<p>amherst, being a liberal arts institution, is obviously listed in the liberal arts rankings. However, if you had to place it among national universities, where would it rank?
somewhere between upenn and u of chicago?</p>
<p>In some ranking, (maybe US News?) it is ranked #7 in terms of prestige. This list includes all universities. Harvard is #1.</p>
<p>You can't really do this because grad departments and extensive research grant money is part of the national university formula.</p>
<p>I agree; this is a moot point.</p>
<p>i would say deffinitely in teh top ten, if you look at wall street journal, they have a combined list for schools that get kids into the top grad schools and we are ahead of penn and chicago on that</p>
<p>All though any list is going to be somewhat arbitrary, the Wall Street Journal recently ranked prep schools based on what proportion of their graduating seniors matriculated at 8 top colleges and universities: the two LACs on the list were Swarthmore and Williams; the universitites included Harvard, Princeton, etc.</p>
<p>
[quote]
All though any list is going to be somewhat arbitrary, the Wall Street Journal recently ranked prep schools based on what proportion of their graduating seniors matriculated at 8 top colleges and universities: the two LACs on the list were Swarthmore and Williams; the universitites included Harvard, Princeton, etc.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>One reason for that may be that Amherst is sort of in the middle in the Amherst/Swarthmore/Williams grouping. Not quite as much athletic emphasis as Williams, but more than Swarthmore. Not as close to a large city as Swat, but closer than Williams, etc. Maybe the WSJ felt that including Williams and Swat was enough to get a representative sample of LAC's, given that including Amherst probably wouldn't have changed the composition of the rankings too much.</p>
<p>Agreed. Yale wasn't ont he list.</p>
<p>Sorry, you can't "mix and match" data from different USN&WR ratings. So the question is impossible to answer.</p>
<p>For example, the single most important component of the USN&WR ratings is the "Peer Assessment" (PA) score, which is based on a survey of school administrators. But it seems likely that the admininstrators at liberal arts colleges see things differently from the administrators at national universities. LAC administrators are probably more impressed by teaching reputation, and university administrators are probably more impressed by research reputation. </p>
<p>So Amherst has a very high PA score in the LAC survey, but might have a much lower PA score if it were included in the university survey. For a school like UC Berkeley, it could be the other way around.</p>
<p>^^^I agree with Corbett. The PA component of the USNWR ratings, which operates in Amherst's favor when compared only with LACs, would cut the other way when compared with other types of national institutions. The Revealed Preference survey, which tries to measure preferences between cross-admits of many colleges and universities at once is another method of making cross-comparisons. Amherst and Williams both place very high in the poll which comes out every couple of years.</p>
<p>I am certainly no expert and don't know much about universities or colleges in general, but hpg90 mentioned Amherst is ranked #7.</p>
<p>College</a> Confidential</p>
<p>Basically it's
1. Harvard
2. Princeton, Yale, Stanford.
5. California Institute of Technology, MIT
7. Amherst, Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth, Swarthmore, Williams.</p>
<p>I wonder how reputable this ranking actually is.</p>