<p>It's acceptance rate and admitted class profile have been improving year on year relentlessly. Take for eg, the latest Class of 2017 profile with a 10.84% acceptance and a median verbal and math SAT range ~750-800. That's astoundingly good.</p>
<p>Do you guys expect Vanderbilt to take over Duke soon? I'm thinking Vandy could make it to ~12/13th spot on the US News ranking really soon.</p>
<p>Don’t conflate the Admitted Class of 2017 with those who actually matriculate. Vanderbilt’s yield rate is around 40%, so more than half of those students will go elsewhere. Those statistics also do not include acceptances off the wait list. The final numbers will be somewhat lower, with a slightly higher acceptance rate of ~12%.</p>
<p>Vandy has been stagnant in the USNWR rankings for a few years now. This is partially because acceptance rates are declining at most schools, including Vanderbilt’s peer institutions. However, even relative to other schools, Vandy has recently climbed into the upper echelon, with a lower acceptance rate than Cornell, Hopkins, and Northwestern. Unfortunately, in the 2013 rankings, USNWR continued using admissions statistics from the previous year, so the lower acceptance rate wasn’t even a factor. Hopefully they will make the jump this year, and we may see a slight rise to 15th or so, or break the tie with Rice and Notre Dame at the least.</p>
<p>Admissions statistics are only one of several factors, however, and the best ways for Vanderbilt to improve are to improve its yield rate and increase its endowment. One strategy which the school has used in recent years to great effect is throwing a ton of money at the strongest applicants in order to lure them away from other elite schools. This is pretty apparent in the “Vanderbilt vs. ________” threads that show up every year where people are trying to decide between a higher ranked school that gave them little or no money and Vanderbilt who gave them a generous aid package. Ultimately rankings are basically the least important part of the college decision and are given far too much influence considering their lack of precision. A tiered ranking system would be much better than a numerical one. Rankings are also useless because they put extremely different schools side by side. For instance, the students at Vanderbilt, Northwestern and Dartmouth have very little in common with the students at MIT, Caltech, and UChicago. Unfortunately as long as there are rankings people will pick the best numerical value and go there, even if the school is actually an awful fit.</p>
<p>I’ve though about rankings a lot over the past several years and have finally concluded that you can toss them out. If you want a real ranking, make a list of all the colleges you’ve heard of as you think of them. This will be a reasonable ranking, because ultimately, it’s about getting a job for which the first step is getting a job interview. You can opt for the best school in the world, but if employers haven’t heard of it, or worse confuse it with another school (e.g., Penn and Penn State, or Williams and William and Mary), then what’s the point? It probably all boils down to – if you can’t pick and Ivy, go with a school with big football program. In other words, toss the rankings; figure out how you learn best and what environment will make you happy; then tell them about it in your essay. The sooner you realize Forbes, Kiplinger, US News and various others could care less about you, the better off you are.</p>
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A question that should never be asked and no one should care about, regarding any school.</p>
<p>I fail to see how a small right, say from 17th to 14th would make any real difference. Now if somehow it were to crack the top 5…but seriously speculation such as this doesn’t yield anything of value.</p>
<p>As stupid as rankings are, people do take them seriously and they do have a meaningful impact on schools.</p>
<p>All rankings are limited by their methodology. The USNWR uses:
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Some people take them seriously, although I think that number is dwindling, albeit slowly. Have to wonder if a school wants a person that cannot understand how totally bogus they are.</p>
<p>I think it has been discussed ad naseum how once you get to a certain ranking they are all very good no matter what. It just becomes a matter of which school suits YOU better. You might have a great school in a city you might not be crazy about or in a region of the country where you might not like the weather, too hot or too cold for your tastes. But really If you are in the top 20 or so schools they are all excellent. Vanderbilt is a fine school whichever way you look at it. To me it would be irrelevent if it went up a few notches or even down a few. Really like other’s here have posted the resources/endowment just make such a difference. There’s only a select few that have endowments over the $1B level.</p>
<p>Yes, you are right of course franko. I would even take it a bit further and say while the resources of these few dozen or so top universities can be very beneficial, there are many more schools that also offer wonderful educations with great peer groups and excellent opportunities outside the classroom. This whole “prestige” thing has gotten completely out of hand.</p>
<p>I think you’d be surprised how much importance the nation’s strongest college applicants place on rank. Obviously not here to say they should, but they do. Applicants just don’t have that much to go off to qualitatively compare school X to school Y so they turn to rankings.</p>
<p>Rankings are practically the sole reason why students believe school X is better than school Y when it comes to the top 50… They really don’t have any sense of the relative quality of education or anything else.</p>
<p>You can’t blame them either. It’s not easy to compare peer institutions in a meaningful way without some serious research. Rankings may be convoluted but at least they give people something convenient to reference.</p>
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Which is exactly what makes them so wrong. What good does it do to have something convenient when it is so riddled with false assumptions and subjective crap?</p>
<p>I certainly won’t disagree there are large numbers that do place undue importance on rankings. But having worked with literally hundreds of students the last few years, with a little more than 30% of them having been accepted to Ivies and/or schools such as Duke, Chicago, Stanford, Vandy, etc., I have not found the rankings to be heavily weighted in their considerations. They seem to focus more on the stats of the students that have gotten in before and the feedback they have gotten from students that have recently attended these same schools, when they know some. Of course there is a very high correlation between high stat schools and their ranking, especially in the top 20-30 with an exception or two. Not a linear correlation, but as a cluster. But still, there is a difference in focusing on the ranking and focusing on the qualities of the school itself. Most of the students I know seem to understand that there really is little difference academically between #20 and #12, or any other school in the top tier. At that point it is more about the numerous other factors at play.</p>
<p>Of course, you will always have your subset of students that will just die if they don’t get into HYPMS.</p>
<p>Hate rankings or not they are here to stay. Students, parents, alumni, and university administration all know them and want them high and improving. Yep, a smart kid would be dumb to use them as the only factor in selecting a university but most will include them in the discussion of 20 other factors.
