schools in the south

College Search & Selection
46

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Not quite. If you are looking at rankings, then Texas falls behind Duke, Vanderbilt, UVA, UNC, William and Mary, Wake Forest, and Emory…

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<p>Uh, actually YES QUITE. You’re referring to the overall USNWR undergraduate rankings which considers non-academic criteria, does not consider academic program rankings AT ALL, and only weighs peer reputation 25%. However, despite this, UT’s <em>undergraduate</em> peer reputation score is greater than W&M and Wake Forest and tied with Emory and Vanderbilt.</p>

<p>However, I was referring to perception in academia - which is based on quality of faculty, research, grad programs, etc. If you look at individual ACADEMIC department/program rankings (i.e., scholarly rankings like the NRC, London Times, AWRU… even the USNWR individual program rankings in the grad school rankings), UT-Austin is stronger than every school on that list except Duke. Looking at individual program rankings, the only school that comes close to UT’s academic depth and breadth is Duke. While UNC and UVA have some strong individual programs (especially professional schools in UVA’s case), neither has as many highly ranked programs across as many disciplines as UT. (This isn’t really debatable since UVA itself recognizes this and has made a concerted effort to increase faculty of UT’s caliber by hiring away NAE members, etc. Someone has posted a detailed internal report from UVA on here a few times before).</p>

<p>Some more data
average PhD score for grad programs (based on peer reputation rankings)

  1. Berkeley - 4.8
  2. Stanford - 4.8
  3. MIT - 4.8
  4. Princeton - 4.6
  5. Harvard - 4.6
  6. Yale - 4.4
  7. Michigan - 4.4
  8. Wisconsin - 4.3
  9. Chicago - 4.3
  10. Cornell - 4.3
  11. Columbia - 4.3
  12. UCLA - 4.2
    *13. Texas - 4.0
    Where are the other Southern schools?</p>

<p>professional schools by mean rank:

  1. Stanford - 1.8
  2. Berkeley - 5.0
  3. Michigan - 6.4
  4. Harvard - 7.0
  5. Northwestern - 12.3
  6. Columbia - 12.6
    *7. Duke - 13.0
    *8. Texas - 13.2
  7. NYU - 14.5
  8. UCLA - 14.6
  9. Wisconsin - 15.2
    *12. Virginia - 16.5
  10. Illinois - 16.5
  11. Indiana - 17.3
  12. Pennsylvania - 18.6
    At least other Southern schools show up here!</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.grad.berkeley.edu/publications/pdf/usnews_rankings_2008.pdf[/url]”>http://www.grad.berkeley.edu/publications/pdf/usnews_rankings_2008.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>The current USNWR PhD rankings are surprisingly consistant with the more rigorous NRC rankings from over a decade ago:</p>

<p>Average of nonzero scores across all ranked disciplines:
1 MIT
2 Berkeley
3 Harvard
4 Princeton
5 Caltech
6 Stanford
7 Chicago
8 Yale
9 Cornell
10 UCSD
11 Columbia
12 Michigan
13 UCLA
14 Penn
15 Wisconsin
*16 Texas
17 Illinois
17 Washington
19 Northwestern
*20 Duke</p>

<p>Average of all 41 scores
1 Stanford
2 Berkeley
3 Michigan
4 Cornell
5 Wisconsin
6 UCLA
*7 Texas
8 Columbia
9 Illiois
9 Penn
9 Washington
12 Harvard
13 Minnesota
14 Princeton
15 Chicago
16 Yale
17 Ohio State
*18 Duke
18 Johns Hopkins
20 Penn State</p>

<p>Really the only schools on your list that can compete with UT are Duke, UNC, and UVA. I agree at the undergraduate level something can be said for more selective admissions favoring smaller/private schools, but that doesn’t change the fact that UT’s academic programs are, if not the strongest, certainly among the absolute strongest in the South.</p>