<p>Hi i'm a prospective undergrad student hoping to major in International Relations/International Development.
After undergrad I hope to go to law school (hopefully top-tier ivy-league school).
Which university do you think is better??</p>
<p>Pomona is not a university, but a college. It has a very different vibe than Duke. If you are very worried about prestige, you should probably go to Duke. Everyone has heard of them because of their basketball team. Sports is a huge part of the culture at Duke, so if sports are a love of yours, Duke would be a lot of fun. </p>
<p>If you are primarily interested in getting an excellent education and preparation for graduate or law school, you can’t do better than Pomona. The students will amaze you, and many will remain your friends for life. But don’t be surprised if the average person on the street has never heard of it- or thinks it is a Cal State University. </p>
<p>In the end, which school you pick is a lot less important than what you do when you get there. Where do you think you will be the happiest and thrive? Pick that one.</p>
<p>I don’t really buy the prestige argument to be as distinct. Pomona students do splendidly in representing the top graduate, law, and med schools, as well as top employers like Google and McKinsey and top graduate fellowships like Fulbrights and Goldwaters.</p>
<p>The name brand is rapidly increasing, and the Sagehen network is quite strong. The classes are becoming more geographically diverse and cosmopolitan- and bringing that name to their communities. Pomona’s strong internship programs are helping it gain recognition to the general public, both in SoCal and around the world. Our very new Draper Center for community partnerships links students to the community at large. And in the case of Duke to the public eye, not everyone is aware of its academic strengths. </p>
<p>Pomona is very pre-professional. It prepares you very well for gaining admission at top tier graduate schools, which seems to be your ideal goal. I don’t know much about law prep, but I know that Pomona students who are seeking acceptance to med schools can basically walk in a professor’s lab and ask them if they can collaborate on their research-as freshmen. Pomona also has various programs, such as the Summer internship program and Shadow a Sagehen, that prepare you for following a future career in whatever field you are interested in. The competition is encouraging, but it’s not cutthroat. I don’t really know much about Duke’s programs or academic prepration (primarily because I didn’t apply for Duke), but hopefully my information for Pomona helped. </p>
<p>I don’t agree with Supernova123. I’ve served on several grad admissions committees at top-ranked science grad programs, and in my experience the top liberal arts colleges including Pomona are all much more successful at placing alumni into those programs than Duke, which certainly is well known for athletics and graduate programs (especially medicine) but doesn’t have a particularly high undergraduate academic profile in the parts of the country I’ve worked (New England and the west). I certainly know grad alums in my field, but would be hard pressed to think of any undergrad alums. Duke talks of its Nobel laureates, but none of the science winners with Duke connections were undergrads there. Clearly if you want to do law or business in the south, pick Duke, but there are lots of really good reasons to pick Pomona in a broad range of fields.</p>
<p>Supernova, I was talking about elite circles. Pomona and Duke do equally well. So if your intent is to go to a top tier ivy League schools, both will serve equally well in terms of name brand.</p>
<p>No doubt that Duke has a stronger general reputation, but Pomona graduates do extremely well with the elite companies, grad schools, and so on. </p>
<p>Duke may have a great undergrad focus, but it is not an exclusive undergrad focus like Pomona’s is. There is a difference between liberal art colleges and liberal art educations- something that I learned upon turning down Columbia College of Columbia University for Pomona. </p>
<p>If never being ranked outside the top 10 on US News doesn’t constitute a ‘particularly high undergraduate profile’, I don’t know what does. Duke is the only school in the US to ever rank alongside a member of HYP on the US News rankings (even Stanford can’t make that claim). If you average the rankings from 1983 to 2007, Duke comes out ahead of every school except HYPSM. Duke is more selective than Pomona, Duke has a higher yield than Pomona, Duke has a bigger endowment than Pomona, Duke has a better faculty than Pomona, Duke alums earn more money than Pomona alums, Duke alums make more donations to their alma mater, Duke is ranked among the 25 best universities in the world on virtually every single global ranking and Duke beats Pomona in cross admit battles.</p>
<p>Pomona’s ranked in the top 5 for US News Rankings. Top 2 in Forbes.</p>
<p>Pomona is barely less selective than Duke (10% vs 12%). In fact, because Pomona attracts a self-selecting student body, it is likely to be more selective. Pomona’s average SAT for accepted students is a notch higher than Duke’s.</p>
<p>Pomona has a higher retention rate than Duke. Also, Newsweek, using a variety of factors, ranked Pomona a more desirable school than Duke.</p>
<p>Pomona has a greater endowment per student han Duke does.</p>
<p>Pomona has faculty that actually care about their students, but still manage to be extremely accomplished. </p>
<p>Payscale is useless in comparing the institutions because it doesn’t consider those who go to graduate school. Nearly 85% of Pomona alum attend graduate school. This is hardly a fair comparison. Also, major distribution affects things- of course Duke’s engineering students will earn more. Pomona doesn’t have that to increase their numbers.</p>
<p>More Pomona alumni donate percentage wise than alums at Dukes do.</p>
<p>Much of Duke’s prestige comes from its graduate programs. Its undergraduate programs are ranked for two things- Forbes and US News. Pomona does better in these rankings which can actually be compared.</p>
