<p>WORLD'S TOP UNIVERSITIES</p>
<p>1 Harvard University</p>
<p>2 University of Cambridge</p>
<p>3 Stanford University</p>
<p>4 University of California, Berkeley</p>
<p>5 MIT</p>
<p>6 California IT</p>
<p>7 Columbia University</p>
<p>8 Princeton University</p>
<p>9 University of Chicago</p>
<p>10 University of Oxford </p>
<ol>
<li>Harvard Univ</li>
<li>Stanford Univ</li>
<li>Univ Cambridge</li>
<li>Univ California - Berkeley</li>
<li>Massachusetts Inst Tech (MIT)</li>
<li>California Inst Tech</li>
<li>Princeton Univ</li>
<li>Univ Oxford</li>
<li>Columbia Univ</li>
<li>Univ Chicago</li>
</ol>
<p>a distant second, however, when size is considered.</p>
<ol>
<li>caltech (100)</li>
<li>harvard (72.4)</li>
<li>cambridge (66.9)</li>
<li>stanford (65)</li>
<li>princeton (59.1)</li>
<li>oxford (53.2)</li>
<li>MIT (53)</li>
<li>berkeley (52.7)</li>
<li>yale (49.3)</li>
<li>UCSD (46.6)</li>
</ol>
<p>This ranking puts Brown and Dartmouth below Penn State, Michigan State, University of Arizona, and Purdue, among many others. Byerly risks discrediting his own assertions about the effect of student body quality on colleges by giving any credence to this study.</p>
<p>Brown and Dartmouth are only prestigious because they happen to play in the same league of HYP, man!!!!</p>
<p>dartmouth and brown offer superior undergraduate educations (and last i checked, this board concerned undergraduate admission and education). D and B's graduate and professional research output, which is largely what's measured by these sorts of global rankings, should be largely irrelevant to CC'ers.</p>
<p>It is not irrelevant, however, which may (in addition to the attractions of Cambridge as a college town) be one of the reasons common admits to both Harvard and Princeton overwhelmingly choose Harvard.</p>
<p>And they perhaps overwhelmingly make a massive mistake.</p>
<p>I'm disappointed to see the Colosuss in Palo Alto drop a spot.</p>
<p>The Shanghai ratings include graduate schools. This obviously skews the results towards schools that have strong and large graduate programs. Additionally, 90 % of the calculations upon which the rankings are based ignore size of the institution. The last column, which normalizes the data by size, cannot make up for the deficiency. </p>
<p>Again, whatever you believe about the relative merit of Brown and Dartmouth as compared to other Ivy League schools, they are elite institutions, arguably superior to some of their Ivy League counterparts and indisputably superior to the vast majority of the US schools ranked ahead of them using the Shanghai methods.</p>
<p>Here's one respected ranking that puts it on a par with them.</p>
<p><a href="http://thecenter.ufl.edu/research2004.html%5B/url%5D">http://thecenter.ufl.edu/research2004.html</a></p>
<p>And here's another that puts it ahead of BOTH of them.</p>
<p>Sure, it's great when the faculty of a university pump out highly-cited papers, win Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals galore, and get articles published in Nature and Science. However, these fairly narrow measures (80% of the Shanghai rating!) do not indicate what kind of education undergraduates are receiving, and indeed these criteria dramatically favor large, research-oriented institutions over smaller, education-focused ones. UC Berkeley is a case in point: it has highly respected graduate programs, but few would say that it beats MIT and Caltech for undergrad applicants interested in science.</p>
<p>In fact, the Shanghai ratings appear to favor the sheer size of a research university over all else. Not surprisingly, strong but not particularly remarkable flagship state universities are ranked quite highly, while liberal arts colleges are essentially ignored. This is some pretty shoddy methodology.</p>
<p>The first link from your most recent post leads to a "research university ranking", which you label "respected". Somehow, this ranking places the University of Pittsburgh right ahead of Caltech. If you can make the argument that, even allowing for a gargantuan stretch of the imagination, Pittsburgh is even on the same research <em>planet</em> as Caltech, maybe I'll reconsider my skepticism. Until then, I'm convinced that something is clearly quite wrong with this system.</p>
<p>The final ranking has some serious issues as well. Again, it is a very poor evaluation of undergraduate education. For instance, we can see UT Austin and UC San Francisco very high on the list. These aren't bad schools, but upon further examination it is clear that their high placement comes from one measure: "citations/faculty score". Why would they score so high? UT Austin has a top law school, and UC San Francisco has great medical schools - these are both fields in which there is a LOT of citation. </p>
<p>UC Berkeley places well solely because of its "peer review" score. This is a quite reasonable measure for the evaluation of a university's research, or even for its graduate programs, but is a nonsensical one for undergraduate colleges. Academics know a lot about the kind of research each school is producing in their fields, but they aren't likely to be particularly knowledgable about the quality of undergraduate education at each particular college.</p>
<p>So, in the end, for high school applicants on this forum concerned about college, these ratings are extremely poor. The glaring flaws in these ranking methodologies don't take long to spot - did you even consider them after seeing Harvard at #1?</p>
<p>haha these rankings gave me a good laugh....</p>
