<p>Not sure why anyone wants to compare this ranking with USNWR’s. This ranking is a ranking of the graduate departments of research universities. USNWR, except for its misleading peer assessment, is meant to measure the undergraduate education at universities and LACs. </p>
<p>This ranking is grossly irrelevant to high school students as it glorifies parts of an education they will barely see, or have any contact with. </p>
<p>A total yawner. Even with the rapidly declining value and integrity of the USNWR ranking, this ranking remains as questionable as it is misleading.</p>
<p>Cal Tech had a great reputation for math/science in the 70’s when I was looking at colleges and I have never heard of it falling off. It has long been well respected for its areas of strength. Can you major in English there - and if you could, who would? Whether it is the top university in the world, whatever that means, is irrelevant. It is one of the top universities of its kind in the world. Perhaps it is a niche school, but it is an extremely important one. For a student with terrific quantitative skills, it would be a hard university to surpass, though it has nearby competition from Harvey Mudd which benefits from its inclusion in a consortium of fine liberal arts colleges.</p>
<p>I have no trouble with the “top” part of the rating–it’s “university” that I have trouble with. I have trouble seeing Caltech as exemplifying what a “university” is. That’s not an insult, it’s just a matter of classification.</p>
<p>Is a place a university, for example, if there are no music, art, foreign language, or religious studies majors?</p>
<p>Pizzagirl - I don’t mean it in a bad way. It is becoming uneconomical to support them when it costs 220k plus to get a degree in English and all you might get is a job paying 40k as a teacher in return.</p>
<p>The cost of education has gotten out of hand at most schools and when students graduate, they find that the passion they are exhibiting for their major does not always pay them back in kind when they account for cost of living and student loan payback requirements. This applies even if you go to a state school and take on even 50k in loans.</p>
<p>That’s a different topic, though. Go back to Hunt’s question. Is a university a university if there are no music, art, foreign language or religious studies majors? Or ask the question more broadly - no humanities majors? Certainly no one calls Juilliard a university or pretends that it’s anything but super-specialized – why is Caltech any different? It’s not a slam on Caltech in the least, so don’t pretend that those of us who are asking the question have anything other than respect for the school, its students and faculty. We’re asking the STEM people on here to open their minds and think differently and stop thinking of STEM as the be-all-and-end-all of human existence.</p>
<p>I am only stating that the rest of the schools are headed Caltech way. Caltech does have humanity majors with 30% of course catalogue dedicated to it. The fact that no one wants to go there to major in humanities is a whole different issue, no different than people not wanting to go to Yale to major in engineering. </p>
<p>What if I also want to study humanities and the social sciences?
Not only are you required to do so at Caltech, you’ll want to. Almost 30% of Caltech’s course offerings are in the humanities and social science division, with fascinating classes and excellent professors. There are opportunities to learn about topics completely unrelated to science, and also to merge your interests through coursework and research. A number of students will double-major in a science field and a humanities/social science field each year.</p>
<p>The reason that no one wants to go to Caltech to major in humanities is because they aren’t strong in humanities and they attract students who don’t have a lot of use / time for humanities. So that’s a straw man. That’s rather like saying no one goes to Juillard to major in physics. It has nothing to do with humanities being less valuable as an area of study, though.</p>
<p>Let me cut the STEM people a little hint: If you don’t want to be thought of as number-crunching, soulless drones who evaluate people’s intelligence solely on the basis of SAT scores, always value a 2400 over a 2300 in college admissions no matter if the 2400 is a loner and the 2300 is a leader … then don’t act like number-crunching, soulless drones. Not valuing the humanities – not seeing the importance of humanities to how we live life – is the very definition of soulless drone. What’s the point of figuring out the physics behind the engineering of a fancy new building if there are no great orchestras to play in them, no great plays to be acted in them, no works of art that make people think differently about the world?</p>
<p>Why is that a straw man? How many people serious about engineering want to be at the Ivies?</p>
<p>I know of at least one jewish girl this year who got into Harvard, Yale and Princeton, was given a 100,000 Thiele grant to stay out of college but chose to attend MIT.</p>
<p>PG, The thing is it’s coming close to no great orchestras left. Julliard may not be so marginalized in university rankings if making classical music is as lucrative as being tech savvy. You are right that they both are narrow in thier teaching. But that’s where the similarity ends. I doubt that Julliard trained musicians will make up much of future upper middle class while it is a real possibility future middle class be dominated by tech types, like it or not.</p>
