Is Duke really the number five university in the nation?

Colleges and Universities A-Z Duke University
1

<p>It's a real super idiotic question to ask, after loved, applied, and got it, and will be the orientation in couple days.
but yeah why is duke's ranking in US NEWS (or other those rankings published by WSJ and watnot) so high every year like since 1990??</p>

<p>In graduate schools, duke is not really the best at anything except Medicine.
And to be honest, Duke's name is not that universally known (which i think US NEWS is trying to look at as well), perhaps it's a lot more of reginal school compared to other top notch schools.
What is Duke's pro?? Any awesome well-known undergrad program (other than BME)??</p>

<p>Maybe, i wonder, there is some secret stuffs about Duke I have not realized yet.</p>

2

<p>I was actually wondering how Duke ended up with the rank it had. The WSJ feeder ranking gives its methodology very straightforward, so I know why Duke is ranked high on that. But its different for US News. It looks similar, stat-wise, to Columbia, Dartmouth, Brown, and Northwestern yet those are ranked 9, 9, 14, and 12 while Duke is ranked in the top 6. In my mind, I would rank Duke aside these schools, not above them - Dartmouth even has a higher average SAT score spread than Duke. So I am also wondering about the major factors since acceptance rate and SAT scores don't seem that important.</p>

<p>This was posted earlier comparing it and schools usually thought of as similar to it:</p>

<p>Brown, 17%, 1310-1520, ranked 14th
Columbia, 11%, 1320 - 1520, ranked 9th
Cornell, 29%, 1290 - 1490, ranked 13th
Dartmouth, 19%, 1360-1550, ranked 9th
Duke, 22%, 1330 - 1530, ranked 6th
Johns Hopkins, 30%, 1300 - 1490, ranked 13th
Northwestern, 30%, 1300 - 1520, ranked 12th
Penn, 21%, 1330 - 1500, ranked 4th</p>

<p>Duke's professional schools are all top 10 or around there so atleast the professional schools are good. When people say it has a regional reputation, I'm not sure how its any more regional than Penn or Columbia (in the sense that both schools have similar propotions of students from in-state, have primarily applicants from the Northeast, and have similar number of apps overall). After all, if it was regional, most students who picked it over its Northeastern counterparts wouldn't have lol.</p>

<p>Oh yeah, on the WSJ feeder rankings, the universities ahead of Duke are Harv Pton Yale and Stanford, and those are all higher or tied with Duke. I wonder of the preprofessional aspect has some sort influence on US news.</p>

3

<p>We have better grad placement than those ranked below us. Be proud and continue packing. :)</p>

4

<p>Duke's actually very good about placement into great schools. Check out this link, provided by Byerly. </p>

<p><a href="http://www.classroomedition.com/pdfs/wsj_college_092503.pdf%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.classroomedition.com/pdfs/wsj_college_092503.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

5

<p>Yeah, just a note about this:
If you go around College Confidential to other boards and stuff about rankings and prestige, there will always be people talking about how Duke is completely overrated, etc. but for the most part, these people are just uninformed. The more knowledgeable people on this board, even those with no connection to Duke at all, will admit that Duke is probably somewhere in the top 10 schools. I personally think distinguishing beyond Top 10/Top 50/Top 100 or whatever to giving specific numbers is just nitpicky and not necessarily very accurate, but I don't see any specific reason why Duke couldn't be number 5. People make lots of assumptions, like that MIT is soooo much better than Duke for example, when there really is no way to say either is "better." People use the "well, if I don't know about Duke, it can't really be all that good, can it?" thought process, which is circular and self-perpetuating in nature and not really useful at all in the college selection process, so don't get too caught up in what everyone else is saying around here.</p>

6

<p>MIT is better than Duke though. The 'Tute is equal to HYPS in terms of prestige, quality of faculty, caliber of students, number of highly-ranked departments, etc. Duke isn't. I love Duke and all but I'm realistic about where it stands in the pecking order of US universities.</p>

7

<p>I agree with Banana. Duke is not better than MIT/CIT and it might be premature to suggest that it is tied with a mammoth like Stanford. Duke could be a candidate for top 10 though. As Alexandre suggested, there should be a tier system. HYPMSC in the first tier and all the other schools in the top 15 in the second tier. There is no way to say Penn is better than Duke, Duke is better than Penn, Cornell is better than Duke, Duke is better than Cornell, etc.</p>

8

<p>duke duke duke. ahhhhhh</p>

<p>let's just say it's the best school in the nation... i mean, i'm going to duke and so you are ... so why not :P</p>