<p>Last time I checked BU was way bigger than BC and had a lot of more things going on. Not to mention that they have more Nobel Prize winners than BC (which has zero) and more famous faculty members.</p>
<p>So why does BC take the cake? Is it because the campus is nicer?</p>
<p>Erm…unfortunately nothing you mentioned determines how good a school is. Is this even a serious thread? I’m not sure, lol.</p>
<p>In USNews ranking formulas, BC just has better numbers in nearly every category. BC has higher average test scores and a stronger student body, in that 80% of students are in the top decile of their HS class in contrast to BU’s 55%. BU’s acceptance rate is 54%, while BC’s is half of that amount.</p>
<p>For Peer Assessment, however, they are considered essentially equal by academics: BC has a 3.5 while BU is 3.4. Thus, it is hard to say that BC “takes the cake.”</p>
<p>Well peer assessments run hand-in-hand with class body strength. Academic rigor, from the viewpoint of a less talented pool, will be viewed differently than academic rigor from the more talented pool of students. In other words, assuming everything else being equal, students at Ohio University are likely to find an econ class taught at Harvard more academically challenging than students from Yale.</p>
<p>I don’t understand why pretty much a majority of BU students feel the need to have a superiority complex when it comes to BC whereas BC students could careless what BU students think of them.</p>
<p>“Is it because the campus is nicer?”</p>
<p>Well, it HAS a campus which is more than BU can say…</p>
<p>Yeah but BU’s campus is located almost in the heart of Boston and is next to Fenway Park and the beautiful Charles River.</p>
<p>But BC is in the middle of nowhere. If you want to go to Boston you can:</p>
<p>wait 20 minutes for the next B line train, then wait an hour to get to Boston
wait 10 minutes for the next BC shuttle, go to the D line station, wait 10 minutes for the next train, then wait 30 minutes to get to Boston
call a cab, get to Boston in 15 minutes, and pay $20</p>
<p>Chestnut Hill MA, a community 6 miles from downtown, is clearly in the middle of nowhere. If your logic were true, then universities and colleges over 6 miles from major cities (which includes about 95% of such institutions) are also subpar to super-urban schools. BU is better than Tufts/BC. DePaul is better than Notre Dame. USF is better than Cal-Berkley. Georgia State is better than Emory… not really.</p>
<p>BC just has better numbers - higher average gpa, higher average sat, higher average act. Yale is in a dumpy location…I guess thats a bad school too</p>
<p>hahaha wait what? “BU is next to Fenway park, which must mean it’s better than BC.”</p>
<p>Location can meet a lot, but it is certainly not everything. BC is considered more prestigious due to its numbers: Princton Review rates the academics at HC a 95 and gives BC an 89.</p>
<p>^ the comparison isn’t HC to BC, but BU to BC…people just think BU is a public school and automatically perceive it as being lower tier.</p>
<p>^Not necessarily. BU is simply conceived as being generally inferior to BC with regards to academics. Any remotely informed person knows that there is a group of about 4-5 public universities that are only below the Ivy League, which would make the perception that all public universities are low tier rather false.</p>
<p>^michigan, virgina, unc, and two others are not right below the ivys…last i checked u chicago, duke, hopkins, cal tech, mit, northwestern and stanford were much stronger than any public school.</p>
<p>^ uva, unc, umich, berkeley, and ucla are all just below the ivy-tier. all those other privates you listed aren’t sub-ivy, many of them are on the same level as the ivies. if you’re suggesting that the very best schools in the country are private, then you are correct, but publics like berkeley and uva really are just below ivy-level.</p>
<p>This showing of a slight error of mine is all beside the point. Your perception that public universities are inferior to private ones is mislead at best. Outside the top 10 or so level schools, any informed person’s list will include a large number of public schools. Also, as griffin said, Chicago, Stanford, and Northwestern are arguably stronger than Cornell or Penn. Caltech and MIT on in their own, engineering league. Duke and Hopkins are no more than Georgetown or Notre Dame IMO. Etc etc We can argue this for a lifetime, but my fundamental point remains true.</p>
<p>And my original point is just that many people perceive public schools usually as being less selective and more as “party” schools than private. It is a perception that students have for high schools and it just carries over into colleges, whether it is true that public are lower than privates or vice versa, agreed, we can argue that until the end of time.</p>
<p>perception is different than reality. I concur.</p>
<p>London times ranked BU ahead of BC this year (found that interesting)</p>
<p>Like everyone else said higher numbers, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any smart people at BU. BU I think is about twice the size of BC which can skew data of the undergraduate population a bit.</p>
<p>BU is larger, and more importantly for most rankings, BU has more science offerings (which attract research dollars and thus rankings, particularly international rankings). For example, BU has a med school and an engineering school, neither of which BC has. In contrast, with its Core, BC is a little more focused on liberal-arts. (Neither good nor bad, just a different focus.)</p>
<p>That London Times article sounds interesting, but anything that ranks the University of Iowa, University of Iowa, Iowa, Ohio State, and the University of Utah higher than BC and Georgetown…</p>
<p>1.) Have a bias against Jesuits (laugh)
2.) Have a bias towards big state schools that, by the fact of their size, send significant number of students internationally for study abroad.</p>