<p>Well, the 2008 rankings have been leaked. As always, the smaller and awesome undergrad ivies get screwed. Penn rises 2 notches and Brown 1. Dartmouth drops 2.</p>
<p>Best National Universities</p>
<li>Princeton University (NJ) </li>
<li>Harvard University (MA)</li>
<li>Yale University (CT)</li>
<li>Stanford University (CA)</li>
<li>California Institute of Technology
University of Pennsylvania </li>
<li>Massachusetts Inst. Of Technology </li>
<li>Duke University (NC)</li>
<li>Columbia University (NY)
University of Chicago</li>
<li>Dartmouth College (NH)</li>
<li>Cornell University (NY)
Washington University in St. Louis</li>
<li>Brown University (RI)
Johns Hopkins University (MD)
Northwestern University (IL)</li>
<li>Emory University (GA)
Rice University (TX)</li>
<li>University of Notre Dame (IN)
Vanderbilt University (TN)</li>
<li>University of California – Berkeley </li>
<li>Carnegie Mellon University ¶</li>
<li>Georgetown University (DC)
University of Virginia</li>
<li>University of California – Los Angeles
University of Michigan – Ann Arbor</li>
</ol>
<p>Princeton has a larger graduate student population than Brown. This gets lost because people like to site that, overall, Princeton has fewer students. However, that's because Brown has more undergraduates. Princeton not only has more graduate students, but it has historically allocated more of it's institutional resources to graduate students. Remember, pretty much all of the top ten "National" universities are research factories, including Princeton. To assert that the more undergraduate focused Ivies such as Brown and Dartmouth are penalized in the U.S. News National "undergraduate" rankings is not outlandish.</p>
<p>I would point out that many undergrads at places like Princeton and Brown take graduate courses and do research with faculty. So it is hardly obvious that having lots of graduate students is bad for undergraduate education. In fact, isn't Brown engaged in enlarging its graduate schools?</p>
<p>I wasn't trying to infer that having lots of graduate students was bad, what I was attempting to point out is that Princeton has traditionally funded and placed more emphasis on graduate research than either Brown or Dartmouth, and this influences, to a degree, how National universities do in the U.S. News rankings.</p>
<p>To have top faculty you need a supply of top grad students, labs, libraries, undergraduate slave labor and all the other hallmarks of a research-focused university. More grad students means more availability of recitation sections, office hours, research mentoring and courses for the undergrads. That Princeton is more grad-oriented is, directly or indirectly, a big part of the reason it ranks at the top as an undergraduate program, and deservedly so.</p>
<p>Well, I'm not sure more grad students means "more availability of recitation sections, office hours, and courses for the undergrads".</p>
<p>It certainly means more GRADUATE courses, which enhance the educational experience for undergraduate majors in the field. It means a larger faculty, which leads to deeper and broader expertise at this level. The trade off is more people competing for faculty attention. There is no single right way to manage this. For all their student focus, the top LAC's have much worse student faculty ratios than do the highly graduate oriented universities.</p>
<p>Using the Carnegie classification or the less nuanced USNews classification, one gets a choice, large university with lots of graduate students and programs or small LAC with, presumably more direct faculty interaction but fewer opportunities. For an individual student the best environment depends on that particular students interests and needs.</p>
<p>If these rankings worry you, you're not a true Bruno. Real Brunos would sneer at the notion of some non-educational corporation trying to rank-and-file education as if it were some kind of race for the Nextel Cup.</p>
<p>You can't really stereotype a "true Bruno." Some people do depend on these rankings; the reputation of a school can make or break a applicant's chances for certain jobs. Most everything is a peking order.</p>
<p>"the reputation of a school can make or break a applicant's chances for certain jobs. Most everything is a peking order."</p>
<p>Except that the reputation of a school is not dependent on USNWR. The rep comes first and USNWR attempts to measure it. Get your cause and effect straight. No firm is choosing where to recruit based on USNWR rankings.</p>