<p>Cue, no particular reason.</p>
<p>Out of a morbid sense of curiosity, I have to ask why there is so much bad blood between Duke and Chicago on CC. The students from both schools that I have met in real life seem to hold each other in high esteem.</p>
<p>Duke will never be in Chicago’s league. Do you really think Asians want to attend Duke??? I don’t believe it is on their wish list. They only apply because it is ranked in top 15 as backup.</p>
<p>Umm it’s actually been ranked in the top 10 for decades, and this is the first time in history that Chicago has been ranked above it so that can’t really be true. But I appreciate your input. Anyone with a more substantive reason?</p>
<p>Also, I’m Asian and I’m looking very closely at Duke as well as Chicago so I don’t know what you’re talking about.</p>
<p>I see that you are talking about the beauty contest called the US News “rankings”. Chicago for many years did not play the “game”. Schools like Penn and Duke played the game to manipulate their numbers in the 90s to the present. You are one naive individual who doesn’t know or appreciate the venerable history of Chicago which was highly ranked with Stanford when it was founded in 1892 about the same time Stanford was founded. Since the early 1900s, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Chicago, Stanford, and Columbia have consistently been highly respected powerhouses. The natural cycle has come to fore once again.</p>
<p>Woah, “naive individual” “appreciate venerable history” “1892” “natural cycle” …?
I love UChicago, but still :/</p>
<p>iamnoeinstein. I have a theory about this, which I’ll thumb in later when I have a moment. </p>
<p>But, quickly, Duke’s ascendancy in the ninties/00s reflected the triumph of marketing over substance; it was overrated by credulous high school guidance counselors, as well status-anxious teenagers and their parents. Conversely, UChicago was grossly underrated by this same group. Now that’s changed, and both institutions are more appropriately valued. This flip in perception provokes resentment from Duke partisans, who don’t like to see their judgement questioned, and annoyance from UChicago-types, who are irked by the whole conversation</p>
<p>Also, Einstein, Duke was never ranked among the top 10 universities in the US, let alone the world, before the USNews came along in the late-eighties.</p>
<p>Believe me (actually, don’t believe me; do your own research), Duke was not mentioned in the same league as UChicago, MIT, Stanford, Harvard, etc., prior to the USNews ranking. </p>
<p>Let’s keep this thread going, folks! It’s going to be a classic</p>
<p>I think the bad blood has more to do with certain Duke students and recent alumni that up until a short time ago insisted on coming here to put down U Chicago…look guys, they’re both fantastic schools with different strengths. The fact that they’re in the top 10 (15, 20, 25, I would even venture to say more) of the US News gives enough proof of this, and who’s ahead in a given year has to do more with non-academic criteria that can be “gamed” rather easily. As has probably been mentioned many times, the bigger differences lie in the general cultures of the schools, <em>like strong sports tradition vs aloofness towards athletics, bigger traditional party scene vs a generally more nerdy crowd, the city of Chicago vs Durham, etc. On the academic side, Chicago is supposed to be better for getting you to NASA and Duke is supposed to be better for getting you to med school, Chicago for a PhD in Economics and Duke for Wall Street, and yada yada yada. Well guess what? Anybody can do any of those things in either one because they’re TOP schools, and maybe one gives advantages over the other for specific goals but a) a general US News ranking difference of 3-4 spots is not going show you this, b) these small advantages are not going to matter at all if you just sit on your butt and expect the school’s reputation to do all the work for you. For example, a Chicago student with a great MCAT score, top GPA and lots of research experience is going to be a better candidate for med school than a Duke student (or a student from any institution for that matter) that doesn’t have those things. Once you reach the level of top school, which Duke and Chicago are both part of, FIT matters a lot more. Who cares that they’re a few spots apart? Chicago may be ranked higher than Duke now but Duke would certainly be a better choice for BME…starting with the fact that Chicago doesn’t even have a BME program.</em></p>
<p>PMCM18, your response is far too sober-minded and reasonable for this thread. Kindly refrain from confusing the matter with your mature attitude. Thanks.</p>
<p>Tortoise, when I said decades I meant since the inception of the USNews rankings. I know all about Duke in the 60s and how it was transformed through Terry Sanford’s savvy. I don’t understand why Duke’s relatively recent ascent into the highest echelon of higher education makes it less worthy of respect though. Again, forgive me for playing devil’s advocate.</p>
