<p>Cal and Harvard are on par with Princeton in Math and the Sciences (not including Engineering).</p>
<p>
Perhaps when Cooper Union and Juilliard send the highest (in this country and possibly in the world) percentage of their alumni to graduate schools, when the biggest percentage of their alumni go on to become PHDs, when the highest percentage of their alumni in the world become Nobel Prize winners, when they start managing Jet Propulsion Lab and become involved in every american and most international space missions inside and outside of the solar system - perhaps then Copper Union and Juilliard will also be included in Tier 1.</p>
<p>princeton lags well behind berkeley and harvard, stanford, and MIT in chemistry. It’s also behind columbia, yale, cornell (all of which are strong too). same basic story in bio sciences.</p>
<p>So it’s hard to generalize about the sciences, you have to look at individual depts.</p>
<p>I agree with Alexandre’s assessment of the USNWR Academic Peer Review of UNDERGRADUATE schools. Seriously, the Deans of Admissions at places from Harvard to Wisconsin are not chumps and know their peers much better than the posters on this board do. With that said, for graduate school, there is NO way in hell that Brown or Dartmouth would get higher ratings than UCLA, UVA, UNC-CH, Wisconsin, Texas, NYU, etc. They would be more on par with Georgetown perhaps (only a handful of remarkable graduate level areas), and would be much further down that list.</p>
<p>With that said, the MOST accurate and telling list of Undergraduate Prestige and Academic Excellence is: (Note, this is from 2008 as I can’t get a hold of the 2009 one, but the rankings remain relatively the same)</p>
<p>1 Princeton University (NJ) 4.9
1 Harvard University (MA) 4.9
1 Stanford University (CA) 4.9
1 Massachusetts Inst. of Technology 4.9
5 Yale University (CT) 4.8
5 University of California - Berkeley* 4.8
7 California Institute of Technology 4.7
8 Columbia University 4.6
8 University of Chicago 4.6
8 Cornell University (NY) 4.6
8 Johns Hopkins University (MD) 4.6
12 University of Pennsylvania 4.5
12 University of Michigan – Ann Arbor * 4.5
14 Duke University (NC) 4.4
14 Brown Unversity (RI) 4.4
16 Darmouth College (NH) 4.3
16 Northwestern University (IL) 4.3
16 University of Virginia* 4.3
19 Carnegie Mellon University ¶ 4.2
19 University of California - Los Angeles* 4.2
19 University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill* 4.2</p>
<p>For 2009 I don’t remember whether Columbia went down to 4.5 or Penn went up to 4.6, but I do remember that they were now tied</p>
<p>I think Columbia went down to 4.5, tying with Penn, and leaving Chicago, Cornell, and Hopkins as the only schools at 4.6</p>
<p>What about schools such as:
Deep Springs-Lowest Acceptance rate, actually Julliard is slightly lower… Highest SAT… A whopping 65% of all graduates get PhD
Sends most people to schools like Harvard, Oxbridge, YPSM</p>
<p>Cooper Union-Was discussed above…</p>
<ol>
<li> Harvard University 4.9/5.0</li>
<li> Massachusetts Institute of Technology 4.9/5.0</li>
<li> Stanford University 4.9/5.0</li>
<li> Princeton University 4.8/5.0</li>
<li> Yale University 4.8/5.0</li>
<li> University of California-Berkeley 4.7/5.0</li>
<li> California Institute of Technology 4.6/5.0</li>
<li> University of Chicago 4.6/5.0</li>
<li> Columbia University 4.5/5.0</li>
<li> Cornell University 4.5/5.0</li>
<li> Johns Hopkins University 4.5/5.0</li>
<li> University of Pennsylvania 4.5/5.0</li>
<li> Duke University 4.4/5.0</li>
<li> University of Michigan-Ann Arbor 4.4/5.0</li>
<li> Brown University 4.3/5.0</li>
<li> Dartmouth College 4.3/5.0</li>
<li> Northwestern University 4.3/5.0</li>
<li> University of Virginia 4.3/5.0</li>
<li> University of California-Los Angeles 4.2/5.0</li>
<li> Carnegie Mellon University 4.1/5.0</li>
<li> University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill 4.1/5.0</li>
<li> University of Wisconsin-Madison 4.1/5.0</li>
<li> Washington University-St Louis 4.1/5.0</li>
<li> Georgetown University 4.0/5.0</li>
<li> Georgia Institute of Technology 4.0/5.0</li>
<li> Rice University 4.0/5.0</li>
<li> University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign 4.0/5.0</li>
