<p>Many places release lists every year ranking "the United States best colleges", US News being probably the most well respected.
Many of us on CC dislike these rankings and believe that they are based on arbitrary calculations that have little merit in practice.</p>
<p>If you were doing the rankings, based on your experience, what would your list look like? Would you base it on prestige, education, athletics, etc?
Show us your own lists! :D</p>
<p>Harvard / Stanford
MIT / Princeton / Yale / Caltech</p>
<ul>
<li>gap -</li>
</ul>
<p>Berkeley / Columbia / Chicago / Penn</p>
<p>-- TOP 10 --</p>
<p>Northwestern / Duke / JHU / Cornell / Michigan / Brown / Dartmouth / Vanderbilt / Virginia / Georgetown / Emory / Rice / CMU</p>
<ul>
<li>slight gap -</li>
</ul>
<p>UCLA / USC/ Uof Miami / Boston College / Tufts / NYU / William & Mary / UT-Austin, and the like</p>
<p>Silly exercise you walked into here, OP. Such threads have been started many times on CC, always with the same replies, either by various shills tweaking lists for their own schools’ benefits and claiming absolute authoritative knowledge, or by those simply replicating the very published rankings everyone purports to dislike. </p>
<p>Obviously, the best school is the one that an individual believes is strongest in whatever categories he/she believes is most important: academics, extra-curriculars, quality of life, athletics, post-grad opportunities, and, of course–since this is CC–prestige. </p>
<p>Sadly, by starting a post like this, for fun or not, you simply reinforce the obsession with rankings. How are rankings here going to be any less arbitrary or unscientific?</p>
<p>1). Harvard, Stanford
2). Princeton, Yale, MIT
3). Columbia, Duke, Penn, Caltech
4). Chicago, Brown, Dartmouth
5). NU, Hopkins, Cornell</p>