Vanderbilt is a hot school in a hot city right now. I expect to see Vanderbilt move up 2-5 spots in the next few years.</p>
<p>I think where ranking REALLY make a difference is in specific departments rather than with the whole college/university as a whole.</p>
<p>I would agree with that statement for grad schools. For undergrad it rarely makes a real difference, and again there is really no meaningful way to rate departmental quality at the undergrad level. People can get just as good an education in, say, economics at any well thought of university as they can at Chicago. The experience will differ in some of the upper level courses for sure, but not necessarily for the better or worse, just different. Grad school is a completely different thing.</p>
<p>No, vanderbilt will never break into the top 10. Duke has never been out of the top 10 so there is no question of Vanderbilt posing a threat to Duke or Penn or whatever. Northwestern has a much better chance of doing that. As do Brown and Cornell. Vanderbilt will never be ranked higher than 15th and there is no shame in that. That places it in the highest echelon of universities.</p>
<p>I believe Duke has been out of the Top 10 & then back in. If recall correctly this latest ranking of #8 was their trip back in as they were out of it. I think like 12 or somewhere around there.</p>
<p>It took one generation for Vandy to step up from a “bubble” top 20 to a “safe” top 17, and it would be amazing if Vandy’d break into the top 15 in another generation. Its competitors along the road, Brown, Hopkins, Washington, Cornell, Notre Dame, and Rice are all mighty formidable schools to beat, and the USNWR ranking system serves to solidify the status quo.</p>
<p>Duke and Vanderbilt are two of the world’s greatest academic and research U’s and share many similarities. The USNWR tends to maintain the status quo and rewards wealth and prestige. There are many Dukies concerned that Duke is on cruise control and not doing enough to move forward but at Vanderbilt Zappos has the gas peddle to the floor and Vanderbilt is undergoing a renaissance now. Many people are taking notice.
<p>Change comes slowly but the winds of change are blowing. When will Vanderbilt overtake Duke…tick tock tick tock tick tock</p>
<p>franko, you are mistaken. The first and last time Duke was ranked lower than 10 was in 1989. You’re probably confusing Duke for Dartmouth which was ranked 11th last year.
Unfortunately for Vanderbilt, it just doesn’t have the money to compete with Duke. Duke’s endowment virtually twice the size of Vanderbilt’s endowment. Duke is currently in the midst of a $3.25 billion capital campaign. Duke is located 15 minutes from research triangle park which is surpassed only by Silicon Valley. Durham is among the fastest growing regions in the entire country. 2 Duke affiliates were awarded Nobel prizes just last year. Duke is one of the largest research powerhouses in the entire country. Duke pays its faculty better than Vanderbilt does. Duke has a lower acceptance rate and a higher yield. Duke has been ranked as high as 3rd in the country and 11th in the world. Vanderbilt has never broken 15th in the country and 50th in the world. Duke basketball will continue to give Duke free publicity for the foreseeable future. Vanderbilt doesn’t have anything like it.
Duke performs incredibly well at placing its students into the best grad schools. Vanderbilt doesn’t come close. Duke is a top target of all the best consulting firms and banking firms. Vanderbilt is a semi target at best. Duke is building campuses all around the world. Vanderbilt is content with staying in the deep south. Duke graduates earn significantly more on average than Vanderbilt graduates.
They are both great schools. Analogous to Harvard and Columbia. Both world class, but Harvard is Harvard.</p>