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<p>There’s an easy way to express your dissatisfaction. Don’t have your kid apply. Oh whoops – too late. You show your scorn for these places and how they cobble together classes that don’t meet your standards because they include URM’s/legacies/athletes instead of “pure” academics. But then you’re dying to have your kid go to them! Who are you kidding? We can see right through it!</p>
<p>What I find amazing is how much the colleges/universities themselves seem to care about exactly where they rank, especially on the USNWR lists – even though, for the most part, it’s the same 10 or 15 schools, year after year (in slightly different order), and none of them seems to have any trouble at all getting far more than enough eminently qualified applicants no matter where they are on the lists.</p>
<p>For example, my son, who’s been working at the U of Chicago admissions office the last couple of years, tells me that he and all the other students who work there recently got a raise – from $9 per hour to $10! – and were specifically told that the reason was that Chicago had moved up in the USNWR list in the past year (I forget exactly, but I think they went from 8th or 9th to a 4-way tie for 5th. Big difference!). And that the new director of admissions got an enormous bonus, supposedly in the millions of dollars, although I find that hard to believe.</p>
<p>(You wouldn’t believe some of the “inside” stories I’ve heard, by the way. But my lips are sealed.)</p>
<p>There are lots of niches. Caltech (and arguably MIT) are in the “you’d better like STEM a lot, and be good at it too” niche. The military academies are another niche. Women’s colleges. BFA schools. “Great Books” driven curricula, with St. Johns as the exemplar. One could argue that Harvard et al are also niche schools, for highly academic self-driven generalists. That’s a much larger niche. The biggest niche of all is for so-so students who’ve not yet found their way, and have little to no money to pay for college. For these students, Caltech and Harvard are both irrelevant. </p>
<p>I’d think it weird if Julliard topped this particular list because the rankings are so heavily weighted towards research dollars. If the list emphasized, I dunno, some sort of measure that looked at how rabidly the students were immersed in their major, then maybe Caltech and Julliard would end up tied. 
Which would show how utterly silly the lists are, anyway. If you’d love to be at Julliard, then how Caltech or most other schools rank is utterly besides the point. If you want to be at Caltech, same sort of thing.</p>
<p>DonnaL - anyone know what the director of admissions would get if Chicago reaches number 1?</p>
<p>Without engineering as a major, I consider Chicago a niche player though. :p</p>
<p>I don’t know, texaspg, but whatever bonus he gets, I think my son and the other students working in the admissions office deserve “points” (a percentage), instead of a paltry $1 per hour raise! After all, they’re the ones who give all the tours and go through the mail and answer the phones (my son’s favorite activity, given the extremely strange questions he often gets from applicants and their parents), and do a million other necessary tasks in the office. That has to be worth something!</p>
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<p>Ego. Just like the high school seniors who think they are hot **** when they get into the school ranked #6 instead of #9 or whatever.</p>
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<p>Right - that’s the whole point - create a metric that is heavily weighted towards research dollars, and then express surprise that STEM-heavy or STEM-only places do well on it! It’s sort of a big ol’ duh!</p>
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<p>I don’t believe that either. UChicago gets where it should be. Why pay big $ to the director?</p>
<p>As to Caltech’s relevance, I guess science in general is vitally important. Without it there won’t be others, not much at least.</p>
<p>The arts are vitally important. It’s all vitally important. There’s no point in living in a society that doesn’t value humanities and the arts. The world needs all kinds.</p>
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<p>You’ll get no argument from me. :)</p>
<p>But understand that both the CC audience and the national audience is biased toward a STEM triumphalism, some of which an objective eye could view as legitimate given the needs of employment, economies, global competition, new technologies for global sustainability, etc. But unfortunately on this site such preference is also mixed with dismissal of all of the humanities as irrelevant, trivial, and for idiots. Never mind that some STEM majors, regardless of SAT scores, cannot critically think their way through a dense series of concepts in a document. </p>
<p>(There is a bias that STEM students are “smarter” because STEM is “harder.” At least among many.)</p>
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<p>There are 4 autographed books on my bookshelf, two by Nobel Laureates and two Pullitzer Prize winners in poetry. I don’t favor one over another.</p>
