<p>Public schools are definitely underrated. I don’t see how schools like Emory can be better than Michigan/Wisconsin/UVA/ect. In foreign countries where people don’t look at at us news rankings, these public schools are are ranked very highly while nobody has ever heard of Emory or Georgetown.</p>
<p>Here is a much different ranking of universities</p>
<p>Here are some random schools and their ranking on that list:
Harvard = 1
stanford= 2
UCB = 3
Columbia = 7
Cornell=12
UCLA= 13
Wisconsin= 17
Michigan= 22
Brown= 69
UVA= 91
Emory= 100
( these are rankings for the world, not
just the USA)</p>
<p>@modeling…you’ve posed compelling points. In looking at your argument #3 (SAT scores) some of the info for the state schools, however, is inadvertently skewed. You talk about OOS acceptance rates of schools like UVA, for instance (argument #2). UVA does not discriminate in their publications the SAT averages for IS and OOS – the figures you’ve shown are for the combined applicant pool. If you had the figures for OOS students available, you could break it down even further to illustrate the competitive selectivity of this subcategory of students at the well-known publics. I would be interested to know what these averages might be for OOS applicants to schools like Berkeley, UVA, UMich, UNC, W&M, etc. and how they compare to the IS population.</p>
<p>Don’t you think major plays a big role in choosing for a school too? </p>
<p>Would you really pick Dartmouth or Brown over Berkeley if you want to major in computer science or engineering? </p>
<p>I don’t know about you, but I would pick Berkeley EECS over any engineering at Brown, Dartmouth, UPenn or Columbia. I would pick Haas over Brown or Cornell.</p>
<p>RML: Yes, major matters. I would argue that it matters quite a bit more for graduate school than undergraduate though. I major in computer science, and made the choice for UCLA over Berkeley. I’ll admit, reputation was a huge factor in favor of Berkeley. I ultimately chose LA just because I was completely in love with the campus and area and environment. Did I make the right choice? Maybe. Maybe not. I certainly don’t think going to UCLA will limit any job prospects. However, I feel that the education I’d get at Brown would be superior to that of either school. Computer science is actually a very strong major at Brown. The school has close ties to companies like Google and Pixar, and graduates usually go onto fantastic jobs. The small class sizes and more “teaching-oriented” focus of the college make me believe strongly that I’d come out of Brown more skilled than I would out of Berkeley or LA. </p>
<p>For graduate school, I’d choose Berkeley over the other options in a heartbeat because of it’s reputation in the field.</p>
<p>side-note: My dad was actually a hiring manager at Northrup-Grumman, which is an engineering place. Because of that I was able to speak to a lot of engineering professionals about things like school reputation. The impression I get is that you just need to go to a good school. No one really cares about slight differences in ranking or reputation. They would look at UCLA and say “hey that’s a great school” the same way they would look at Berkeley or Yale or Brown and say “hey that’s a great school”. I realize this is just a personal anecdote, but this is definitely the vibe I get.</p>
<p>^ I don’t have any problem with the statement that Brown’s CS program is superb. I do however have a problem when someone says that Brown’s CS is superior to Berkeley’s even at the undergraduate level where Brown is generally believed to have the strongest advantage. I don’t think Brown grads get more love by those big IT companies than Berkeley grads are. Google and Apple have special ties with Berkeley too (no idea about Pixar.) I don’t think Google would rather have a Brown CS grad than a Berkeley CS in their company. And Berkeley’s proximity to SV is a big additional advantage for Berkeley and its graduates. It’s the same advantage which Columbia grads enjoy in joining WS companies over Berkeley or Stanford grads.</p>
<p>I don’t think any of these companies care whether their employees came from Berkeley or Brown. Ibanking would care more about that. I think that these companies care much more about the quality of their employees’ work and skill set. I didn’t say that Brown was better than Berkeley for computer science. I said that it was better for me. I feel that I’d have more access to professors and research. I like the environment better and could see myself succeeding more. I also prefer the area, since I would like to live on the east coast after graduation. It’s ridiculous to say that one school is just plain “better” than another, and I didn’t mean to say anything like that.</p>
<p>RML,
As a non-American living outside of the USA, you may not understand our college and/or business culture. You could learn a lot from arcadefire. Read his posts again. </p>
<p>In the USA, employers don’t make fine distinctions between high quality colleges, eg, UCB is superior to Brown or vice versa, as the basis for their hiring decisions. </p>
<p>In the USA, employers often use the school’s name as a screen (and for engineering, UCB and Brown would both likely make the cut), but after that, the name of the school is meaningless and the individual in the interview room is everything. </p>
<p>In the USA, we have historically looked at the individual and hired based on his/her merits and not the credentials of the college attended. </p>
<p>In the USA, advancement in the business world is based on one’s work and not on one’s college. We are a meritocracy. This is not a monarchy or a state-controlled economy (at least not yet). </p>
<p>I recognize that it may be difficult for you to understand the USA given the hierarchical nature of the societies from which you come and in which you now live. I guess it’s easier and simpler to have such a social and economic structure where the schools brands dominate and everyone knows their place. But the USA is not like that. In the USA, we value the individual more than the institution. The college doesn’t define the person or determine his/her life and success potential.</p>
<p>(1) Be as a starting point for tabulating universities super-score their SAT scores versus those do not. In that light, ranking is relative and subjected to change as increase or decrease of data entry. As stated in my previous post: </p>
<p>As a starting point, Table 3 presents the ranking of some of the most popular national universities based on the summation of first two SAT scores (reading and writing) by the order of 50% SAT. One can retrieve those do not super-score SAT scores to create a new table for them.</p>
<p>(2) Address a statement made by lesdiablesbleus: </p>
<p>Yeah, the top 5% of Michigan, UVA and Berkeley students are HYP material while the next 20% are probably Ivy/Stanford/Duke/<em>insert top private school</em> material .</p>
<p>Two strange things in the post:
(1) Only HYPS were included, MIT was not mentioned.