<p>Sorry, but Duke is not a better institution than Pomona, and Pomona is not a better institution than Duke. You’ve missed the point in multiple ways.</p>
<p>Damn Supernova just got put down</p>
<p>Silly argument:
Half the general populace can’t find the Indian Ocean on a map let alone name either Pomona or Duke as colleges. They might know Harvard, Yale and Princeton and their own flagship but that’s about it.</p>
<p>Daughter will be at a big university next year starting her masters, she would not trade the undergraduate experience she received at Pomona for all the so called name recognition you refer to as being important.</p>
<p>Apples and oranges, both very good and tasty but darn if I don’t prefer one over the other given the choice.</p>
<p>Please stop being so defensive about Duke, and so antagonistic about the liberal arts colleges. I have not at any point undermined Duke’s traditional strengths, but you seem to be taking this way too seriously. This will be my last post about this issue, as we are getting out of point to the original poster’s thread.</p>
<p>Your points lack perspective. They lack context and emphasize the absolute. Rankings. Absolute salary numbers. </p>
<p>Pomona does not have the same rich history of alumni as Duke does- I don’t deny that. Just see my first post on this thread. Only recently has Pomona risen to the top- only recently has the school attracted national attention. Being a smaller institution, and only recently having the benefit of prestige, Pomona does not have the millionaire alumni that a school like Duke does. I know this, but it doesn’t affect me too much because I know Pomona’s current day strengths. </p>
<p>Annual giving at Pomona focuses on participation, not on money. Pomona’s endowment is far greater than what alumni give each year, and Pomona doesn’t go out of its way to ask for more money. Duke, on the other hand, connects with rich alumni and doesn’t prioritize participation. As a result, the giving rates are not as simple as they seem. </p>
<p>Secondly, about rankings. In case you didn’t get it, my post was a satire of yours- a play on your using US News Rankings to justify Duke as the next HYPMS. I also don’t see rankings in the seemingly absolute context you do, since you seem to think that graduate school rankings mean that those schools without these programs (like Pomona) have a worse undergraduate experience than research universities. I don’t see US News Rankings or Forbes as suggesting that Pomona is better than Harvey Mudd (in US News Rankings case) or Rice (in Forbes case). What I see it as, and how it should be seen as, is that in these flawed rankings, which emphasize different things, Pomona does well. Pomona does exceedingly well on the rankings that it’s in (the only exception I can think of being PayScale, but as I have indicated above, that measure is exceedingly flawed because it excludes the vast majority of Pomona alumni), which are indicative of its own excellence, but not relative to another institution. In order to compare between institutions, I have to create my own set of rankings- deeply personal to myself, and not any institution. I value the liberal arts experience. I want a proactive location, a deeply contradicting student body that will challenge me, and opportunities to explore. I want small classes, engaging and caring professors, but also research opportunities and a great career development center. Pomona is the school which fits me best. For another student, with their own set of rankings, Duke may fit them best, and that is beautiful thing.</p>
<p>People are more than the institutions they attend. I know at Pomona that the journeys of people here are deeply personal and complex. That Pomona students have higher average LSAT scores than Duke, or that according to a 2003 report more Duke students (6th) attended an elite graduate program than Pomona (13th), or that Pomona students earn more Fulbrights while Duke students earn more Rhodes Scholarships, means very little to me beyond being a source of encouragement that the same doors which are open at the top regarded universities are available at the top regarded liberal arts colleges. I know, because alumni are representing Pomona at the top companies and graduate schools, that my institution will not hurt my chances in also being able to do so. That is what is the real important message here. Numbers are useful, but to an extent, and we all value different sets of numbers. Pomona beats Duke in some numbers, and Duke beats Pomona in others. But more importantly, both schools provide their students with the resources and opportunities to end up at the best places afterward, if that is what you’re looking for. </p>
<p>Personally, on the whole LAC vs. research university debate, I wouldn’t disagree with the statement that Duke (the culmination of everything- graduate and undergraduate resources, Div I sports, etc.) is a more important school, a more endowed school, a more well known school, a more diverse school than Pomona is. I am not sure where you’re getting the impression that I consider Pomona to be a “better” (a word which has to be given context) place than Princeton. But for my needs, and for the needs of many undergraduates, Pomona may indeed be a better place for them than Duke or Princeton are. And that’s what really matters. </p>
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<p>Poke all the fun you want. But in the most comprehensive preference comparison tool, Middlebury beats out your ‘vaunted’ Duke by a statistically significant margin. </p>
<p><a href=“Compare Colleges: Side-by-side college comparisons | Parchment - College admissions predictions.”>Compare Colleges: Side-by-side college comparisons | Parchment - College admissions predictions.; </p>
<p>Like nostalgicwisdom, I’m not suggesting that one school is better than the other for all students. But asking if Pomona students “take a leave of absence to go make millions in the NBA” when trying to convince people that Duke is the superior institution is a laughable. </p>