<p>Also tortoise, I’d be interested to know whether you have the same opinion of the college of arts and sciences at Penn, since to the best of my understanding, it is also a relatively new entrant into the clique of elite undergraduate colleges.</p>
<p>iambiceinstein, I believe you said:</p>
<p>"…this is the first time in history that Chicago has been ranked above it…"</p>
<p>If you’d said “first time in the history of USNews ranking” that would have been one thing. But you didn’t. No doubt because it would have sounded really silly.</p>
<p>Terry Sanford pulled a rabbit out of a hat, that’s for sure. Alas, he’s not around anymore.</p>
<p>No opinion about Penn. </p>
<p>And, by the way, Penn isn’t a recent entrant into the “clique of elite colleges.”</p>
<p>Penn’s college is which is why I specified that. Anyway, I appreciate your taking the time to answer my persistent questions but I can’t help but find your tone a little pretentious and condescending.</p>
<p>urnoeinstein, my tone is intended to be condescending, patronizing, and annoyingly know-it-all-ish…but definitely not meant to be pretentious. I am sorry it came off that way!</p>
<p>Collegechica strikes again. Even the writing style is the same.</p>
<p>
As tortoise pointed out, part of it has to do with Duke’s decline in US News and Chicago’s rise. For many Duke students/alums, it’s a bitter pill to swallow going from as high as #3 to potentially falling out of the top 10, the first time it would do so in over 20 years. To see a university formerly ranked in the teens “usurp” Duke’s spot is particularly galling for them. </p>
<p>For another, the two schools are - as they present themselves - somewhat antithetical. Duke boasts about school spirit and DI athletics; Chicago boasts about the Life of the Mind. Duke is in the top 5-10 for MD applicants per capita; Chicago is in the top 10 for per capita PhD production. There are many other differences between them. Although as PMCM18 pointed out, it’s quite possible to do Chicago-like things at Duke or Duke-like things at Chicago, there is a tendency on these boards to caricature Duke students as beer-guzzling, intellectually vapid frat boys focused on nothing but making money and Chicago students as industrious, teetotaling scholars capable of simultaneously writing Chinese with one hand and ancient Greek with the other. There is also, I dare say, a tendency in both camps for people to look down upon the other.</p>
<p>Finally, there is the HYPSM problem. These five schools, and occasionally Caltech, have been worshipped on CC as a sacred and untouchable tier for as long as I’ve been on CC and probably for some time before that. Whenever a college threatens to break into this tier, it draws an intense amount of fire from other colleges. HYPSM posters dislike this because it threatens the natural order of things and their specialness; students from other colleges dislike this because they perceive that college as being uppity. Columbia, which drew fire on the Stanford board for being ranked above it last year, and Chicago, which pretty openly compares itself to Harvard, are examples of colleges that have drawn particular dislike on CC. When you have Chicago students believing that “Duke will never be in Chicago’s league” and Duke students believing that the two are peers (if not Duke as superior), there’s bound to be some conflict.</p>
<p>As for Chicago, yes, I hold it in the highest esteem. I turned it down for undergrad (poor financial aid) and grad school (too cutthroat), but it is unquestionably one of the world’s best universities, and I certainly hold no grudge against it or its students. As for Duke, I received an excellent education there and am immensely fond of it. My opinion of it is not dependent on rankings or others’ opinions, so I, for one, am not inclined to get huffy or antagonistic when others don’t grovel before it.</p>
<p>In any case, I agree with Cue that Nobels are not a particularly good way of gauging a university’s performance. Subject variation alone makes it rather difficult. For example, which of these two universities is “better”?</p>
<ul>
<li>College A with 10 Nobels each in medicine, physics, chemistry, and literature</li>
<li>College B with 25 Nobels each in econ and peace</li>
</ul>
<p>College B has more in sheer numbers and in each field, but College A has more breadth. Tough call! That’s quite aside from the issue of weighting undergrad vs. grad student, researcher vs. faculty member, etc. For example, is it more impressive to produce lots of Nobel laureates or to simply have a lot of them on staff?</p>
<p>Chicago is #4 this year and Duke is #8 while there are thousands upon thousands of schools ranked below the both of them. This discussion is silly.</p>
<p>Goldenboy, this just in…</p>