Real top 10 schools

College Search & Selection
1

<p>What are the real top 10 schools for undergrad? not the usnews version, which most people find to be very inaccurate.</p>

<p>I think the list would look like this:
Harvard
Yale
Princeton
Stanford
MIT
Caltech
Columbia
Dartmouth
Penn
Duke</p>

2

<p>Sorry, I’m reposting because the title of the other one isn’t clear.</p>

3

<p>The Wall Street Journal’s top feeders list looks good to me.
Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Williams, Duke, Dartmouth, MIT, Amherst, and Swarthmore.</p>

4

<p>the pa scores will give you the best (not perfect) indication of the opinions of those that matter (meaning academians and professionals). that said, most of my credentialed peers think…</p>

<p>harvard
stanford
yale
princeton
mit
columbia
chicago
duke
penn
berkeley (high pa, but slightly lower student body quality)</p>

<p>honorary mentions:
caltech (too specialized)</p>

5

<p>bayvcroberts - pa score is heavily influenced by amount of graduate and professional programs. Besides, with response rate of less than 50%, pa score is no more accurate than Wall Street Journal’s use of just 15 professional schools. Besides, the OP specified not to use usnews.</p>

6

<p>Why is Cornell always left out of this list?</p>

7

<p>

Expand all the other schools on the list to 23,000 undergrads and lets see them maintain their better SAT averages.</p>

8

<p>There are only ten spots, which one would you replace Cornell with?
HYPSM are vitually untouchable
Caltech has hardcore engineering elites and highest SAT
Columbia has always attracted the intellectual type. It now has premiere location after major improvement in NYC’s safety.
Dartmouth has only been ranked outside top 10 by usnews 4 times since the ranking started in the 80s (only HYPSM, Caltech, and Duke ranked outside fewer times). In addition, Dartmouth is ranked number 1 in undergraduate teaching.
Penn has Wharton. CAS and other schools are pretty good too.
Duke has never ranked outside of top 10 by usnews. It ranks number 6 on Wall Street Journal’s list of feeder schools to elite professional schools.</p>

9

<p>Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, Penn, Dartmouth, Williams, Columbia, and Duke.</p>

10

<p>

</p>

<p>then goes on to justify list with:

</p>

<p>:confused:</p>

11

<p>There are too many GOOD schools in the U.S. So a ‘top 10’ list wouldn’t fit all of them</p>

12

<p>What johntonishi said.</p>

13

<p>

I agree. The US is saturated with quality undergraduate schools. 10 is such an arbitrary number. In all honesty, any of the top 50 or so schools (including LACs) are going to be great.</p>

14

<p>What is the number of freshman students who matriculate to the top 10 schools? top 25? top 50? That might be an interesting thing to know. I mean in total, not each individually.</p>

15

<p>johntonishi’s top 10 undergrad schools have a total of around 43200 undergrads.</p>

16

<p>If you mean for undergrad, some of the top LACs belong on the list.</p>

17

<p>Agreed with what some of the other posters have said - outside of HYSPM, which are a cut above, it becomes hard (and useless) to distinguish between the other schools - especially if you throw LACs into the list to. </p>

<p>Is UPenn a better undergrad than Brown? What about Brown being a better undergrad than Chicago? You really, really start to split hairs, and it’s a useless exercise. </p>

<p>It’s better to keep research universities and LACs separate, and even then, there are just a LOT of good undergrad schools.</p>

18

<p>William & Mary is #1 public for undergrad.</p>

19

<p>Harvard
Yale
Princeton
Stanford
MIT
Columbia
Berkeley
Cornell
Upenn
Duke</p>

<p>Berkeley should be in the top 10 of every college ranking, unless all you care about are SAT scores. and please no more of that mushy stuff about class sizes…</p>

20

<p>Class size is probably one of the few NON-mushy things you can do to compare schools…</p>