, some of them banded together to form an "image committee," making it their mission to press the university into marketing and branding itself more aggressively, and to help it climb higher in college rankings.
Their fear is being viewed as a country cousin to Harvard, Yale and Princeton, more like a Midwestern flagship state university than a core member of a prestigious club. "Because of when most people go to college, their identity becomes closely associated with the identity of their university," said Peter Cohl, a committee founder who graduated last spring and is now working on Madison Avenue.
Let the college's standing drop in publications that rank universities, he said, and "my value as a human being feels like it's dropping." (Cornell is now ranked 13th among national universities by U.S. News & World Report.)
"We deserve more respect," said Heather Grantham, a senior who is now co-chairwoman of the image committee. "I am glad I came here," she added, "and it saddens us if it's not properly marketed."
It is an odd bit of role reversal. Marketing and honing an image have become commonplace among university presidents and admissions deans these days. But it is rare to hear students speaking the same language.
In this case, the committee, which was formed four years ago and now has about 50 members, successfully lobbied administrators to jettison a relatively new logo, which featured a large, bright red box with the word Cornell in modern typeface, and to revert to a simplified version of the old circular logo, with a crest and other traditional symbols.
The committee also persuaded the bookstore to stock a line of vintage hats and sweatshirts that decidedly emphasize Cornell's Ivy League roots. Next up is an assault on class size. "If they can reduce class size, they can be a Top 5 school," said Mr. Cohl, a nontraditional student who was 38 when he enrolled at Cornell.
Some recent developments have bolstered the students' view that Cornell was not putting its best foot forward, committee members say, and that changing its image has helped. Applications have increased by 35 percent in the last two years, and so it has been able become more selective, with the proportion of applicants offered admission declining to 24.7 percent this year from 31 percent three years ago.
Many elite universities also experienced increases in applications this year, but few if any have been as large as Cornell's. Its rate of admissions, while declining, is still higher than the seven other Ivy League universities.
Doris Davis, the associate provost for admissions and enrollment at Cornell, cited several factors in the sharp increase in applications, from a revamped timetable for sending mailings to potential applicants to an expansion of its recruitment trips to eight primary market areas. The image committee was not prominent on her list.
Other Cornell officials, though, gave the committee credit. "There's no doubt in my mind that it's directly related," said Thomas W. Bruce, vice president for university communications. "They were enormously important to the process."
Image committee members say that students' morale and sense of self-worth is caught up in the university's standing, though they deny that they see the school as the Rodney Dangerfield of the Ivy League.
"I don't have an inferiority complex," said Daniel Cohen, an image committee co-chairman who is now a graduate student in mechanical engineering at the university. "I just want to see my school improve, and I don't see why it can't."
The committee's roots lie in a Cornell-Yale football game in Ithaca four years ago. Yale fans in the stadium were wearing hats and other neat gear unlike anything Cornell offered for sale, Mr. Cohl said. He talked about that with students sitting nearby, including leaders of the campus Republicans and Democrats.
All were in agreement, he said. "Nobody was wearing our stuff," he said. "We didn't have cool hats, we didn't have cool hoodies."
