<p>^That was a productive post.</p>
<p>@ dreamer, that list is what you think, the opinion and perspective of a 17 year old. You can’t really argue with the methodology of USNews, the only thing that is generally criticised is the PA and the new counsellor score, both of which actually hurt Penn! The facts are the facts, penn deserves its ranking and arguably it should be rated higher without the PA score. If your expectations don’t match reality well then that’s your problem.</p>
<p>Why should UChicago be so high? It doesn’t send people to grad school, get people into top jobs, ave the selectivity, or have the loyalty of the Ivies. I would choose Northwestern over Chicago without a second thought.</p>
<p>The real ranking should be:</p>
<p>Harvard
Yale
Stanford
MIT
Caltech
Princeton
Columbia
Dartmouth
Chicago
Brown </p>
<p>.
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.Cornell /Penn</p>
<p>Penn is the easiest Ivy to get into.</p>
<p><a href=“http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=601105##[/url]”>http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=601105##</a></p>
<p>gugupo gugupo gugupo gugupo</p>
<p>@greenexcess: Why is every opinion that does NOT favor Penn as the 5th best uni in the country(lol) an opinion of a teenager? Why can you not argue with the methodology? Is USWN the Bible or what? Never trust any statistics that you didn’t forge yourself. Everybody knows that USWN altered their methodology to match public opinion. Everybody knows there are schools in the top 25 that play along USWN stats obsession more than others. How could one possibly think that such an institution can measure anything when the methodology as well as the participants are questionable? </p>
<p>All the hard facts one can measure in a statistic (Endowment, Faculty Ratio, publications etc.) CAN all contribute to great education. But even if I had one faculty member per student (you know schools cheat on that statistic, right?), three times the publications of Harvard(quality=quantity?) and 900 quadrillion Dollars, what makes you think such a university has a better quality than another one with less money? This is all sheer speculation.</p>
<p>The subtext, of course, is that no one can say anything for certain. Very informative.</p>
<p>
</p>
<ol>
<li>Chicago has a higher PhD production rate than Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. As far as universities go, Chicago is only behind MIT and Caltech, whose rates are inflates mainly because of engineering.</li>
<li>Chicago graduates are more well-regarded as workers than Princeton graduates, according to an international survey from the US News World Rankings.</li>
<li>Chicago has higher SATs than half the Ivies.</li>
<li>Chicago has a higher freshman retention rate than most of the Ivies.</li>
</ol>
<p>Why are you making posts on things you’re completely ignorant of?</p>
<p>And Northwestern over Chicago? There are good arguments for choosing Northwestern over Chicago. Yours is so full of ignorance that it isn’t even worthy of being considered.</p>
<p>I think people think that U of C is not as incredible as it is because it used to have a much higher acceptance rate for undergrad. However, I don’t think this was because it isn’t as strong of an institution, but rather because the environment at Chicago makes it a very self-selective place. Academically, U of C is one of the top ten research universities in the world rivaling all of the ivy league as well as Cambridge and Oxford. For someone who enjoys intellectual inquiry it is among the very best places. However, for many students the environment is not suited to them.</p>
<p>First off, my apologies to the Penn folks because this thread temporarily turned into a Chicago forum.</p>
<p>With that aside, Slipper1234 - if you made your comments a decade ago, with the same metrics to evaluate a college (strength of job placement, selectivity, etc.), I would have readily agreed with you. When I was at Chicago, something like 65% of the applicants were accepted, the school didn’t have great job placement in comparison to the ivies, etc.</p>
<p>(The reason I chose Chicago over some Ivies for undergrad a decade back was, I don’t know if I could have found what I was seeking - superb academics delivered with a certain intensity - as readily elsewhere. Of course this is a topic for another day.)</p>
<p>At the present, I’m not sure your statements about Chicago are accurate. In short, Chicago has changed quite significantly and quite quickly. Penn, in fact, is the school I often look to compare and contrast Chicago to in these discussions. In the mid-90s, you probably wouldn’t compare schools like Penn and Columbia or Penn and Dartmouth all too closely. At the time, Columbia, Dart, etc. probably had a leg up on Penn. Now, as you did in this very thread, people often group CU, Dart, and Penn together. This change has occurred over a pretty small period of time.</p>
<p>Similarly, Chicago has changed quickly, although the administration began to implement this change more recently. In any case, in terms of selectivity, Chicago’s now in the same ballpark as Penn, Dart, etc. In terms of alum loyalty (by alum giving rate), I’d imagine Chicago is also similar to Penn, Columbia, etc. Again, in short, Chicago today seems to be quite different that Chicago 5-10 years ago. So, to conclude Slipper, while your comments may have been accurate in the late 90s, they don’t seem to hold true as well. </p>