<p>I was happy to see Caltech do well not because of its STEM focus, but because their only criteria for admission is academic ability. They are looking for deep thinkers. Most of the others elite schools say stuff like, “we want people who can ‘do the work,’ but after that we look for other things.” While I do respect non-academic talents (and am an avid college football fan,) I think Caltech’s point-of-view is refreshing.</p>
<p>Incidentally, one of the Pullitzer Prize winners I met was a Harvard professor who was giving a poetry reading. Before she spoke, she thanked the students in the audience for their support, and said she “was surprised to find that at Harvard.” There was a definite edge in her voice. </p>
<p>The other Pullitzer Prize winner I met said that he tries to get his students to “do something with it,” meaning his writing assignments, “but they most often don’t.” </p>
<p>Once you get above 2250/2400 and are one of the top couple of students in your high school, additional intelligence does not help as much as being “active.”</p>
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<p>The same is true for english majors, regardless of their SAT scores. However, I am confident that the people at Caltech have excellent critical thinking ability.</p>
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<p>Could any of the deep thinkers explain how this latest ranking addresses the admission criteria? Is there a percentage of the final scores that measures the specificity of the student body? </p>
<p>The discussions of STEM versus OTHERS is rather unfortunate. Just as unfortunate as having to repeat that this ranking reflects a methodology that is mostly irrelevant to the future classes of applicants. Perhaps it is time to reflect on the content of the very first post in this thead … it is a post by a mother who is extremely proud and satisfied of a ranking that gives its just desserts to Caltech. As the mother of a PhD student, she should be happy to see a ranking that focuses almost exclusively on research. The problem is that people seem to draw unreasonable conclusions about the impact of this ranking that measures research and faculty output with little relevance to the undergraduate students.</p>
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No, this ranking is not based on this. I was happy to see Caltech do well, even though the qualities I like most about it weren’t measured in the ranking.
No need for the sarcasm.</p>
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<p>That’s what always happens with rankings.</p>
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<p>Where is your scientific evidence – not your prejudice – that English majors are impaired critical thinkers more often than STEM majors are, which is the only conclusion one could draw from your comment that</p>
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<p>and the fact that you contrasted that population (as a universe) with the population of English majors.</p>
<p>“People at Caltech” are not representative of the category “STEM majors.”</p>
<p>At my D’s math and science magnet, Caltech is considered a backup for very high stats kids who get turned down by MIT.</p>
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<p>Of course not. (Then you’re correction would be toward him, not me. :)) I was speaking of STEM majors; he countered with an assertion about CalTech students. Yes, CalTech is the subject of the thread, but my earlier comment (to which he responded) was broader.</p>
<p>The faculty at your daughter’s school should know better than that, annasdad. (I won’t identify the school, since you didn’t.)</p>
<p>Caltech is truly a niche school, but not simply because it is essentially for STEM majors, nor because it is essentially for unusually smart STEM majors, but because it takes a certain type of unusually smart STEM major to really feel at home at Caltech, and make the most of it. (This is not a knock on the unusually smart STEM majors who would not really like Caltech.)</p>
<p>The text of Sandra Tsing Loh’s Caltech commencement address (given some years ago) is on the web, and it’s hilarious–at least, I thought so. I especially commend to your attention the part about the take-home test with “infinite time” and the problem that drove Laplace (Lagrange?) insane.</p>
<p>Other universities do offer courses like this–for example, Harvard, MIT, and Chicago have them (Princeton, surely, and fill in your other nominees here–omission is just for space conservation). The difference, as I understand it, is that at Caltech, the students must take this course, whereas elsewhere it is an available option.</p>
<p>It takes a special kind of STEM major to thrive at Caltech–I am always impressed when I meet one.</p>
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<p>Also true for some private schools near me.</p>
<p>And for some the small size of Caltech (not to mention the location and gorgeous campus the honor code) may make it a better fit than MIT. I know Caltech mostly from the grad student point of view - my husband got his PhD there - but I did spend about a year working in one of their libraries part time. They had the nicest administration of any college campus I’ve ever had dealings with too.</p>