<p>Schools in the US are ranked first tier, third tier, or fourth tier--plus there are community colleges, which are feeder colleges (meaning you go there your first two years and try to get good enough grades to the first tier schools during the final two years;-if your grades aren't good enough, then you transfer to a third or fourth tier school if you still want to get a four-year degree--of you just quit college after two years--when you normally get what's called an Associate of Arts degree). Also, there are LAC (liberal arts colleges, which generally are in the first two tiers).</p>
<p>Keep in mind that most "second tier" colleges (the lower half of the first tier--since there really is no listing for "second tier") are still tremendously strong colleges here--and may have thirty to fifty thousand students taking over 6000 different classes per semester from over 1,000 faculty (teaching) members. And the school may be sponsoring hundreds of millions of dollars of research in medical, production, and engineering areas. And in some disciplines, they may be considered one of the top ten schools in the country. For example, Boston University, Ohio State, Indiana University and Purdue University all fall into this category. Boston University and Ohio State University have fabulous medical programs and biology programs tied to strong medical hospitals on campus. Indiana University has a business school ranked in the top 10 undergraduate business programs in the country. And Purdue University is ranked in the top five in engineering in three different areas. </p>
<p>So basically what I'm saying is that there is only a slight difference between first tier (top half) and first tier (second half) in terms of education. The only difference is in terms of how difficult they are to get into--primarily because of a "prestige" factor--which is usually related to the fact that ALL of their departments are really strong at the prestige schools. Take UC Berkeley--which has 36 areas you can study in as a graduate student. 35 of these departments rank in the top 10 for that major nationwide. For example, their nuclear engineering is ranked #2 nationally, antropology probably around #8, etc. That's the difference between the schools.</p>
<p>The absolutely top of these schools are the eight members of the Ivy league (Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, Dartmouth, Brown, Univ of Pennsylvania, and Cornell), some of the top LACs (like Williams, Amhertst, Swarthmore, and Wellesley), and top-notch scientific schools like MIT, Caltech, Carnegie Mellon and John Hopkins. And then just a few other top schools, like Stanford, Northwestern, Duke, Univ of Chicago, UC Berkeley, UCLA, Notre Dame, Tufts, Vanderbilt, Emory, Georgetown, University of Virginia, University of Michigan and Rice University.</p>
<p>Altogether there are about 50 national universities and about 10 to 15 LACs that make up the first tier.</p>
<p>As far as 2nd tier (schools in the bottom half of the first tier), which is what you should consider, here are a few of the best of the more than 75 schools:</p>
<p>University of Texas at Austin, Fordham University, University of Pittsburgh, University of Maryland--College Park, University of Connecticut, Purdue University, Indiana University at Bloomington, Ohio State University, Boston University, University of Minnesota--Twin Cities, University of Oregon, Texas A&M, University of Miami (Florida), George Washington University, University of Iowa, and University of California at Santa Cruz. </p>
<p>There are thousands of colleges in the US, so there is no way I can list them all here.</p>
<p>P.S. UIUC (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) is ranked #42 on the first-tier list (which puts it in the top half).</p>
<p>Good luck.</p>