<p>Below is my rankings of colleges by prestige, nationally. I think my ranking a whole gives a good indication of how the schools rank. My method of calculating prestige is pretty basic and not foolproof so I do realize that some colleges may be higher or lower. My interpretation of prestigious is not how academically renowned it is, but how recognized the university is as a whole around the country and around the world..</p>
<p>MY LIST(number of millions of search results on googlefight.com)
1. Stanford University 165
2. Harvard University 132
3. Columbia University 110
4. University of Michigan 106
5. Cornell University 100 (a little higher than it should be, but clearly higher than UPenn, Brown, and Dartmouth in terms of recognition by an average person or internation person).
6. Massachusetts Institute of Technology 95
7. University of Chicago 82
8. Yale University 73
9. Princeton University 68
10. University of Pennsylvania 67
11. Carnegie Mellon University 54
12. Duke University 49
13.Johns Hopkins University 45
14. Northwestern University 41
15. New York University 39
16.University of Virginia 38
17. University of Southern California 30
18. Brown University 28
19. Georgetown University 24
20. Boston College 24
21. Emory University 14
22. Rice University 14
23. Vanderbilt University 14
24. Dartmouth College 12
25. Washington University-St Louis 2.7 mil ( another reason they need to change their name! in this case, i don't think numbers accurately portray prestige although having such a hideous name does affect their prestige)</p>
<p>Here's what I did. I searched each university in quotes(ex. "Stanford University") and used the full name of the university. While I recongize that some colleges are often referred to by shorter names, like UVA, CMU, NYU, USC, I believe this method to be fair because full names are normally used only in a formal context. For example, in a situation one would refer New York University as NYU, one would also refer Stanford University as Stanford. Neither NYU or Stanford meet the criteria for a search result so Stanford University does not get an unfair advantage over a school that is often referred to by a shorter name, like NYU. I can explain this more if necessary.</p>
<p>If you want to include the "full name" of the university, Stanford drops down to 717,000 hits. Its full name is Leland Stanford Junior University. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>I find it amusing that Rice, Emory, and Vanderbilt received about the same number of hits.</p>
<p>BTW, using your method, Bob Jones University is more prestigious than Pomona College. :eek:</p>
<p>Not fair though, it gives a huge advantage to 1) larger schools and 2) schools with grad programs. Michigan has 50K students vs. Dartmouth's 6K total. Ranking makes no sense.</p>
<p>i don't know about rankings, but i do know that Harvard is famous here in Asia. even the ones that don't really care about college know what it is (with the exception of those who think that it's a grocery store or something)</p>
<p>*results from googlefight.com differ at times. you have to 'fight' the search results at least 3 times and choose the one that repeats most frequently.</p>
<p>"Not fair though, it gives a huge advantage to 1) larger schools and 2) schools with grad programs. Michigan has 50K students vs. Dartmouth's 6K total. Ranking makes no sense."</p>
<p>I think thats accurate. I based prestige based not on academic merit but by its familiarity with the general public. sure dartmouth may deemed to be more prestigious on the basis of academics and getting a job or in the eyes of the educated and informed, but in the general public, more people have heard of michigan than dartmouth.. lots of americans dont even know that dartmouth and brown, etc even exist let alone are top 20 universities in the nation.</p>
<p>also, im not sure how it gives a huge advantage to a large school. it was my impression that stanford, harvard, yale, etc. had smaller number of undergraduates than state schools and other schools. liberal colleges, while academically excellent, are not known by many people and therefore not deemed prestigious. Swarthmore, a top 3 liberal arts college in the nation, is not known by the average American, let alone people abroad. I never heard of Swarthmore until my sophomore year in high school, and only because I was researching colleges.</p>
<p>"UT- Austin does have the most undergrad students doesn't it? I may be wrong."</p>
<p>Close enough. Anyways, a search on "University of Texas" yielded 128 mil. And that search includes 9 universities, only one of which is UT-Austin along with medical branches and other results that don't pertain to the Austin campus. Therefore while, I'm sure UT-Austin takes a majority of its hits, I can't see that number being above 70 million. A search on "University of Texas at Austin" yielded 46 million hit. I believe the actual number to be between 47 and 70 million, so around 58 million.</p>
<p>Even accepting your sketchy definition of prestige, are you expecting us to believe more people have heard of Michigan, Cornell, Columbia, and Chicago, than Yale?</p>
<p>Sebeg, internationally, Cornell is more highly reputed than Brown, Dartmouth or Penn. Hopeful4cornell, although I personally like any ranking that puts Michigan and Cornell in the top 5, I think this ranking is about as accurate as a ranking that would suggest Penn and Duke are top 5 universities! hehe</p>
<p>Slipper, Michigan doesn't have 50,000 students. Michigan doesn't even have 40,000 students. Michigan has 39,000 students. But I agree that the ranking above favors large research universities as well as universities in huge cities (like NY and LA).</p>
<p>I think prestige is often confused with ubiquity. Prestige involves not only how well-known a school is, but how well respected the school is as well. Google-fight really says nothing about how people actually view the university just that they know about it.</p>
<p>For example, you have MIT and University of Michigan ranked pretty closely. Clearly Google-fight says that they are equally talked about, but I guarantee that the vast majority of people hold MIT as a more important and distinguished university. </p>
<p>Anyway, it depends what you want to apply this ranking too. If you simply want the most well known universities, this method probably does a decent job of that, but if youre actually trying to answer which are the better universities or where should you go, this list is pretty flawed.</p>
<p>Well, if you search for just "Washington University" (without the St. Louis, since you didn't add "Ann Arbor" for Michigan, etc.) makes it come up with 54 milion results, or in 11th place next to CMU.</p>