Finally - College rankings based on something important!

College Search & Selection
1

<p>Their total number of replies on the first page of their board on CC. Why not? It may be an index of how interesting they are to the nation's most interesting students, how engaging a topic of conversation they are, and the level of buzz they generate.</p>

<p>Take the first 20 regular threads on each university's page (that's the first page minus any "stickies" appended to the top, throw out the high and low threads for each, and total them up at a random point in time:</p>

<p>Yale 603
Harvard 445
Chicago 344
Brown 259
MIT 221
Michigan 163
Rice 126
Duke 125
UC-B 122
Princeton 111
Cornell 110
Cal Tech 103
CMU 100
Dartmouth 97
Penn 96
Stanford 94
Vandy 79
UCLA 78
Wash U 78
JHU 64
UNC 57
N. Dame 57
G'town 51
U.Va. 51
Columbia 48
NWern 45
Emory 28</p>

2

<p>You mean a popularity contest? Surely you jest.</p>

3

<p>lol this is definitely up there in terms of useless rankings (move to CC cafe please)</p>

4

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<p>Absolutely! Penn’s exactly twice as “popular” as Columbia? This is crucial information on CC! :)</p>

5

<p>Rice and Duke are very close with a difference of only one. Princeton outranks Cornell by only one. I am amazed at how accurate this is.</p>

6

<p>Sorry, but how could Yale better than Harvard…</p>

7

<p>nation’s most interesting students? That’s quite an arrogant statement. More future PHD’s come out of “less popular” schools.</p>

8

<p>the buzz is brand name recognition.</p>

9

<p>I think another interesting comparison would be to see how many times the college’s name is mentioned anywhere on CC over the course of a month. I bet Harvard would come out on top.</p>

10

<p>I must admit that this reminds me a bit of the way my 7th-grade girlfriends and I used to rank the “most popular” boys back in 1964. The big rub was that we began with a rather limited list. So the guys I now find most interesting when I go to my class reunions are often the ones who never made the contenders roster in the first place. ;)</p>

<p>Of course, our ranking system back then was fun–albeit flawed and ultimately pretty worthless–and this one seems amusing, too.</p>

11

<p>Yay, UMich is #7.</p>

<p><em>Goes to quickly manipulate the rankings to go make it number 1</em></p>

12

<p>love it, especially that yale’s first ;)</p>

13

<p>It’s funny, but “Harvard” is sometimes used as the generic term for the ultimate-super-elite-prestige category of schools. And yet even here on CC, Yale beats Harvard by a comfortable margin. :eek:</p>

<p>We need to stop talking about HYPS. Looks to me like it should be YHCB.</p>

14

<p>Views and posts are often not of a positive nature. Being at the top of this list could also be interpreted as how nervous, unsure and doubtful students are about that university</p>

15

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<p>That could be true of any college on the list, including Harvard.</p>

16

<p>True that. That was my point.</p>

17

<p>My bad. I thought you were a Harvard booster justifying why it wasn’t #1. Sorry about that.</p>

18

<p>Yale SCEA deadline is in a week. number inflation???</p>

19

<p>Yeah, this is definitely biased depending on when the “point in time” when data is taken happens to be set. Schools with deadlines/decisions around then will have more posts than schools without anything in particular happening then.
Also, this just shows how narrow-minded we as a community are on CC. There’s a school which I’ve heard mostly good things about and has fairly good academics, including a field where it’s nationally known… not ONE post in the last 30 days on CC. Why? Because it’s not Ivy League, not ranked highly by U.S. News, not one of the Colleges That Change Lives, not even a flagship state school, not anything that would put it on CCers’ radars.</p>

20

<p>So the 2nd least “interesting” and “engaging” student body has the HIGHEST number of Fulbright students this year? How is that possible? Did Northwestern bribe the Fulbright committee? :rolleyes:</p>

<p>[Top</a> U.S. Producers of Fulbright Students, by Type of Institutions, 2009-10 - International - The Chronicle of Higher Education](<a href=“http://chronicle.com/article/Top-US-Producers-of/48847/]Top”>http://chronicle.com/article/Top-US-Producers-of/48847/)</p>