<p>1 Stanford
2 Penn
3 Vanderbilt
4. Duke
5 Dartmouth
6 Brown
7. Notre Dame
8 Wash U
9. Rice
10. Northwestern
11. Yale
12. Emory
13. Cornell
14. Harvard
15. Columbia
16.Princeton
17. Hopkins
18. MIT
19. Chicago
20 Cal Tech</p>
<p>There you go....completely arbitrary and mostly guess work and hearsay</p>
<p>Joke thread, just an excuse to get "lower" ranked colleges a "nicer" rank.</p>
<p>piccolojunior. How else could Duke make the top five?</p>
<p>bescraze,
Thanks for your input. I'd love to get some other contributions, so hopefully others will add their views/ranks/comments. </p>
<p>p and r,
These colleges are all among the USA's Top 20 national universities. Jokes? LOL. All are absolutely superb colleges and all are tops in their home regions. Several are almost universally recognized as among the nation's absolute premier names, eg, Stanford has received a lot of # 1 votes for providing a great social life to go along with its outstanding academic offering. </p>
<p>And for the record, Duke has ranked in the USNWR Top 5 in four of the last six years.</p>
<p>The joke is in ranking a flawed ranking system based on a flawed category.</p>
<p>piccolo,
LOL. Lighten up. There is no ranking system here. This is a completely subjective listing and no doubt different things will appeal to different people. But I will disagree with your thought that this is a flawed category. A student's social life is a very important aspect of your college time and absolutely, positively should be part of the calculus in the college search process. </p>
<p>As for the rankings that are being posted, they are based on a combination of what we all have experienced first-hand, what our friends & family members might have experienced and what we might have heard through the grapevine. All different experiences that we all will value individually. Anyway, not meant to be a scientific study, but it may give some insight into the prominence of social life outside of the classroom at these colleges. And for many folks, that is a pretty important factor in their college selection process.</p>
<p>mmmm anyone who tells me to lighten up hasn't seen enough of my 2,257+ posts. It's flawed in that social life varies based on the person more than anything else. (Common sense IMO, lulz I cant believe you guyz are so dumb)</p>
<p>Anyway, my remedy: just go to school in Boston, watch the Celtics dominate for four years and /thread.</p>
<p>How many ppl here actually been to college and have experienced atleast 1-2 years of college to safely say that their own college is good or bad.</p>
<p>yup, not many.</p>
<p>I agree with piccolo - a "good social life" truly is in the eye of the beholder. </p>
<p>I attended a u that was ranked as one of the top party schools. I spent a good amount of time at my sister's alma mater, however, which was not ranked at all as a party school. I found that her school's parties put mine to shame. They were amazing.</p>
<p>Similarly, while many have ranked Stanford near the top, I have heard that many Stanford students find the social life there lacking, and actually spend their social time across the Bay at Cal!</p>
<p>bay,
I don't think anyone is contesting the idea that a good social life is in the eye of the beholder. Part of the appeal of some colleges is that they can provide a variety of very appealing (at least to some groups) social experiences. </p>
<p>This is a request for a subjective ranking and different folks will be drawn to different things in different degrees. Frankly, the surprise to me has been how much uniformity there has been in the opinions of most of these colleges. Part of these likely derive from historical stereotypes, but the more you see these views expressed, maybe the more likely it really is the case at ABC College. </p>
<p>As a reminder, some of the factors that was originally proposed for making judgments and these rankings were:</p>
<p>*Welcoming nature and friendliness of the students
*Musical scene (both locally and for bands that come through)
*Athletic scene for entertainment purposes, ie, sports teams
*Greek life (good or bad)
*Strength of party scene
*Size, diversity and cohesiveness of the student body and how this impacts social life
*Weather and its impact on social activities
*Proximity to urban life/arts
*Student activities including community service, club activities, intramural sports, etc.
*Alcohol and drug scene</p>
<p>hawkette, </p>
<p>do you have the data for retention rates?</p>
<p><quote> Part of these likely derive from historical stereotypes, but the more you see these views expressed, maybe the more likely it really is the case at ABC College. </quote></p>
<p>Of course these rankings are all stereotypes. None of us have attended all of these colleges in order to compare them equally so we rely on "i know a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy at Vandy who can kill two thirties of natty" or "i know a girl who knows a girl who knows a guy at Caltech (because there are no girls there, remember?) who passes out from studying so much" </p>
<p>I also believe that people tend to focus on about two out of the ten factors when they hear "social life"</p>
<p>Ahh... so limited is of our knowledge of each schools.</p>
<p>Most of us based partly our opinion on:</p>
<p>what the above posters say
what other poster say
probably a day or two visit each college
historical sterotypes
what friend, mom, dad, relatives say
what you've read in a book
historical sterotypes
also, what your friends say that have gone to each of those schools</p>
<p>it all comes down to a lack of intimate experience at each college. That is not to say that this list is wrong, it could be right as Hawkette says, the consistency of it mirrors historical sterotypes, so the more ppl say it, the more its likely to be right.</p>
<p>But I do think there is a lot more happy places that may be overlooked. These are just all the colleges that we know of and have heard of and are the ones we are most acquainted with. (thought none of us really go there to know for sure. Its all hearsay :) for sure)</p>
<p>my watch,
Freshmen retention data is not very revealing for these schools. I think that all are at 95% or better. IMO, this might be the least revealing element of the USNWR ranking methodology as the differences are very small deep into the rankings and this factor also is worth 4% of the overall score or 4x more than the weight assigned to the student/faculty ratio.</p>
<p>As for the focus on only 2 out of 10 things, you're probably right, but those 2 things likely differ among the group opining.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I think you just made that up. I know a number of Stanford grads/ current students and I have never heard that statement. Stanford is said to have a superb social life and very rarely do guys go to Cal for that. Obviously the town around Stanford isn't great, but San Francisco is only 45 min away.</p>
<p>You can think what you want. I have a nephew who just graduated from Stanford, so you can take your doubts up with him.</p>
<p>Nonsense, Bay, everybody knows that high schoolers are experts on all the ins and outs of college social scenes.</p>
<p>Kidding aside, I can't say I disagree with the assessment about Stanford and Princeton's social scene.</p>
<p>That was the point of my original post anyway - that the quality of the social life is going to be unique to each student. If you had very little social life in high school because you were working so hard to make it into the top 20, then just about any social scene may be liberating and fulfilling and therefore quite positive.</p>
<p>i think your 1-5 is definately right i think the rest are pretty much the same.. except i think princeton should move up a bit.. i live in the area and you can find some sick parties but some of the kids are straight up mad awkward</p>
<p>Uh, if the alcohol and drugs scene is correlated with a better social life then I'll take my "hermit" status.</p>
<p>piccolo,
My take in including alcohol and drug scene was in line with your comments, ie, not equating better scene to more prevalence of alcohol and drugs. My view is that the degree of either in a school's social scene is a factor and that if it is overdone, then it would be a negative. I also think it is naive to think that there isn't at least some of this on nearly all of these campuses. Some schools may have a party element, but does this degenerate to a destructive level and compromise the academic environment and, if so, how broadly does this affect the student body?</p>