<p>Building upon Drab's post, that means UCLA > UCB ! Another debate is now brought back to life! :p</p>
<p>Just me inserting a random post to lower the serious tone.... :)</p>
<p>The thing is no matter how much we deny/bastardize rankings they are part of life, and we can't escape them. Likewise, we can provide as many facts as we want here but at the end of the day, one page excerpt from US news or THES will hold more water than all our facts and arguments would.</p>
<p>Latest Engineering Raking from US news (undergrad):</p>
<ol>
<li> MIT</li>
<li> Berkeley/Stanford</li>
</ol>
<p>Latest THES world-wide ranking for Technology:</p>
<p>Rank Previous Rank- School-Country Peer Score Citations per Paper
1 2 MIT USA 100 6.0
2 1 Berkeley USA 98.7 6.3
3 4 IIT India 86.4 N/A</p>
<p>However you slice it, MIT & Berkeley are two top dogs in engineering both for under and grad. This is what I meant by Berkeley becomes World-Class due to its tech programs !!!</p>
<p>C'mon, rabban, I need more than this. It also does little in defining "world-class." And who says those two rankings are the ones to use? And what about the social science and humanities rankings in those publications?</p>
<p>Stanford and Berkeley are tied in the first ranking. How far behind those three in the second is Stanford? I'm not saying one is better than the other, but I'm still confused as to why Stanford is "far behind"?</p>
<p>
[quote]
Do you see how this assumes quality equals selectivity?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I am assuming nothing. Note how it was actually the OTHER poster who chose to talk about selectivity, not me. I have made no reference to quality in this context.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Stanford and Berkeley are tied in the first ranking. How far behind those three in the second is Stanford? I'm not saying one is better than the other, but I'm still confused as to why Stanford is "far behind"?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>So am I. Especially when, in the graduate rankings (which Rabban seems to like to cite the most), it is actually Stanford that is #2, and Berkeley that is #3 according to USNews.</p>
<p>Furthermore, in the THES ranking, Stanford is ranked #4 in Technology this year, and #3 last year. </p>
<p>Hence, I still see no evidence that Stanford is in any way, shape, or form, "far behind" when it comes to engineering.</p>
<p>Sakky: I dont know which US News version you are looking at, but according to the following link Berkeley and Stanford are tied for 2006:</p>
<p>I think Sakky is looking at Grad school rankings, and Rabban is looking at Undergrad.</p>
<p>That or Sakky only noticed the ordering: "MIT...Stanford...Berkeley" and didn't see that there's no "3" next to Berkeley.</p>
<p>Well, let's see according to THES</p>
<ol>
<li>MIT peer score 100</li>
<li>Berkeley peer score 98.7</li>
<li>IIT peer score</li>
<li>Stanford peer score 84.9</li>
</ol>
<p>As you can see, there is a negligible difference (1.3 pt) between 1 & 2, but a substantial gap (almost 13 pt differential) between #2 & #4.</p>
<p>So i would say 13 point differential cannot be easily dismissed !!!</p>
<p>
[quote]
Sakky: I dont know which US News version you are looking at, but according to the following link Berkeley and Stanford are tied for 2006:</p>
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Uh, I said graduate school.</p>
<p>
[quote]
1. MIT peer score 100
2. Berkeley peer score 98.7
3. IIT peer score
4. Stanford peer score 84.9</p>
<p>As you can see, there is a negligible difference (1.3 pt) between 1 & 2, but a substantial gap (almost 13 pt differential) between #2 & #4.</p>
<p>So i would say 13 point differential cannot be easily dismissed !!!
