<p>heh :: This thread is just ranking bashers vs. a guy who keeps trolling.</p>
<p>Rankings are like heroin - you can never stop; you need it to satisfy the subconscious need for statistical data to show which university is the best - or otherwise, you need it there so that you can keep criticizing it. Lol just relax. it's just there for you to make your own judgement. Whatever opinions others make of it... well it's all just like econoimcs I guess.</p>
<p>funny how oxford is 10th now, and cambridge is 2nd!!</p>
<p>I cant remember where i saw this but one ranking (I think it was USA Today) put Princeton in front of Harvard as the best college. I think that this is more relevant than Byerly's ranking, since Princeton is mainly an undergraduate school and has no law, business or med school.
Anyway, I honestly don't care about rankings and strongly advise all of you not to make your decision according to them because they'll get you confused more than anything else.</p>
<p>Uhm, I personally wouldn't trust an Asian ranking. They're going to put a lot more emphasis on the research, and the rankings are going to reflect some bias that people have with American colleges. Also, I think I read a while ago that these ratings count how many Nobel prize winners the universities have had in their history. This obviously doesn't mean that those same winners are teaching at the university.</p>
<p>How about the London Times rankings? Can the Brits be trusted more than those inscrutable Asians?</p>
<p>You'd have to ask a Brit about that. I don't think I'm the correct person to ask to criticize the Times' rankings.</p>
<p>all those rankings are for universities, not colleges.</p>
<p>The Shanhai rankings suck. They have listed Dartmouth and Emory in the 100-200 spots, and they have BU ranked 80 over them and Brown. That's ridiculous!</p>
<p>Nobody seems to like the ranking that don't have their schools of choice ranked near the top. Hmm, very telling. So emoryg08, are you saying that if brown, dartmouth and penn were ranked closer to where you think they should be that these rankings would be just fine? Or what if emory was ranked 1st, would you still be complaining about how bad these rankings are? And someone said that peer assessment only works when talking about grad schools. First, why? I still don't understand that logic. Second, peer assessment is basically a measure of prestige among academia. Someone working at harvard is not going to know exactly how good the departments at stanford are, he or she will rely on what they Do know, mixed with their general perception of how good the school or program is. Anyway, there's another little ranking that just came out last week that seems to put quite a bit of weight on peer assessment, so why not disavow those rankings as well?</p>
<p>BU better than Brown and Dartmouth???</p>
<p>HAHAHAHAHAHA</p>
<p>GentlemanandScholar,</p>
<p>I dont think that those rankings are very trustable since they do not statistically concur with several other rankings that have been released by other, even more serious, organizations such as FT, US News, LT etc. There is not even a close relationship between the academic qualities of Dartmouth's and those of BU, the two schools are of a different caliber. The Shanhai rankings of course heavily oppose my "dubious" claim.</p>
<p>I think the Atlantic Monthly has a better methodology. They had Harvard in the #5 spot, with Caltech, MIT, Princeton and Yale above it. Princeton Review is also pretty good I think. Their top 20 "best overall undergraduate academic experience" ranking contains all liberal arts colleges, with the exception of Yale (the one university to make the list). Funny, Harvard didn't make it in that ranking last year, either, even though Yale and Princeton both did.</p>
<p>In my opinion, any of the top 20 LACs are better than Berkeley for educational purposes. And UC-Berkeley has less federal research funding (only $208 million in 2001) than either Yale or Harvard, despite having four times the number of students. So, are there five students crowded around each lab table?</p>
<p>This ranking is not very useful, not to mention not very accurate.</p>
<p>emorygirl, they're not "trustable" because they don't put your school where you think it deserves to be, right? </p>
<p>posterx, why don't you self publish your own book entitled, "The Idiots Guide to Everthing that has ever or perhaps will ever happen anywhere...ever?</p>
<p>You seem so know about architecture, singing, underage drinking in Rhode Island, economics, engineering, and a host of other things. You're brilliant. Just admit it. How else can you explain how you've been able to spent time at each and every one of the top 20 lacs and still find time to recieve an education from Berkeley? Its quite a feet! Plus, you know more than every, and I mean every rankings system out there which puts Berkeley in the top 5 schools in terms of research in the word. Plus, you know more than the world famous, nobel prize winning researchers who've choosen to do their work at Cal instead of any other place in the word. Does you brain hurt with all that knowledge up there?</p>
<p>hahahahaha</p>
<p>GentlemanScholar, I'm sorry that you're so bitterly contemptuous of someone with more real life experience. Now go out and play. You might learn something, and the real world isn't going to kill you.</p>
<p>Posterx, I'm very sorry that you feel so insecure about Yale that you can only sing its praises while denigrating equal or better institutions (Pton). No more nonsense utterances on your behalf.</p>
<p>This thread is getting to be about the posters instead of the colleges. Time to move on.</p>