<p>
[quote]
Yale would be overranked as well, though it is actually top-20 and probably top-10.</p>
<p>GRAD quality rank would be more like (excluding foreign places, which I'm not too familiar with):</p>
<p>Stanford/Harvard
Berkeley
Princeton
MIT
Michigan/Caltech
Yale/Chicago
Columbia/UCSF
UCLA/Cornell
(lots of state schools)
Duke/Penn
[/quote]
The rankings you provide, particularly your assessment of Yale are highly biased toward strength in the sciences. Yale is much stronger than you suggest when you consider graduate programs in the humanities and social sciences as well, where it is consistently one of the top schools in the country. Harvard and Stanford are still better overall with Berkeley and MIT (strong in areas like Econ as well as sciences) possibly better too, but to claim that Michigan or Caltech (only strong in a sciences, and not even all sciencs) is better or that there is any significant difference in quality between Princeton and Yale is not really accurate.</p>
<p>I don't think undergraduate programs should be specifically ranked ever...I doubt a ranking for political science and english really matters when talking about a group of elite schools (ie saying Chicago undergrads are 6th in one field while Brown undergrads are just 10th in the field)...</p>
<p>I think the main thing that sets most undergraduate fields apart are how competetive the students are and what sort of grad schools and professional schools they go to. I know that there is no pre-med or pre-law major, but I'd think seeing how people get admitted to top med programs reflects the quality of their science program/students, as with law reflecting on polisci/history and business school reflecting on econ/business skills. Looking at success in sending kids to a topprofessional school is one of the better ways to say "Hey, if you are looking for a strong polisci program look at this school," especially compared to undergrad rankings which are basically based off of the schools graduate school.</p>
<p>Seeing and rating feeding into top professional schools is a real measure of undergrads thriving, whereas a ranking which looks and adds major weight to categories such as major grants and publishing doesn't show how useful the program is for undergrads, just the strength of the professors and grad students (and very rarely are undergrads involved in these).</p>
<p>With that, I think the best way to say UChicago as being singular in its strengths is to see if students from their only go onto to succeed in businesses and go on to top business schools (one of many measures, yes). Another would be how many firms hiring undergrads in financial fields, etc. compared to admissions to top med schools or law schools. I'm sure you'll find Chicago grads going onto all sorts of elite law schools and med schools (I'd assume its students often go onto its own top law and med programs). The students are among the nation's most competetive based on SATs and class strength. Thus, I'd say calling Chicago a school with only one major strength is ridiculous - simly be looking at the success of its undergrads and the strength of the undergrad class, I wouldn't hesitate to recomend Chicago as a strong choice in any field (at least based on professional school fields).</p>
<p>Yes, I still dispute this underrating of Yale. Berkeley certainly enjoys a great reputation in East Asia, though it would be surprising to me if it trumped Stanford there. In the rest of the world, Yale would almost certainly be more highly regarded. In Europe people seem very familiar with the Ivy League, with the possible exceptions of Penn (name confusion) and to a lesser extent Cornell.</p>
<p>-Caltech is probably overranked, you're right.
-Michigan and Berkeley certainly have stronger grad schools than Yale. I can't see how one would begin to argue with this.
-MIT isn't as narrowly focused as Caltech. It's grad school is clearly better than Yale's. Not by a huge amount, but there's not really any uncertainty.
-Same goes for Princeton, actually.
