Just wanted to say @obsessedwcollege tiers are almost perfect imo. I would move USC down to 29, and Case up to 34.
My perspective as a student at a top northeast prep school:
Tier 1a: Harvard, Stanford, MIT
Tier 1b: Yale, Princeton, Caltech
Tier 2a: Columbia, Penn
Tier 2b: Duke, Chicago
Tier 3a: Brown, Dartmouth
Tier 3b: Cornell, NU, Hopkins
Tier 4a: Rice, Berkeley, Georgetown
Tier 4b: UVA, Tufts, BC, Emory
If I run into someone and don’t know anything else about them other than when where they attended undergraduate school, here is how I would rate them on perceived overall capability:
Tier 1 - Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Yale, Princeton, Caltech
Tier 2 - Columbia, Duke, Dartmouth, Chicago, Penn (Penn, Chicago, and perhaps Duke were not in this tier not long ago – they have come up)
Tier 3 - Brown, Northwestern, Rice, Williams, Amherst, JHU (Just thought I’d throw in some LAC comparisons). (Service Academies are in this general area or perhaps higher, largely due to leadership perspective)
Tier 4 - Notre Dame, Cornell, Georgetown, Vanderbilt, Swarthmore, Pomona, WashU, Claremont, Harvey Mudd, CMU
Tier 5 - Berkeley, UCLA, Michigan, UVA, William and Mary, Georgia Tech, Emory, Wellesley, Washington and Lee, Davidson, Middlebury, Boston College, NYU, Tufts, USC
I’m sure I have some unintentional omissions here. Some reputations have changed dramatically in my memory. Penn, Chicago, Brown, Vanderbilt and some others have come up quite a bit in selectivity. The deltas between some of the tiers are pretty slight, but significant enough that I thought it would be worth the delineation.
“I was assuming that I was supposed to place Harvard equidistant from the two points - for a rank of around 13 (but maybe I am taking this ranking stuff too literally)”
I never thought of a geometric ranking Mastadon. It makes perfectly good sense to me! 
@IzzoOne I fail to see what your rankings are based off beyond US News rankings. There is no factor that will enable Williams to be conclusively a stronger school than Swarthmore or Dartmouth a stronger school than Brown- at least not to the extent of delineating them in specific tiers. As a matter of fact, Swarthmore and Brown are more selective than both of them. Pomona is more selective than everyone in tier 3 and half of tier 2, while having the largest endowment per student out of everyone in 2 or 3. Tier 5 Wellesley is a top 15 feeder school to top graduate/professional/medical/law programs and higher ranked than Tier 2 Penn, Tier 3 Northwestern, and Tier 1 Caltech. Can you elaborate on why you’ve organized the schools in that way?
If you can’t give specific, targeted reasons beyond relying on other rankings, I think it just points out what a waste of an exercise this really is.
Here’s my perspective:
Graduates from colleges I’m wowed by, but I would much rather let their accomplishments and perspectives speak for themselves: Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Yale, Princeton, Caltech, Columbia, Duke, Dartmouth, Chicago, Penn, Brown, Northwestern, Rice, Williams, Amherst, JHU, Notre Dame, Cornell, Georgetown, Vanderbilt, Swarthmore, Pomona, WashU, Claremont, Harvey Mudd, CMU, Berkeley, UCLA, Michigan, UVA, William and Mary, Georgia Tech, Emory, Wellesley, Washington and Lee, Davidson, Middlebury, Boston College, NYU, Tufts, USC
- Bowdoin, Haverford, Grinnell, Carleton, Carnegie Mellon, Colorado College...and so many more!
No tiers necessary.
We are finding out that tiers can cause tears.
If there is a compelling reason for the schools to be organized that way, I have no qualm. I would appreciate the clarification, though. If it’s a subjective ranking based on what schools they like, I wouldn’t have bothered arguing. But since the comment made references to some “deltas between some of the tiers…significant enough [to]… be worth the delineation.”, it would be great to know what these are, exactly.
For instance, I do think there is a small gap between Harvard/Yale/Princeton/Stanford/MIT and others. That is because these five are the only five US colleges which rank among the 10 most selective colleges, among the top 10 for highest yield, among the top 10 for endowment per student, and among the top ten for sending students to the best business/law/med programs. They are also all in the top 10 for schools producing the most undergraduate fellowship winners per capita. Not necessarily saying these are the best indicators of strength or the only ones, but HYPMS do consistently well. Others come close, but don’t hit all four benchmarks.
PurpleTitan, for instance, created his or her own set of rankings by identifying four factors: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/1893105-ivy-equivalents-ranking-based-on-alumni-outcomes-take-2-1-p1.html Do I think that it’s the best approach for ranking schools? Absolutely not. But at least it draws on actual, objective data.