<p>It’s all pretty silly to me. With my d. now at Princeton (supposedly, though the data don’t show it, the most “undergraduate focused” of the Ivies), my limited experience combined with hers would say the quality of teaching is substantially higher at Pomona, or CMC, or Smith than it is at Princeton (or H. or Y.) It frankly is hardly a contest. So clearly something else besides the experience of teaching is being measured.</p>
<p>As to the validity of that measure, as for the USNWR as well, they are what they are.</p>
<p>So the beauty of engineering is impossible to enjoy or inspire? Have you seriously never seen an episode of Modern Marvels and been just as enthralled as watching a play on PBS? If you can’t see all the beauty of the Louvre in a the Hoover Dam, a skyscraper, or quantum mechanics then I think you’re missing out on half the beauty of humanity!</p>
<p>PG, it seems you are presenting an extreme picture. Texaspg nailed it when he spoke of the quality of the soc sci & humanities courses. Many Caltech UGs are involved in drama and musical groups, newspaper, etc. While they have an interest in these areas, they know they have to complete a core heavy in sciences. Years back, the core included 5 terms of physics. </p>
<p>The top grad schools in some of the STEM fields require 2-3 day interviews. I suspect they have a benchmark for GRE scores, but they wouldn’t spend so much time and money interviewing if they were not looking for research and personality ‘fits’.</p>
<p>Artloversplus - The rankings you list that puzzle you are easily explained by this method’s huge emphasis on research, especially graduate-level research (not many undergrads are going to be doing and publishing citation-worthy research).</p>
<p>These rankings “feel” more legitimate to me if you are looking at graduate research programs. If you are talking about undergraduate education, not so much.</p>
<p>Under this ranking’s notion of “quality,” an LAC would not stand a chance. LACs would barely rank above many high schools.</p>
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<p>Maybe we are returning to the times centuries ago when a university education consisted almost solely of the study of Latin and Greek literature, with maybe a little theology or mathematics thrown in around the edges. Except now the new Latin and Greek are science and engineering.</p>
<p>The main formal distinction between a university and a college is that the former offers graduate education, and the latter doesn’t. We can certainly argue the nuances of this (what else is CC for? ), but that means that yes, Caltech is a university. It takes people in surprising directions, like this young woman [Caltech</a> Gold-Medal Fencer Doubles Up on NCAAs - Caltech Features](<a href=“http://features.caltech.edu/features/148]Caltech”>http://features.caltech.edu/features/148) who may yet be a humanties major…at Caltech. </p>
<p>There was a recent discussion about how the state of Texas is considering eliminating on a campus-by-campus basis majors which graduate on average fewer than 5 students a year. The CC thread concentrated on how some campuses would no longer offer a physics major. That seemed as depressing to me as having a campus lose majors like English or Econ. Those campuses would surely also lose some of the majors Hunt referred to. Yet we’d still refer to those campuses as universities. </p>
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<p>C’mon PG, you’re unfairly conflating arguments and posters from other threads with people on this one. Caltech is certainly not a place which slavishly values higher numbers over other factors, and its students and faculty aren’t humorless, soulless drones who find no value in other fields (Sandra Tsing Loh is laughing somewhere at this notion–read [[FoRK</a>] [archive] Sandra Tsing Loh’s Caltech commencement speech](<a href=“http://www.xent.com/pipermail/fork/Week-of-Mon-20050613/036623.html][FoRK”>http://www.xent.com/pipermail/fork/Week-of-Mon-20050613/036623.html) if you’ve never done so)</p>
<p>I very rarely agree with Mini (an understatement) but his post is right on the money. Based on direct personal experience and more than a few closely related experiences, I can add Stanford to that list. </p>
<p>Fwiw, this forum might be interested that people who do NOT agree (and have no reason to agree) on about every subject do find common grounds when reporting their experiences and the experiences of their children. As an additional FYI, a pretty substantial number of students who were in the “ancient” CC classes have now graduated or are in the middle of graduate programs. When this experience encompasses different schools at the UG and graduate level, it becomes a very valuable data point, and substantially superior to what can be culled from books and rankings. Of course, some will always think that some “scientist” in China or London can describe and measure schools better than someone who spent years attending them. In the same vein, those scientists know that the amount of research published in an arcane journal read solely by “peers” is a much better yardstick than the number of hours devoted to the education of students, and especially undergraduates. </p>
<p>Although the definitions and measurements of “quality of teaching” are in the eye of the beholder, it should give pause to most observers when recent graduates find the rankings rather suspect.</p>
), but that means that yes, Caltech is a university. It takes people in surprising directions, like this young woman [Caltech</a> Gold-Medal Fencer Doubles Up on NCAAs - Caltech Features](<a href=“