[/quote]
</p>
<p>And let me see...according to USNews graduate school edition.</p>
<p>1) MIT - 100
2) Stanford -95
3)Berkeley - 86</p>
<p>You tell me what that means, Rabban.</p>
<p>Man Eff US News. Eff THES. This is such a trite argument. This thread is getting a post every other minute. Lets get some sleep people, and resume bashing Stanford a month before the Big Game.</p>
<p>well said, twilightzer0</p>
<p>Its pretty sickening listening to these kinds of conversations. Who the hell cares if you go to Berkeley or Harvard or Princeton for physics or math or whatever. If you aren't good, harvard/princeton/whatever isn't going to make you any better. Besides - lower ranking schools have hardly stopped top physicists/mathematicians from winning nobel prizes of fields medals.</p>
<p>It's blasphemy to say, but I would have chosen Stanford. It's not even about the prestige. It's more about the comfort level there. In Berkeley you don't feel very special, you feel like one of the thousands of pigs trying to feed out of the trough. But being a Graduate is much different. Berkeley is a much more eclectic city than Palo Alto and you feel very special as a Grad student walking among the insect Undergrads.</p>
<p>Yeah... my coworker is a Berkeley grad student and she keeps saying how she loves it all. Without going into specifics, I was complementing how she has all her activities planned out during her graduate years, and she says along the lines of "yeah, if I don't plan it out, they will (laugh)"</p>
<p>People, these arguments are ridiculous. It's people like you that enable groups like US News to make so much money on something as silly as college rankings. Fact is, if you're a good student, it doesn't matter where you go. I know someone that attended Seattle University (ever heard of it?) for MSE. Oh no, he'll never succeed in a non-prestigious university! Except that he got a 3.9 and is now attending Stanford for graduate school (and that's BS that Stanford isn't on par with Berkeley/MIT in engineering).</p>
<p>A better question than "Is this is a good university?" is "Am I a good student?" If the answer to the latter is "yes", then former won't hold you back as much as you may think. If the latter is "no", then the you can go to Harvard or Oxford or Princeton and you still won't have a job when you graduate.</p>
<p>
[quote]
People, these arguments are ridiculous. It's people like you that enable groups like US News to make so much money on something as silly as college rankings. Fact is, if you're a good student, it doesn't matter where you go. I know someone that attended Seattle University (ever heard of it?) for MSE. Oh no, he'll never succeed in a non-prestigious university! Except that he got a 3.9 and is now attending Stanford for graduate school (and that's BS that Stanford isn't on par with Berkeley/MIT in engineering).
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Uh, am I the only one who sees the paradox in this paragraph? You talk about how rankings are silly, but then you talk about a guy who went to a no-name school and then went to Stanford for graduate school. But who says that Stanford is a good graduate school in the first place? Answer - the rankings. So really, this paragraph, which purports to state that rankings are unimportant has, in reality, implicitly * confirmed * the importance of rankings.</p>
<p>Ranking undergraduate schools is more absurd than ranking graduate schools. With graduate schools, you can be more objective and specific. With undergrad - its pretty weird.</p>
<p>edit: stanford isn't good because its ranked high. It's good because of prestige. People read the newspaper and see so and so professor from stanford doing this research or winning this award. Fast-forward a few decades...</p>
<p>
[quote]
Uh, am I the only one who sees the paradox in this paragraph? You talk about how rankings are silly, but then you talk about a guy who went to a no-name school and then went to Stanford for graduate school. But who says that Stanford is a good graduate school in the first place? Answer - the rankings. So really, this paragraph, which purports to state that rankings are unimportant has, in reality, implicitly confirmed the importance of rankings.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Indeed, you are right. I've completed screwed up. Oh no.</p>
<p>Actually, the point of my saying the rankings are stupid is because you guys argue about whether Stanford is as good as MIT or Berkeley in engineering based on rankings. Rankings are useful to tell apart Seattle U from Stanford. When you nitpick whether Stanford or Berkeley or MIT should be higher on a list (when they're listed in the top 3), THAT'S when rankings are silly. That's what you guys are doing. I may exaggerate the unimportance of rankings, but you guys certainly exaggerate their importance.</p>
<p>I think the rankings would be just as valuable if they simply listed by tiers. Who is top tier, who is second tier, who is third tier, and so on. If we lumped the top 15 engineering schools into a tier, people wouldn't have rankings to use to complain about such and such school being better than another when they're, in fact, comparable.</p>