I'm so arrogant....

College Search & Selection
1

<p>that I decided to make my own list in spite of USNews. I don't know everything about every school, so feel free to make changes to it. I did use USNews as a tool, but i fixed its mistakes and added liberal arts schools to the mix. Also, i ranked them in small groups, not by numbers. I left off military academies and music schools. Tell me what you think:</p>

<p>Group 1: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, Caltech
Group 2: UPenn, Columbia Dartmouth, Brown, Cornell, Duke, Chicago, Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore
Group 3: WUSTL, Northwestern, JHU, Rice, Vanderbilt, Emory, UC-Berkeley, Pomona, Harvey Mudd
Group 4: Notre Dame, Carnegie Mellon, Georgetown, UVA, UMich, UCLA, Wellesley, Middlebury, Carleton, Bowdoin, Haverford, Davidson, Wesleyan, Vassar, Claremont McKenna
Group 5: USC, UNC, Tufts, Wake Forest, Grinnell, Colgate, Hamilton, Wash & Lee
Group 6: William and Mary, Brandeis, Lehigh, Boston College, NYU, URochester, Barnard, Oberlin, Colby Macalaster, Bates</p>

<p>After that, it gets too hard, so i stopped.</p>

2

<p>NYU should be in Group 4. Tufts and Gtown in Group 3 seeing its applicant pool is nearly identical to JHU and Northwestern.</p>

3

<p>Also I think Oberlin and Barnard should be higher; Haverford and Carleton lower. And Swarthmore down to group 3.</p>

<p>In all, this is is not a good ranking IMO. Ranking is flawed in every way to begin with. Why are we perpetuating this?</p>

4

<p>Group 1: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, Caltech, Williams, Amherst
Group 2: Duke, Columbia, Dartmouth, Swarthmore
Group 3: Brown, Cornell, U Penn, U Chicago, Northwestern, JHU, Berkeley, Rice
Group 4: WUSTL, Vanderbilt, Emory, Pomona, CKC, Georgetown, UVa, U Mich, UCLA, Wellesley, Wesleyan, Notre Dame</p>

<p>Just because I'm bored. Enjoy.</p>

5

<p>I think Mudd should be a group 2 school. But that's just me... and it also may be because I'm a Mudder...</p>

6

<p>if only so much effort were put into trying to get INTO or doing work AT one of said colleges instead of ranking them...</p>

<p>employers, peers, etc. aren't going to reference any rank list in order to establish the "value" of your degree...don't get me wrong, prestige factors into many things, but it definitely shouldn't be as important as it is made out to be by many CCers. to me, if anything needs to be evaluated, it's not so much whether one school (or group/tier) is better than another but rather whether a school is simply perceived on the whole to be "good," which is why i like the philosophy Princeton's Reviews top 361 colleges. it does have some listed rankings, but they are not central. even still, many of the lists focus on student life and other factors.</p>

<p>i agree with lolabelle, there is no purpose in perpetuating this. IMO, it's not even fun haha.</p>

7

<p>Obviously you know nothing about William and Mary......................your list is not correct.</p>

8

<p>HMC should be first in group 3 or last in group 2</p>

9

<p>I think that this list is a shining example of what's wrong with American education. No ranking that simply comes off the top of someone's head, without use of some sort of methodology, is worth the bits it takes to display it.</p>

<p>The US News rankings are useful, but only in context of the ranking system. One must know the reasoning behind the ranking for the ranking to have any meaning.</p>

<p>We live in a country where "everyone has a right to an opinion," and people exercise that right relentlessly on subjects about which they know absolutely nothing. Our schools don't teach people to know what they don't know, and to withhold judgment until they actually DO acquire some knowledge. Instead, we make a virtue of certainty, even in the face of conflicting data.</p>