-Chicago and Yale have grad programs of very nearly identical strength but different focuses</p>
<p>How is Yale underranked? It's very good in the humanities and good in some of the social sciences. The schools above it have a wider range of top programs. I don't see how I'm biased towards the sciences here.</p>
<p>Remember, i'm talking only about grad programs. Yale fully deserves its undergrad ranking. At the grad level, it's one of the top few schools, but it doesn't have the same power it does on the undergrad level. Any survey of grad programs will demonstrate this. Knocking down Caltech, Yale winds up co-ranking 7th in the country. The only other overall grad ranking I'm aware of puts Yale in 8th.</p>
<p>I'm not quite sure where you have determined that Michigan and Berkeley should be mentioned together when discussing graduate program quality: Berkeley is far better and recognized as such by almost all rankings. The most prominent rankings of universities by research quality (which is essentially the same as graduate program quality, since graduate school essentially consists of working with a professor in your field of interest) are the two cited by Newsweek in the article on which this thread is based. Both of them rate Michigan lower than Yale (Michigan is 21st in the Shanghai rating while Yale is 11th, while Michigan is 36th in the Times ranking and Yale is 7th). The Shanghai rating is based mostly on research and quality of faculty (80%) while the Times is based mostly on research (in the form of citations: 20%) and peer review (40%). With the Shanghai rating biased toward science (as it counts nobel prizes, most of which are in the sciences and articles in the journals Nature and Science as important components in its score) the fact that it rates Yale, a university stronger in the humanities than the sciences, higher than Michigan implies that Yale is probably better overall.
I will agree that I should have described MIT and Berkeley as "better" rather than "possibly" better since as you say (and as I pointed out myself) MIT is somewhat well-rounded and of course Berkeley is a top graduate school.
Finally, in regards to Princeton, the Shanghai rating puts it higher than Yale by 3 spots, but within US universities, it is only one spot higher. However, since that rating is biased towards the sciences, we should look at individual components that are equal across disciplines. I propose (from Shanghai's rating) the highly cited researcher "HiCi" category and the category that looks at articles across all disciplines "Sci." Princeton and Yale are about the same in "HiCi" (59.6 vs 59.1) while Yale is higher in "Sci" (63 vs 47.3). Then from the Times rankings, the peer review and citations/faculty scores seem appropriate as measures of overall quality. In citations/faculty, Yale is behind(19 points to 31), while in peer review the two universities are about the same (Yale is ahead 71 to 69). Thus, I would argue that overall, Yale and Princeton are roughly equivalent in graduate quality, as Yale leads significantly in one category, Princeton in another, with both tied in the final two.</p>
<p>I like this list lol.
Though I have to admit I was also surprised.. because I've never heard of UCSF.</p>
<p>The only thing for sure about ANY world college list (so far I've seen) is that.. Harvard is always top (whether sharing the spot with someone else [like Princeton] or not).</p>
<p>-I know that Berkeley and Michigan aren't equal, which is why I didn't rank them together. The sentence that follows them happens to be true of both.
-Princeton > Yale because it has way more top departments.
-THES is not a ranking of research quality. Look at random criteria (%foreign?) and weird placement (Duke is not a great research school. It has only a handful of top programs. Look up department rankings and see Duke slaughtered by schools ranked below it in THES). Take a look at foreign peer assessment and notice that, as expected, foreign evaluators are fairly ignorant of foreign schools and that as a result peer assessment results are nonsensical.
