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Notre Dame is still a weak school in terms of faculty quality, Ph.D programs and research.
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<p>From your statements preceding this, you seem to imply that faculty quality can be measured by the quality of a university's Ph.D. programs and research. But what about undergraduate teaching? I'm fairly certain that at most LAC's, very little research takes place, as faculty are most concerned with educating the undergraduates rather than making breakthrough discoveries in their respective fields. I think that you are neglecting this key element of assessing faculty quality, since it is crucial to how students perform on tests like the MCAT and GMAT and reveals itself in medical school acceptance rates and elite graduate school placement, not to mention job placement upon graduation. ND excels in these areas and is one of the few select schools that is heavily recruited for IB (or so I've been told by some other CC members).</p>
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Also, Notre Dame's faculty is FAR from leading the nation in Fulbright Scholars.
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<p>I said Fulbright Scholars in the humanities over the past few years.</p>
<p>Depends on what school, but even for HSS, CMU can be at best be considered a match. For SCS/Engineering/Tepper, its simply not true the school can be called such.</p>
<p>To LACtransfer: Glad you got into Swarth from PSU but with your grammar and lack of understanding of Top Privates, I don't see how your anecdotes of how certain people got into a certain school means anything. I know people who got into Brown that were not accepted into UVA instate.</p>
<p>FYI, the CCAP rankings of national universities as published by Forbes.com is inaccurate as to CCAP's actual ranking of SMU. Forbes.com lists SMU as 13 when, in fact, it's ranked by CCAP as 43. Take a look at CCAP's own list at the bottom of its own home page:The</a> Center for College Affordability and Productivity. As you will see, the top 20 schools now begin with Harvard and end with Brandeis. BTW, I confirmed the accuracy of the CCAP-published list by email with CCAP</p>
<p>I just finished visiting a few of the ivies and others on the East coast, and this is what I thought.</p>
<p>Brown: Extremely overrated on these forums. It is basically an overgrown LAC. Their whole "core curriculum is bad" mindset worked well, but the ability to take any and every class pass/fail (<em>cough</em>GRADEINFLATION<em>cough</em>, mixed with mediocrity in most of their programs makes Brown a bad place to spend $200,000 IMO.</p>
<p>HYPM: I feel embarrassed saying this, but these colleges were all amazing. I loved them all. Overrated on these forums, but only because people seem to treat them like gods.</p>
<p>Darthmouth: Meh.. Overrated. People seem to only want to go there because its an ivy. It was better than Brown though.</p>
<p>Boston College: I haven't heard too many opinions of BC here, so I don't know if its over or underrated</p>
<p>Overrated Colleges: Penn(Wharton boosts their rep by miles, but they're still a good school), WUSTL(where would this school be without USNEWS?) Duke(USNEWS comment applies here)</p>
<p>Underrated: Berkeley, JHU, Caltech (not enough laymen's prestige for some of the research they produce + their impressive student body)</p>
Of course, it doesn't hurt that in the last National Research Council (NRC) rankings--the most respected of their kind--FIFTEEN of Penn's departments were ranked in the top 10 in the country, and another TEN were ranked in the top 20 in the country, and NONE of those were Wharton departments (most of them were in the arts and sciences). Not to mention Penn's other schools ranked in the top 5 or 10 in the country (Medicine, Law, Annenberg School for Communication, School of Design, Dental, Veterinary, Nursing, etc.), and it's being ranked among the very top research universities in the country (along with Harvard, Columbia, MIT, and Stanford) by the Center for Measuring University Performance, etc., etc.</p>
<p>There's a heck of a lot more to Penn and its outstanding reputation than just Wharton. :)</p>
<p>Brown man has a vendetta against WUSTL, penn and Duke, but be loves Berkeley, JHU and Cornell. I guess for WUSTL its top rate academics and 18% acceptance rate don't mean much. Don't let it bother you</p>
<p>45percenter,
Well... we're talking about overrated colleges, not overrated grad programs here. Many of the departments you mentioned were grad departments.</p>
<p>Having a number one program in any popular field such as business definitely boosts a school's reputation especially if the rest of its programs are not up to par with the business programs #1 status (Penn does have some good programs here and there though, such as BME, econ, history, polisci, urban studies, etc., but they're not Wharton level). Just my opinion, you're welcome to have yours.</p>
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Brown man has a vendetta against WUSTL, penn and Duke, but be loves Berkeley, JHU and Cornell. I guess for WUSTL its top rate academics and 18% acceptance rate don't mean much. Don't let it bother you
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<p>Bescraze is a prestige whore high schooler who doesn't see past selectivity, USNWR, and admissions rates. Don't let it flatter you.</p>
<p>In that case you still didn't explain your reasoning and why JHU and Berkeley are underrated? ON CC Berkeley is vastly overrated (there is a thread with people asserting its as good as Harvard or easily top 5 undergrad, and JHU is always stated as next best tier after the Ivies+duke+stanford+MIT+Cal Tech+Uchicago.</p>