(2) Stanford was placed in different group</p>
<p>I try not to get trapped into a lengthy discussion on MIT so I leave it out intentionally. Ivy should stay since they were mentioned in the post.</p>
<p>Thanks for your interests in the discussions.</p>
<p>UVA does not discriminate in their publications the SAT averages for IS and OOS – the figures you’ve shown are for the combined applicant pool.</p>
<p>True, thats why I used a lowered-IS/OOS-ratio Berkeley, instead of UVA, Michigan, and W&M, as an example for illustration.</p>
<p>If you had the figures for OOS students available, you could break it down even further to illustrate the competitive selectivity of this subcategory of students at the well-known publics. I would be interested to know what these averages might be for OOS applicants to schools like Berkeley, UVA, UMich, UNC, W&M, etc. and how they compare to the IS population.</p>
<p>Alex, UCB, and hawkette, do the breakdowns of the aforementioned SAT averages for IS and OOS exist? I wish they do exist and are available in the public domain.</p>
<p>Wow, this is stupid. LOL. I mean really, let’s cut the data another 100 ways and put about 50 more conditions and assumptions on top of that and then pretend it is really meaningful. Unbelievable.</p>
<p>modeling: the data for UC exists, but must be back-calculated using UCStatfinder. But the short answer is that the IS SAT mean for Cal is 1326 (M+CR) and ~1390 for OOS.</p>
<p>This is the second time you use such offensive language on this thread. Do you have anything that would provide scientific insights to help the readers? I expect better from you.</p>
<p>It is not offensive language, I am not calling you stupid. There is nothing scientific about any of this, so no I have no insights on such an arcane and useless discussion, other than to call it arcane and useless and, well, stupid. I think it is a quite accurate description actually, and I am alerting other readers that is the case, obviously only IMO.</p>
<p>I am not sure why you would expect anything from me, frankly. Do you know me? But actually I think what I posted is extremely useful. It is my way of saying, if you need me to spell it out, that it is useless to analyze these things to death. The data is not that good, there are far too many conditions and caveats to make any analysis useful even if the data were better, and in the end it ends up generating tons of useless discussion. Which would be alright if it were only a matter of people that like this sort of thing just wasting their time, but it inevitably results in misstatements about various schools and in presenting the unsuspecting or less informed with a poor view of how universities compare. There, is that better for you?</p>
<p>It is understandable that applicants from foreign countries have to rely on hearsay, imperfect information, and a poor perception of what a superior undergraduate education should offer. It is not really surprising since the same attitude is tangible among recent immigrants in the United States, especially from Asia. Brand name shopping sometimes yields the best quality, but rarely the best values!</p>
<p>Xiggi and I have had our disagreements in the past (well, one big one, lol) but we totally agree on this one. Using foreign perceptions as a yardstick is bizarre. It is bad enough that USNWR uses PA when most of the people surveyed don’t really know what is going on in other schools, but to worry about what some guy in Paris or Sydney thinks or has heard of? Ridiculous. Besides, the statement that people in foreign countries don’t look at USNWR is completely wrong. There are only a few thousand if not tens of thousands of posts on here from international students that worry about prestige based on USNWR rankings, which is too bad for them IMO. But back to the original point, how much do most Americans know about which are the best schools in China, or Japan, or South Africa, or even Europe? Not much. Most have heard of Oxford and Cambridge, and a smattering of others maybe. Don’t you think it is the same reversed? Of course they know Harvard, Yale, MIT, etc. but don’t you think they know Wisconsin and Illinois because they studied US Geography in their schools? Of course it is why they know the names.</p>
<p>How can anyone establish that the median and the mean “gravitate” to the the same number at … different schools? Do you believe that the distribution of the SAT scores is identical at all schools, or even at the schools ranked on the first page of the USNews ranking table?</p>
<p>Playing with tables and presenting “selected” data can be fun, but IS always misleading. However, trying to draw conclusions from such futile exercise is pure non-sense. The massaged information presented in this thread is one of the most egregious examples one could read on CC, although many have come close. </p>