<p>In your opinion what are the top ten best colleges in the U.S.</p>
<p>That question is impossible to answer because it varies factually by individual as different universities offer different approaches to learning.
Some are more academically focused, while others may focus more on the personal growth of students outside of academics--of course, every university has a balance, but where do they set their balance?
In addition, how personable are the professors? Are classes large w/ lots of competition and the best professors in the world, or are classes smaller with less-recognized but far from incompetent professors? Does the school as a whole tend to use a deficit-based remediation teaching model, a strengths-based development/application teaching model, or a survival of the fittest-based teaching model? Where does the majority of the funding tend to go (what departments)? How big is the university (and large a school am I comfortable in--do I want a place where I know everyone or know someone who knows everyone else, or would I rather be somewhere where I can fit into any crowd because there are always a lot of new people to meet)?</p>
<p>If you ask those questions of a university you might begin to get an idea of whether it is right for you, but if I answered those same questions, I might get a totally different set of answers! For example, my academics have always been extremely strong and I learn very quickly, however my leadership and communication skills are not where I would like them to be, so some schools that others might consider "top 10" might not actually be the best for me, despite that I had the grades, scores, writing ability/essays, and ECs to get in.
For that reason, among others, I don't think it is possible to rank colleges very accurately.</p>
<p>For a great majority of students. Clearly its not scientific though, if you want to work at Boeing you'll be better of graduating from Georgia Tech than Yale for example. And Alexandre will disagree by adding some others into group 2, none of which I agree with at all.</p>
<p>Group 1:
Harvard
Princeton
Stanford
Yale
MIT</p>
<p>Group 1.5
Caltech</p>
<p>Group 2:
Duke
Penn
Dartmouth
Brown
Columbia
Amherst
Williams
Swarthmore</p>