<p>OK, guys, looks like some of you spend a lot of your time thinking about colleges, so I am interested in your collective intelligence/experience.
My son's stats: Sat I: 2310 (800/760/750), non-native speaker, not URM.
SAT II: WHist 800, Physics 800, Math II 800
Class Rank: 1 of about 700 with a GPA of 101% (no idea how to convert it to other scale).
Hooks: good enough at athletics to be interesting to DIV I schools, such as Yale, Princeton, and Stanford (these for sure, have contacts with coaches), possibly Harvard, Duke, and UPenn. Coaches at MIT and CalTech (Div III) will be happy to have him, but I do not think that these schools care enough about athletics for that to be a hook.
Intended major: physics/engineering.
School without his sport, but interesting otherwise: Cornell.</p>
<p>What sport are we talking about? At any rate, your son's stats are excellent. IF he is undecided between Engineering and Physics, he should apply to schools that have both options. </p>
<p>California Institute of Technology
Cornell University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Northwestern University
Princeton University
Rice University
Stanford University
University of California-Berkeley
University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign
University of Michigan-Ann Arbor</p>
<p>He is a sabre fencer. Definitely wants to fence for NCAA team, which limits the list of schools. On the other hand, you can only go to one school anyway. Thanks for opinion</p>
<p>Gourman Report undergraduate rankings for Physics:</p>
<p>Caltech
Harvard
Cornell
Princeton
MIT
UC Berkeley
Stanford
U Chicago
U Illinois Urbana Champaign
Columbia
Yale
Georgia Tech
UC San Diego
UCLA
U Penn
U Wisconsin Madison
U Washington
U Michigan Ann Arbor
U Maryland College Park
UC Santa Barbara
U Texas Austin
Carnegie Mellon
U Minnesota
RPI
Brown
Johns Hopkins
Michigan State
Notre Dame
SUNY Stony Brook
Case Western
Northwestern
U Rochester
U Pittsburgh
Penn State University Park</p>
<p>I am pretty sure collegehelp's ranking is flawed.. how can cornell be no.3, why is ga tech ranked so high (i thought their physics it not quite impressive), and why is michigan ranked so low..?</p>
<p>anonamous-
The link you posted lists U Rochester twice, once at 25th and once at 27th. Cornell is 6th in your list versus 3rd in the Gourman Report. Michigan is 18th in your list versus 19th in the Gourman Report. Their rankings are virtually the same. Your list has Georgia Tech at 62nd which seems way too low. From where did you pull this list?</p>
<p>Collegehelp, the Gopruman report rankings were spot on...in 1990. A department changes over the course of 20 years. At this point in time, I'd say the Gourman report is outdated.</p>
<p>Yea that F1 site seems like a guy just made it in a few hours, based on just general consensus. It is aimed at internationals, mainly for graduate studies it looks like.</p>
<p>I also got a feeling that it is shifted toward graduate studies. Though, what's the difference? None of these big research schools are really good for undergrad education anyway. Harvard though is supposedly the biggest producer of physicists (bachelors) in US</p>
<p>Alexandre-
The Gourman Report I have is a 1997 edition so it is about 10 years old, not 20.</p>
<p>I can understand your discomfort with 10-year-old information. But, after studying the Gourman rankings from different angles in different disciplines, I am convinced the rankings are still accurate. I have concluded that departmental quality almost always changes very slowly. </p>
<p>Let me try to persuade you:
(1) The Gourman physics ranking is consistent with current information. The average difference (absolute value) between the Gourman Ranking for Physics and the 2007 US News ranking for graduate programs in physics is only 4.2 positions based on 30 schools. (US News considers the quality of graduate programs an indicator of undergraduate quality at large universities.) The average difference would be much less if it weren't for two schools with large disagreements. Sixteen out of thirty schools were ranked within three positions of each other. The correlation between the 1997 Gourman undergraduate ranking for physics and the 2007 US News graduate ranking for physics is .80 (very high). </p>
<p>(2) Rankings for physics change very little in ten years. The correlation between the 1997 US News graduate rankings for physics and the 2007 US News graduate rankings for physics was .96 (almost perfect). The average difference between the 1997 US News grad physics ranking and 2007's is 1.5 positions (absolute value). If very slow change is true for graduate programs which are more subject to change than undergrad, it is certainly more true for undergraduate.</p>
<p>(3) Rankings in other undergraduate disciplines change very little. The correlation between the 1997 US News undergrad ENGINEERING ranking and 2006 is .95 (almost perfect). The average change in US News rank for undergrad engineering 1997 to 2006 was 2.3 positions (absolute value). For undergrad BUSINESS, the US News 1997 ranking with 2006 ranking correlation was .94 (almost perfect). The average change in 1997 versus 2006 business rank was 3.5 postions (absolute value).</p>
<p>For readers who don't know what "absolute value" means, it is the average ignoring minus signs so a +1 and a -1 difference don't cancel each other out. </p>
<p>Rankings change negligibly over a ten year period. The Gourman Report is still accurate. </p>
<p>The Gourman Report targeted data relevant to undergraduate education. It is the only ranking available for many undergraduate disciplines. It would be irrational to discount the Gourman Report.</p>
<p>collegehelp could you please specify the critetia that gourman report uses to rank universities. I have seen some rankings using criterias such as research expenditures, or % of international staff... which is unrelated to the actual quality of the program.</p>
<p>The Gourman Report states that its ratings are based on "extensive reseach" into the following criteria:</p>
<ol>
<li>auspices, control, and organization of the institution</li>
<li>numbers of educational programs offered and degrees conferred (with additional attention to "sub-fields" available to students within a particular discipline</li>
<li>age (experience level) of the institution and the individual discipline or program and division</li>
<li>faculty, including qualifications, experience, intellectual interests, attainments, and professional productivity (including research)</li>
<li>students, including quality of scholastic work and records of graduates both in graduate study and in practice</li>
<li>basis of and requirements for admission of students (overall and by individual discipline)</li>
<li>number of students enrolled (overall and for each discipline)</li>
<li>curriculum and curricular content of the program or discipline and division</li>
<li>standards and quality of instruction (including teaching loads)</li>
<li>quality of administration, including attitudes and policy towards teaching, research and scholarly production in each discipline, and administration research</li>
<li>quality and availability of non-departmental areas such as counseling and career placement services</li>
<li>quality of physical plant devoted to undergraduate, graduate, and professional levels</li>
<li>finances, including budgets, investments, expenditures and sources of income for both public and private institutions</li>
<li>library, including number of volumes, appropriateness of materials to individual disciplines and accessibility of materials</li>
<li>computer facility sufficient to support current research activities for both faculty and students</li>
<li>sufficient funding for research equipment and infrastructure</li>
<li>number of teaching and research assistantships</li>
<li>academic-athletic balance</li>
</ol>
<p>The weight given to each criterion above varies by discipline.</p>
<p>The average difference between bobobob's ranking and the Gourman Report was 2.8 positions...further confirmation of Gourman Report accuracy. If it were not for big ranking differences for UCSB and Texas, the average difference would only be 1.9 positions...very close.</p>
<p>There is some truth in relating the quality of graduate program to the quality of undergraduate program. In most of big universities it is graduate students who do most of the teaching (I should know, I was one myself), so the better the graduate students are, the better off are the undergrads.</p>