-SJT is a ranking of research quality, but not a good one. Don't get me wrong, I like being ranked 8th in the world and tying with Princeton, but a. we don't quite deserve it and b. the rankings don't make any sense. Michigan has a much larger number of top programs than Yale (and even besides this their top programs tend to be more substantial).</p>
<p>BU has quite a bit of international name recognition because people have heard of the city of Boston and generally associate it with academic excellence. A lot of countries have very very few universities that are not named after cities or other geographic entities, so given the choice between 2 schools they don't know a hell of a lot about, you can imagine them going with the one that has a recognizable geographic entity in the name. Note that UMass is on there whereas a lot of schools that in the USA are far more prominent are not.</p>
<p>-Princeton > Yale because it has way more top departments.</p>
<p>No, I would say that Yale is a stronger university overall, particularly at the undergraduate level. This is true even before you consider things like the arts programs (drama, music, art, and architecture), in which Yale is far and away the world's most preeminent university. </p>
<p>For example, Princeton and Yale have roughly the same number of undergraduate science majors. Yet here's how federal research funding among the two stacks up. In terms of research funding per undergraduate science major, places like Caltech, Yale and MIT are at the very top of the list.</p>
<p>Federal research support, 20042005</p>
<p>Yale 415.4 million
Harvard 507.9 million
Cornell 381.0 million
Stanford 484.6 million
Northwestern 302.8 million
Princeton 114.0 million
MIT 424.0 million</p>
<p>That's probably why in the new Washington Monthly rankings, Yale was ranked as one of the top private universities in the country while Princeton didn't make the top 40.</p>
<p>I agree. I guess you could say that, in the most well-funded and most important area of research, Yale is at or near the top, while Princeton isn't in the top 100. In addition to DOD work, MIT also does a large amount of biology and medical research, by the way, through its special medical institutes.</p>
<p>danielvojtash:
First off, I would like to dissociate myself from posterx's claim that Yale is significantly better than Princeton. They are approximately equal. That said, I would also like to point out that in comparing Yale to Princeton earlier I did not simply look at the THES rating or the Shanghai rating, but rather used components that seemed most fair. You disagree with my use of peer review. Fine, since Yale and Princeton were rated almost exactly equal in that area, removing it does not change the essential conclusion: in research quality, as measured by quality and number of published articles, Yale and Princeton come out equal. You claim that Princeton is still better because it has "way more" top departments. The only compilation of department quality that I can find (other than US News, whose rankings can hardly be called wonderful) is the National Research Council's 1995 ratings. Admittedly, these are out of date, but they provide a general idea of number of top programs. If you can provide recent data suggesting that these ratings have changed significantly, please do. I am hardly trying to blindly promote Yale here (if I were, I would, like posterX, make much more outrageous claims than I have), rather, I want to arrive at a reasonable consensus as to what universities have the best overall grad programs. You still have provided no objective or third-party data, only your own interpretation. Please, prove me wrong! Show me something that supports your interpretation.
That said, the 1995 rankings of the National Research Council (<a href="http://www-ogsr.ucsd.edu/admissions/rankings/tab2.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://www-ogsr.ucsd.edu/admissions/rankings/tab2.pdf</a>) find that Yale and Princeton are very similar in number of top 10 departments, with Princeton having 22 and Yale having 19. The ratings, not surprisingly find that Berkeley (36 top 10 departments), Stanford (32), and Harvard (26) are the three best overall programs. There is then a cluster of very even schools: Princeton (22), MIT (20), Yale (19), Cornell (19), and Chicago (18). Thus it seems that Princeton and Yale are very comparable in this regard, as in so many others. Incidentally, Michigan, which you say "has a much larger number of top programs than Yale" actually only is listed as having 14 top 10 programs, only one more than Caltech, despite the latter's almost exclusive focus in the sciences.
I do, however, realize that these ratings are dated, so if you are aware of more recent rankings (other than US News) please post them here.</p>
<p>Good analysis of the faculty reputation rankings, svalbardlutefisk. Unfortunately, the rankings you cite leave out programs such as music (conservatory/performance music, not musicology), art (not art history), architecture, and drama, in which Yale has the #1 and/or most selective programs in the world by far. Undergraduates at Yale have access to all of these programs. Also, your rankings are over 10 years out of date. </p>
<p>Furthermore - and this fact is rarely discussed even though it is very important - analyzing the rankings the way you have does not adjust for the most popular undergraduate majors. If you do an analysis of the rankings weighted by the most popular undergraduate majors - fields such as English, history, biological sciences, political science and psychology - Yale comes out on top by a wide margin, basically beating every other university in the country, even before you adjust for the fact that Yale is so small and therefore its undergraduates get more attention relative to, say, Berkeley.</p>
<p>You will see that Princeton does not make the top ten - it isn't even listed. As I have shown before, MIT, Yale and Caltech are probably the top schools in research when you consider the size of the programs relative to the number of undergraduate science majors. Sciencewatch in fact says that Caltech, Harvard and Yale are the top schools overall when "average showing" is considered.</p>