<p>(As an aside, if you’re looking for an “ivy-like” school that’s not in the Ivy League, places such as Northwestern or Duke are still probably better choices than Chicago. It’s not to say NU or DU are better schools, just that they tend to have more of the pre-professional, student-centric, well-rounded approach to collegiate life. Chicago, on the other hand, probably still tilts more toward the academic, PhD-prep style. Obviously Chicago has begun to overlap more and more comfortably with these other schools, but some distinctions still exist. Picking an NU over Chicago, then, has more to do with “fit,” rather than any difference in actual quality, as Slipper1234 implied.)</p>
<p>I think the ARWU rankings are quite accurate, though they probably overrate UCLA and especially UCSD to some degree. In terms of professional schools, I would say Penn is probably the 3rd best in the country, behind Harvard and Stanford (blend of USNWR ranks in med, law, business and engineering). </p>
<p>It appears that Columbia and Chicago are somewhat stronger at the PhD level across all disciplines than Yale (the relative weakness of engineering research probably brings Yale down. Chicago still attracts a lot of applied science funding through its physics department/Fermilab).</p>
<p>I also think the University of Michigan is underrated. </p>
<p>1 Harvard University<br>
2 University of California, Berkeley<br>
3 Stanford University<br>
4 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
5 University of Cambridge<br>
6 California Institute of Technology<br>
7 Princeton University<br>
8 Columbia University
9 University of Chicago<br>
10 University of Oxford<br>
11 Yale University<br>
12 Cornell University
13 University of California, Los Angeles
14 University of California, San Diego
15 University of Pennsylvania<br>
16 University of Washington<br>
17 University of Wisconsin - Madison
18 The Johns Hopkins University<br>
18 University of California, San Francisco<br>
20 The University of Tokyo </p>
<p>I would say recent Nobel Prizes are a good proxy for the quality of the faculty- and in that regard, Penn has done very well as have Columbia (the perennial leader) and Yale.</p>
<p>^ I agree ARWU is pretty accurate.</p>
<p>It just has very little to do with undergrad quality.</p>
<p>@slipper: It has a lot to do with undergrad quality in certain ways. The fact that these institutions are where groundbreaking research is being conducted means that the newest ideas and methods are being discovered by some of the smartest people of this century in these places. </p>
<p>However, this only matters at the undergrad level if students have access to these minds and this research. That is what sets Penn apart from most of the institutions that ARWU ranks above Penn. For an undergraduate, Penn is a place where amazing discoveries are being uncovered every day and it is SO easy to be involved in it. Penn’s career services department sets students up with researchers from across a myriad of disciplines. Additionally they have “hubs” on campus that provide undergraduates access to research such as CURF (a.k.a. the center for undergraduate research and fellowships). Additionally, students don’t even have to assist in the research to benefit from it. Many of those individuals conducting research, teach at the undergrad level and even those teaching at Penn’s grad schools are completely accessible to undergrads as a result of the One University Policy (which allows students to take classes in any of the other undergrad and the graduate schools).</p>
<p>Essentially, Penn is a place of innovation that allows its undergraduates access to all of the innovative minds that make it so special. </p>
<p>Whether it is the most selective in the world or the prettiest doesn’t matter because students at penn (who are academically comparable to their peers, and in most cases better (go quakers!)) have access to every professor and every innovation. The students can contribute in their own ways and STILL HAVE FUN DOING IT! We have the quintessential “beautiful college green” and the benefit of a world class city only a short walk away. Whether any of the haters want to accept it or not, Penn deserves to be ranked among the best. </p>
<p>Finally, i doesn’t matter what any of these posters think about Penn, it only matters what the former, current, and prospective students feel about this amazing institution. I’m only posting to prevent any prospective students considering Penn from being confused by the useless banter that you so often see on this website about “prestige” and all that. For you kids, just know that Penn has the best academics in the world and her students have more fun than anyone else in the ivy league (while still having amazing job placement/ graduate school placement after college)!</p>
<p>Penn rocks, and I don’t doubt that.</p>
<p>But as for the Nobel Prize thing, I must differ…</p>
<p>What good are all of Columbia’s Nobels if so many of them are won half a century ago, the people who won them not only retired but deceased?</p>
<p>How about a cutoff of ‘how many nobels won in the last decade or two’?</p>
<p>better than mit what???</p>
<p>It is not that hard to get into UPenn.
Look at the ridiculously high admit rate of Penn.</p>
<p>14.3%…yeah that’s RIDICULOUSLY high</p>
<p>For the last decade Penn has won, on average, at least one Nobel affiliation per year. About the same as Columbia and Yale, slightly less than Stanford and Harvard.</p>
<p>[Interactive</a> Infographic of the World’s Best Countries - Newsweek](<a href=“http://www.newsweek.com/2010/08/15/interactive-infographic-of-the-worlds-best-countries.html]Interactive”>http://www.newsweek.com/2010/08/15/interactive-infographic-of-the-worlds-best-countries.html)</p>
<p>Closing comment. A statistic just stated that the US is NOT the most amazing country in the world. Let’s all move Finland- you statistic obsessed FREAKS!</p>
<p>And now let’s have a long and useless conversation about that…</p>