<li> University of Texas-Austin 4.0/5.0</li>
<li> Vanderbilt University 4.0/5.0</li>
</ol>
<p>I think that graduate prominence heavily affects the USNews PA score. Look at these pairings:
RPI - 3.5
Georgia Tech - 4.0</p>
<p>UT Austin - 4.0
Rice - 4.0</p>
<p>lockn, those are about right. As undergraduate institutions, GT, UT and Rice are all roughly equal and all three are better than RPI. That’s not to say that Rice isn’t excellent, but that UT and GT are also excellent. Well, GT is primarily a Technical Institute, so it is hard to compare it to Rice and UT.</p>
<p>For your logic to hold, if the PA were truly influenced by graduate prominence, UT would have a PA significantly higher than Rice.</p>
<p>Of course, those scores should be taken with a grain of salt. There is very little difference between a 3.8 and a 4.0 or between a 4.0 and a 4.2. But a school with a PA of 3.5 most likely isn’t in the same league as a school with a PA of 4.5.</p>
<ol>
<li>Harvard</li>
<li>MIT</li>
<li>Princeton</li>
<li>Yale</li>
<li>Stanford</li>
<li>Caltech</li>
</ol>
<p>^The standard, of course. That is over-established… Little do people know about little gems tucked up in little places which provide a great experience. Please tell me that Harvard provides a better undergrad than Amherst… Of course, we will continue to see it like this for ever to come.</p>
<p>Nobody disregards the other institutions. They are still included in the listings below the top 6 i wrote out above. However, they lack the comprehensive research and academic intensity of those top institutions. If you were to point out a specific school and delineate to me how its specific program was better than a comparable program at one of those schools, I might well believe you. However, the overall hype, which I admit is overstated in some instances, is a result of their low acceptance rates and difficulty of admissions more than anything.</p>
<p>I honestly think that UNSWR should base about 60% of their ranking on the peer assessment. Stuff like endowment size and yield really doesn’t tell you much about how good an institution is. (especially considering that endowment size shows little indication on how much money a school can spend on each student)</p>
<p>mitpwns:</p>
<p>MIT and Caltech can hardly be called comprehensive universities. Comprehensive to engineers…maybe, but they are more like Cooper Union and Julliard than Harvard and Stanford</p>
<p>^Exactly… Comprehensive would be Columbia… If you want engineering, go ahead and go Cooper Union.</p>
<p>Hope2getrice:</p>
<p>I agree with you about Caltech. Their science and math programs are uncomparably strong, but they do lack in terms of their programs in other fields such as business, music, sports, history, etc., many of them being non-existant at Caltech altogether. Again, Caltech is often listed high because it likes to take the smartest and brightest students, not necessarily the all-rounded ones, and the high selectivity boasts its rankings.</p>
<p>MIT, however being known for its engineering programs, is surprisingly very strong in other programs as well. Just to name a few: their economics is 1st in the nation, MIT Sloan is top 5 in the nation in business, their neurobiology program is considered top 2 in the nation, etc.</p>
<p>Where would LAC fall on this list?</p>
<p>mitpwns, I know MIT has some extremely fascinating programs, but it does not offer a liberal arts education or setting as do some other schools like Rice, Columbia, Chicago, Brown, JHU, Cornell, etc. That’s why I believe it is truly very different.</p>
<p>Hmm… I don’t understand the insistance for UPenn to be in tier 1. “Uber low” acceptance rate? Its at 17%, which is very low, but Cornell is now at 19% and people call Cornell’s “uber high” haha. Can someone explain this to me? I also love how everyone says that Cornell is only a popular household name and is not as respected as the other Ivys in a academic circles. Well the peer assessment has always been very kind and favorable to Cornell, placing it much higher than Brown and Dartmouth in recent years and right on par with the likes of Columbia and UPenn. Hmm… just my thoughts, what do you guys think?</p>