<p>Fine you can put Penn but not Wharton :)</p>
<p>I don't see Cornell or Gtown being underrated...isn't Gtown still like top 20?</p>
<p>Cornell's not.. Georgetown is as it is #23.</p>
<p>For a master list and information on many of the named underrated colleges, you may want to visit a related link:</p>
<p>State schools are underrated. While they may be less personal, the oppurtunities are endless, but I feel that people get turned off by the large percentage of people who are accepted.</p>
<p>I will say the following colleges are overrated or underrated by USNEWS current rankings:</p>
<p>Overrated:Upenn(#4), Caltech(#5), WUSTL(#12), Emory(#17), Vanderbilt(#19)</p>
<p>Underrated: UC-Berkeley, UCLA, Michigan, Johns Hopkins, Chicago.</p>
<p>UCLA is sooooooooooooo overrated....</p>
<p>We need to think this overrate/underrate thing based on school's speciality.
For example:
For science Williams' phsyics and astronomy is severely underrated.</p>
<p>Overrated: Vanderbilt, WUStl, Penn, Duke
Slightly Overrated: Yale (there, I said it), Stanford (there, I said THAT too)
Slightly Underrated: Chicago, Caltech
Underrated: Berkeley, Brandeis, lots of publics</p>
<p>UNDERRATED:</p>
<p>University of Denver:
DU is a solid school that’s highly unrecognized</p>
<p>University of Nevada Las Vegas:
Just because it's in Vegas doesn’t mean it’s a bad school. In fact the economic boom in Vegas over the past decade has allowed UNLV to grow exponentially</p>
<p>Case Western Reserve University:
Case gets a bad rap for a number of ridiculous reasons; namely for offering difficult classes with heavy workloads and being located in the city of Cleveland. Universities must be sympathetic and responsive to their clients (students) needs, but rigorously training those you’ve pledged to train seems hardly a good reason to complain about a school. On the latter note, anyone who’s ever lived in a city knows that all metropolitan areas have their nice areas and their dodgy spots. Cleveland is no different</p>
<p>In terms of USNWR,</p>
<p>Vastly Overrated: WUSTL, Notre Dame, Emory, Vanderbilt
Somewhat Overrated: Penn, Duke, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, Chicago
Somewhat Underrated: Columbia, UCLA
Vastly Underrated: Georgetown, Berkeley</p>
<p>Top 20 (or 21) Schools in Tiers: (ordered alphabetically) </p>
<p>1-5: Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Yale, MIT
6-10 (or 11): Brown, (<em>Cal Tech?), Columbia, Cornell, Georgetown, Penn
10-15 (or 11-16): Berkeley,(</em>Cal Tech?), Chicago, Dartmouth, Duke, Northwestern
16-20 (or 17-21): Carnegie Mellon, Johns Hopkins, Michigan, UCLA, Wash U</p>
<p>I don't know what to do with CalTech, so I'll say its in either Group 2 or 3.</p>
<p>Overrated: USC, Notre Dame
Underrated: UCs, especially UCSD</p>
<p>Overrated: USC, Notre Dame</p>
<p>Agreed somewhat with Casey2889. Mine would look like this.</p>
<p>Vastly Overrated: Washington U. in Saint Louis, Emory, Vanderbilt, Duke, University of Penn
Somewhat Overrated: University of Chicago, Princeton, Brown
Somewhat Underrated: Berkeley, William & Mary, Georgetown, Cal Tech
Vastly Underrated: Columbia, UCLA, most state schools in general</p>
<p>Oh and I would add Harvard and Yale somewhere in the Somewhat Overrated category. Even though I'd love to go to Yale.</p>
<p>Overrated: Vanderbilt, Wash U, Duke, Villanova, Lehigh
Slightly Underrated: Chicago, Caltech, Brown, Tulane, Wake Forest
Underrated: BC, Fordham, Georgetown, Holy Cross, State schools</p>
<p>How can anyone say a school is overrated if they haven't attended it? You're all just regurgitating opinions from other people you've seen posting on here.</p>
<p>underrated: Rice, Georgetown, William & Mary, Tufts, Wake Forest</p>
<p>"How can anyone say a school is overrated if they haven't attended it? You're all just regurgitating opinions from other people you've seen posting on here."</p>
<hr>
<p>Shhhhhh... you're going to ruin the delusion that keeps this website going. </p>
<p>Someone must be inherently better no matter one's personal pursuits or strengths!!!!</p>
<p>there has to be some way to solve the problem.</p>
<p>My idea is to look at all the rankings and see a general consensus among the ranks. When looking at colleges, I also reccomend looking at the international rank (the most prominent ones are Academic Ranking of the World as cited by the Economist and Newsweek International) to see how it stacks up in terms of international fame, which could be considered when we're entering in an increasingly global world. </p>
<p>If I found something in the general consensus, it's that the elite public universities in the US are WAY underrated. Almost every international rank I've read gives UC Berkley a ranking in the top 10 internationally. Almost every ranking I've read gave UM a ranking in the top 10-20 internationally. One reason why I believe people overrate private schools? I believe it could be because people give too much credit too US News as it's the most notable ranking and heavily FAVORS PRIVATE schools because even though US News doesn't admit it, but it basically is a ranking of the wealthiest schools in America. On the other hand, bigger public schools fall because the amount of money availible for each person drops. While we can look at US News, I don't believe it should be the ONLY ranking we look at. Other rankings cite the # of times the school is cited in professional journals or the amount of research. We should look at them all. </p>
<p>One thing that I notice is that the elite private schools are still rated 1-10 in all of the rankings. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Cal Tech, Cambridge, Oxford are still in the top 10 in almost all the rankings I've read. After that, the rankings start diverting from the US News rank A LOT. Darmouth, Brown, Emory, Rice, U of Notre Dame, Vanderbilt, CMU all start falling dramatically in the ranks as they don't fit the research or peer review standards. Therefore, to me those universities are overrated. Who's underrated? The next set of universities after top 10. Those are usually University of Toronto, University of Michigan, University of Wiscounsin, University of Washington. Yes, for US News readers this must seem like a conspriracy or something, but the general consensus agrees. In matter of fact, don't you find it weird that not a single public university is ranked in the top 20 by US News and that their rankings by the US News is usually by FAR the worst rank of ALL the ranks there are? Again, I'm pointing to the US News rank as the most notable (but not most credible) rank there is. Most people don't go out and look at other standards and criteria. Yes, occasionally there may be one rank that severly overrates or underrates a university, but the general consensus should still be within 15 ranks for most. </p>
<p>So my answer (based on ranking consensus) for which universities are overrated and underrated?
The second tier private schools (with the exception of a few like Duke, Wash U, Univ of Chicago, etc) after the elite Harvard level like Emory, John Hopkins, Brown, Darmouth, Rice, Notre Dame, Vanderbilt, CMU.
Underrated? UC Berkeley, UCLA, UCSD, UM, UW-Madison, UW-Seattle, UI-Urbana Champaign and then it starts to gradually spread out after that like UT Austin, University of Maryland, etc.</p>
<p>but you likewise shouldn't have a say if you're going to the university because it's just one opinion and may greatly differ with what others think. In matter of fact, people may complain that talking about your own school may be a bit biased.</p>