<p>You guys going along with my point. Rankings are bogus and prestige oriented, so we definately don't know if harvard or princeton provides a better academic experience than penn. Although our natural tendenices try to tell us that those schools are in reality better, how do we know. because they're better known overall, because they have more "prestige?" NYU has prestige and its not even close in having the academic qualities that Ivys or other top schools have. Prestige is like a car: HYP is the ferrari while penn is the bentley or BMW. Although the ferrari is sexy and an attention getter, bentlys and BMWs are more practical and reliable.</p>
<p>haha wow... yeah... i ditto milki... maybe i'll just wait for my waitlist acceptance when I've secured a spot at USC instead of Cornell..</p>
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downtown128, do you actually know of a better metric that indicates the quality of the school (i.e. the faculty)?
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<p>Sure: USNWR could survey current undergrads at each school about the quality of their professors, advising, education, resources, etc... That would represent a more accurate picture of what a school is like.</p>
<p>But how would they know if a Professor is good or very good (compared to others) if they haven't been to other colleges and more importantly wouldn't it depend vastly on previous experiences.</p>
<p>For Ex: For a student whose had bad teachers their whole life, even a minuscule improvement would be classified as Good, whereas for someone whose had quality teachers in the past, only a much better professor can earn the tag "good".</p>
<p>I actually think this was a GOOD thing for Penn.
I mean, c'mon, no one actually believed Penn was 4th, so one took that rating seriously. 7th, however, is less outlandish and therefore far more believable.</p>
<p>The fact that the rankings can jump 3 or 4 places a year show that they have at least that much uncertainty - is Penn really a "worse" school this year than last? Still they give you some idea - the #1 school is "better" than the #20, most people would agree. The main function is to put the schools in tiers, the rank within each tier is not that meaningful. No matter how you slice it, Penn is in the top 10 tier.</p>
<p>totally agree. and that only means top 10, no HYP and then top ten. The top ten shouldn't be a second tier behind HYP but roughly equal on overall academics. Individual majors, business, and engineering i think should be ranked and could be with much more certainty. If you are doing social sciences why do you care if nuclear physics is a poor program at your school. I mean you do want to be surrounded around the top students in every aspect, but the most important thing is the quality of the area you intend to major in or at least think you want to major in. After that, then you should look at the university as a whole.</p>
<p>Not to speculate, but it'll move again next year.</p>
<p>I hope it moves up this year too. Even though it's silly to quibble over one or two spots in the rankings, my friends and I do. I'd love Penn to be #4 again, or at least #5.</p>