How would YOU rank these colleges?

[beyphy]

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I disagree with many of the above posters. If you look at placement stats into top law schools (such as Harvard or Yale law) you see strong “undergrad” focused schools doing exceptionally well. Schools with great advising, smaller classes, and less “weed out” courses. Georgetown for example is being lower ranked by the posters above, yet if you look at law school placement stats its up there next to the Ivies. </p>

<p>Harvard/ Yale/ Princeton/ Stanford
Georgetown
MIT/ UChicago
UVA
USC
GW/ NYU
UMD

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<p>i’m not sure what you mean by “undergraduate focused,” but Harvard is notoriously bad at teaching. I’ve also heard about students complaining about getting letters of rec from busy professors, and so on. Here’s a teaching anecdote:</p>

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“You’d be stupid if you came to Harvard for the teaching,” said Mr. Billings, who will graduate this spring and then go to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. “You go to a liberal arts college for the teaching. You come to Harvard to be around some of the greatest minds on earth.”

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<p><a href=“Harvard Task Force Calls for New Focus on Teaching and Not Just Research - The New York Times”>Harvard Task Force Calls for New Focus on Teaching and Not Just Research - The New York Times;

<p>In fact, the only “undergrad focused” university i see in your first tier is Princeton (although Yale and Stanford don’t do too bad of a job.)</p>

<p>As a second point, granted the OP asks for your opinion, but there’s basically no one anywhere who would rank Georgetown above Chicago or MIT. It’s a solid notch below both of those schools: its endowment is a fraction of the other two, it’s virtually ranked lower in any ranking i’ve seen, and so on. It’s still a great school though. Rice for example, is a great school too. But it’s not better than Columbia, and no one tries to claim that it is.</p>