<p>"This ranking puts Brown and Dartmouth below Penn State, Michigan State, University of Arizona, and Purdue, among many others. Byerly risks discrediting his own assertions about the effect of student body quality on colleges by giving any credence to this study." <--- amen</p>
<p>Harvard finishes # 1 in MOST rankings - not just these.</p>
<p>In any case, what I find amusing in these standard and predictable attacks by advocates for teeny tinies and other schools with less eminment faculties is their dogged faith in the notion that distinguished scholars are not good teachers, and that, on the contrary, mediocre scholars are uniformly excellent teachers!</p>
<p>If I am interested in a field, I want to have access to the people on the cutting edge of scholarship, whose views are widely respected and whose papers and books are widely read.</p>
<p>Sorry guys, but it doesn't wash!</p>
<p>"In any case, what I find amusing in these standard and predictable attacks by advocates for teeny tinies and other schools with less eminment faculties is their dogged faith in the notion that distinguished scholars are not good teachers, and that, on the contrary, mediocre scholars are uniformly excellent teachers!"</p>
<p>You are twisting our words beyond recognition. No one is saying that distinguished scholars are not good teachers, or that mediocre scholars are "uniformly excellent teachers". We <em>are</em> saying that the level of scholarly output by a university, as measured by somewhat superficial indicators like papers published and articles cited, does not precisely correlate with the quality of undergraduate education - rankings like these, if they purport to measure a college's undergraduate quality (which they don't all even claim to do), are consequently not very well constructed.</p>
<p>You haven't even bothered to answer any specific arguments. How can a rating really measure research quality yet put Pittsburgh above Caltech? Do many people really think that Purdue and Arizona are superior to Brown and Dartmouth? If you took your usual tack, you might look at their cross-admit percentages!</p>
<p>Statements like these make me think that you have no understanding of what constitutes a nuanced, logical argument. We were not claiming that Harvard isn't #1, but rather pointing out serious flaws in the methodologies of these studies, flaws that make them quite questionable for use on this board. You suddenly seized upon our statements and painted us as curiously dogmatic freaks who think that "teeny tinies" are universally superior to Harvard.</p>
<p>You are "twisting my words beyond recognition!!!"</p>
<p>I assume that you're talking about this statement:</p>
<p>"You suddenly seized upon our statements and painted us as curiously dogmatic freaks who think that 'teeny tinies' are universally superior to Harvard."</p>
<p>Let's look again at what you said:</p>
<p>"In any case, what I find amusing in these standard and predictable attacks by advocates for teeny tinies and other schools with less eminment faculties is their dogged faith in the notion that distinguished scholars are not good teachers, and that, on the contrary, mediocre scholars are uniformly excellent teachers!"</p>
<p>You noted our "standard and predictable attacks" and "dogged faith" in a seemingly ridiculous proposition. It sure sounds like you were painting us as "curiously dogmatic freaks" - I don't think that was an unjustified statement. </p>
<p>Further, you note the "less eminent" faculties of apparently lesser universities and remark that we believe that "mediocre scholars are uniformly excellent teachers". Of course, nothing could be further from the truth, but following your train of thought, we have:</p>
<p>1) "Teeny tinies" have "less eminent" faculties consisting of mainly mediocre scholars.</p>
<p>2) We believe that mediocre scholars are universally better teachers than distinguished scholars.</p>
<p>Considering that you used the word "universally" (a pretty extreme word, and almost inevitably a mischaracterization), your truly bizarre implication was that we believe that these small colleges, held together by the sheer mediocrity of their teachers, are universally superior to places like Harvard. I wasn't twisting your words at all.</p>
<p>You are "twisting my words beyond recognition" ... and furthermore I have long acknowledged that for some timid and less self confident folk, teeny tinies are the place to be, providing, as they <em>universally</em> do, a safe haven, where milk and cookies are served in the President's parlour on Sunday evenings, and the Dean of Students stands ready to tuck you in at night. </p>
<p>Who cares if the "professors" are rejects from better schools, and have never published anything of note? (I have an image in my mind of Richard Burton in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?") They are nevertheless friendly and never speak harshly, and in nice weather move classes outside under the trees, with the birds twittering and the cute little squirrels eating potato chips out of your hand!</p>
<p>You mock our perceived support of any university other than your favorite, and respond to criticism by claiming that we twist your words. Satisfied, you go right back to mocking small schools.</p>
<p>This is what makes a legend.</p>
<p>Even if the professors at Williams, Swarthmore, and Amherst are indeed little-published "rejects" from better schools, I feel fairly confident that they at least have better things to do with their time then promote their schools on message boards geared primarily for teenagers.</p>
<p>They are probably still on vacation. The joys of the short academic work year!</p>