<p>HYPSM have always been top schools and look to continue to do so.</p>
<p>Brown is just as good as the other Ivies and Duke, any decision should come down to how much you like the location and the atmosphere of each place.</p>
<p>Guys, seriously, Duke is not going to be replacing any part of HYPSM in the forseeable future. Let's appreciate it for what it is without turning it into something it's not.</p>
<p>We are, of course, in a <em>much</em> better football conference despite our recent individual performance therein...</p>
<p>That having been said, time will tell if HYP->HYPSM->HYPSMD; on the other hand, students who come to Duke will have the opportunity for an excellent education and students who have come here have done terriffic things in many fields with it. Use the rankings as a touchstone but not a mandate.</p>
<p>Of course, the most common set of rankings would indicate that we've already passed MIT and caught up to Stanford... and has been saying so for the past few years now.</p>
<p>And yet banana in the most well known ranking in US we've passed MIT and are tied with Stanford . . .</p>
<p>oh just saw mike wrote same thing lol</p>
<p>If you really want to put that much faith in US News and believe that Duke is truly considered MIT's superior and Stanford's equal, well then I won't stop you, misguided though you may be. :) I assume you believe UPenn is better than Duke as well?</p>
<p>It has some cross-admit state vis a vis other schools in it.</p>
<p>An exerpt:</p>
<p>"Based on acceptance rates, Duke continues to fall behind a few choice schools in terms of selectivity. Against five of those schools in particular, Duke faces substantial recruiting obstacles. According to matriculation data, Duke is successful in wooing to campus only about 15 percent of those admitted students who are also accepted to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, or Stanford. Against the next group--Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth, and Penn--Duke does better, enrolling about 50 percent. In recruiting battles against the third five--Georgetown, Chicago, Washington University, Northwestern, and Cornell--Duke is successful about 80 percent of the time.</p>
<p>Those percentages, Lange and Guttentag say, have not changed much over the years. Guttentag explains that although some of the numbers against individual competitors vary year to year, it is tough to make significant progress because the rest of the schools are all getting better, too. "There are few schools," he says, "that recruit more aggressively than Harvard."</p>
<p>Forget HYPSM, then. It's ALL about BDCDP... Can we buy a vowel?</p>
<p>If you're willing to add LACs, you can buy an 'A.' :p</p>