<p>HARVARD</p>
<p>STANFORD</p>
<p>YALE</p>
<p>PRINCETON</p>
<p>MIT</p>
<p>COLUMBIA</p>
<p>CALTECH</p>
<p>JOHNS HOPKINS</p>
<p>U CHICAGO</p>
<p>U PENNSYLVANIA</p>
<p>for BA/BS, MA, & Ph.D.s, (& professional degrees if applicable(MD, JD, MBA, etc.) These are the private universities with the strongest faculties. Cornell's endowed colleges and Duke would follow these schools...</p>
<p>Is this your opinion? Coz the USnews says differently...</p>
<p>ONLY AND JUST for god's sake, the following are the nation's top ten colleges(and all happened to be private) according to USNEWS ranking.
(i am just copy&paste these so CCers wouldnt be confused this with BarryD's list. By no means, I believe that or whatnot)</p>
<p>Harvard University (MA)</p>
<p>Princeton University (NJ)</p>
<p>Yale University (CT)</p>
<p>University of Pennsylvania </p>
<p>Duke University (NC)
Massachusetts Inst. of Technology
Stanford University (CA)</p>
<p>California Institute of Technology </p>
<p>Columbia University (NY)
Dartmouth College (NH)</p>
<p>ill go with BarryD's first list, minus JHU and Penn, adding in Duke and something else.</p>
<p>You should specify whether you mean research or LAC private universities. Since ranking universities is NOT an exact science and each university has its own strengths and weaknesses, I believe 15 private research universities deserve to be ranked in the top 10. Well, you have 5 universities that are obviously among the top 10 universities. We all know them, they are:</p>
<p>Harvard University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Princeton University
Stanford University
Yale University</p>
<p>But after those 5 universities, it is difficult to pick the other 5 universities since there are roughly 10 or so amazing private research universities that are roughly equal and each can make a compeling case for making the top 10 list. They are:</p>
<p>Brown University
California Institute of Technology
Columbia University
Cornell University
Dartmouth College
Duke University
Johns Hopkins University
Northwestern University
University of Chicago
University of Pennsylvania</p>
<p>US News has ranked all of the universities I have listed among the Top 10 in the past (more than once). Some people consider Brown & Dartmouth Top 10, based mainly on selectivity. Academic prestige, however, is not really all about selectivity. Washington U has recently become just as selective as Duke; does that now make Wash U just as prestigious? Not in my opinion. There's the argument that schools like Dartmouth and Brown are Top 10 colleges because they are undergraduate focused. The University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins have a freshman class size that's considerably smaller than Brown's, and undergrads at the former schools receive just as much attention, if not more. Dartmouth has 56% of its classes with fewer than 20 students. However, larger universities that are well known for their graduate programs, like Harvard, Yale and Penn, have 73%, 75% and 74% (respectively) of their college classes with fewer than 20 students. Undergraduate class size is the main reason, why Penn is on my Top Ten list, ahead of Cornell. Cornell and Duke are among the top dozen private universities academically, in my opinion.</p>
<p>real top ten:
Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, Caltech, Columbia, Cornell, Johns Hopkins.</p>
<p>edit: i forgot we were talking about private.</p>
<p>u can add Chicago in there if you want.</p>
<p>I'd add in Georgetown, too... USNEWS just has a bias against it because of its low endowment, even though that has practically no effect on their spectacular academics.</p>
<p>thats going too far.</p>
<p>yeah, georgetown is defnitely going too far. I agree with alexandres top 15 or so, with the top 5 being seperate. Although I dont know that MIT has any more of a reputation than any of those others, at least here on the west coast. But HYPS, definitely are the only shoe-ins.</p>
<p>Why do you think Georgetown and Notre Dame's peer assessment scores are only 4.0 and 3.9 in US News? Are academics biased against Catholic/Jesuit schools? Do their schools of Arts & Sciences not have top-notch faculty? Do Nobel Prize winners teach at these schools? Do these schools enroll many National Merit Scholars or valedictorians?</p>
<p>Calidan, Georgetown does not have a top reanked department in any of the traditional disciplines, nor does it have a good school of Engineering. It has a good Business school (not top 20 mind you) and an amazing International Relationshions program. It is also excellent at placing students into tLaw school. But that is not enough to make Georgetown a top 10 private university. Georgetown makes the second group...which is still amazing anyway. It includes roughly 10 private schools like:</p>
<p>Carnegie Mellon University
Emory University
Georgetown University
New York University
Rice University
University of Notre Dame
Universitry of Southern California
Vanderbilt University
Washington University</p>
<p>Those 9 or 10 private universities, along with the 15 above, round up the top 25 private universities.</p>
<p>I'd rank it like this</p>
<p>Tier 1
Caltech
Duke
Harvard
MIT
Princeton
Stanford
Yale
Tier 2
Amherst
Brown
Columbia
Dartmouth
N'Western
UPenn
Williams
Tier 3
Chicago
Cornell
Georgetown
Hopkins
Notre Dame
Pomona
Swat
Tier 4
Bowdoin
Emory
Middlebury
Rice U
USC
Tufts
Vandy</p>
<p>LACs and universities dont belong on the same list.
and you put Penn, Dartmouth and Brown over Chicago! no chance! Chicago has better research, more prestige for academics, smaller teacher/student ratio, better location, and most of all, integrity in its academic programs. Brown and Dartmouth (along with cornell, but you put it in its place) are the bastard children of the ivy league. They cater their academic programs to smart kids who dont want to have to work very hard.</p>
<p>I don't think Duke should be in Tier 1.</p>
<p>"LACs and universities dont belong on the same list."</p>
<p>You're freaking absolutely correct! LACs are junior universities...they start below UC Santa Cruz in rankings if you ask me (not that there's anything wrong with UCSC).</p>
<p>The top ten privates are EASY!!</p>
<p>.................The 8 Ivies + Stanford + MIT</p>
<p>................................................period.</p>
<p>golubb.. what the hell are you talking about. You obviusly missed the entire point of my post, and your idea of the 8 ivies being the top 8 schools is just ridiculous. Most people who go to an LAC feel it has provided them with a better education than they would have gotten at a large university. Certainly, many teachers, even at universities, feel the atmosphere at an LAC is such that students take more pride and command over their education. The top 3 LACs (amherst, swarth, williams) equal in prestige to any ivy (at least as far as job recruiting and grad school admissions go), and are just as dificult to gain acceptance into. </p>
<p>stay off the board until you have something interesting or new to say. For now, you're just being a troll.</p>
<p>The City I can say the same for you. Darmouth/ Brown/ Cornell/ Penn are for kids who don't want to work hard? PLEASE. These schools are full of amazing students who go to the top grad schools. Just because they offer a quality of life greatly exceeding that of Chicago does not negate their academic quality.</p>
<p>Schools like Dartmouth/ Brown are tops for intimacy just like the LACs. It means that you have classes an discussions sections taught by professors, you have a strong community, undergraduate research grants, strong advising, etc.</p>
<p>Wow! This is the most misinformed college posting ever. It is common knowledge that Cornell is the most difficult ivy to get good grades in or even graduate from. While HYP have had notorious grade inflation Cornell has been a bastion of old fashioned competative grading. This can be easily proved by looking at the multiplier graduate schools use to adjust the grade point averages of various colleges. Cornell is reputed to have the highest multiplier of any university in the US while some of the HYP group have multipliers below 1. Because of it's size ,state/private blend and diversity of programs Cornell can statisticaly be an easier school to get in to than HYP but one should never make the mistake that it is an easier school to go to.</p>