@nostalgicwisdom I feel most people recognize that HYPSM is the top tier for all the reasons you mention and others.
After that it gets kind of murky.
In no particular order, my top tier contains the Ivies + MIT + Stanford+Caltech+Duke+Northwestern+Rice+Georgetown.
My criteria is having the highest percentage of graduates ending up in the top 1%.
@nostalgicwisdom All my ranking was is exactly what I said it was at the beginning. If I don’t know anything else about the person, that is roughly how I WOULD PERCEIVE their capabilities based only on that bit of information. That is the essence of reputation. I also didn’t say my opinion is perfect, but you could say the same for everyone else.
You are right that it is better to really know the person and their capabilities. At that point, the school becomes all but irrelevant in my view.
Schools become trendy, but that doesn’t necessarily reflect a longer term view. If you look back at the Ivy League in my memory, at one time it was HYP, then Columbia and Dartmouth, and the least selective and prestigious were Penn, Cornell, and Brown. Brown was thought of as the poor relation in the Ivy League as it had a very small endowment. The area around Penn was terrible and the admission rate was high. I recognize the current trends, but I also remember the past, and they both influence overall perception.
You have Wellesley above Caltech as a top graduate/professional/medical/law feeder, About 35% of Caltech undergraduates get PHDs in STEM, the highest in the country. The number for Wellesley is 6.5% according to NSF.
Again, my ranking was just my perception of the capability of graduates absent any other information. It doesn’t reflect which ones I like the most or which ones I think actually provide the best education. Perhaps another time on that.
@IzzoOne I would give Berkeley much more prestige. I would place it tier 3, as it frequently competes with Cornell and rice. Dont let public deceive you
I really just don’t see what makes a current Dartmouth student (admit rate 10.4%) or recent graduate two tiers more distinctive than a Vanderbilt (admit rate 10.2%) or Swarthmore student (admit rate 10.2%). I don’t find it fair to judge current students on the history of their institution.
Even if your comments are rooted in alumni in general and not the more contemporary group, I’m looking at the Dartmouth, Pomona, and Amherst Common Data Set dated 10 years ago (2006-2007) and see no significant difference with admit rates, test scores, and class rank between the three schools that warrants Dartmouth being over the other two. The reality is the same today. The one school which has become drastically more selective is Vanderbilt. It’s actually incredible to see how much more selective 2016 is from 2006: https://virg.vanderbilt.edu/virgweb/vucds.aspx Vanderbilt has higher test scores than even Stanford and Princeton now. This trend cemented in 2010 and will continue.
Here was the source of the Wellesley comment: https://hubpages.com/education/Wall-Street-Journal-College-Rankings-The-Full-List-and-Rating-Criteria This ranking is from 2003. I’m not particularly surprised by Dartmouth’s position at #7, given that 5 of the schools analyzed are MBA schools (which Dartmouth is a big feeder of). But it’s interesting to see that even way back then, many of the so called tier 3-5 LACs did as well as many of your tier 1s/2s. Note that Vanderbilt didn’t make the top 50 then. But I’m confident it would, today, given how much stronger the student body has become in recent years.
My only hope, in the end of all this, is that you and many like you are willing to adjust your expectations for reputations by looking closely at what the current picture is like. HYPMS may remain the undisputed kings and queens, but schools like WashU, Northwestern, and Vanderbilt have caught up to the other Ivies. They are not two or three tiers behind. Some of the top LACs have always been as selective and excellent in outcomes as the non-HYP Ivies/other top schools, and they still are- they’re just so small and unknown that many aren’t aware of these realities.
I’m on board with those saying that HYPMS are on their own tier in terms of prestige, selectivity, resources and national significance, and then after that it becomes extremely, and almost exclusively, subjective.
If my child could go to one of those, I would make every effort to make sure they attended. Beyond that, however, I would care much more about fit and finances, which is what we are doing.
But how many of the graduates of these schools were already in the 1% prior to admission? Much more likely that these schools have a higher percentage than any other tier you want to come up with. As long as legacy matters to admissions, the rich will keep on getting richer.
I’m gonna have to recoin the top universities as “BHYPSM” As the #1 top Public School, Berkeley deserves a nod to be in the top rankings. Not everyone can afford a HYPSM, and well B deserves it.
Be careful – debates are not allowed. You will all be censored soon and be placed in a safe space.
Why not save ourselves the time and go with a far more established source. The tiers have already been set by academe. The Peer Assessment Score takes the average rating of each university according to thousands of university presidents, provosts and deans of undergraduate admissions. They have been rating universities for years, and their results have been consistent. Outliers are automatically discarded.
TIER 1 (schools with peer assessment scores of 4.8-5.0)
Harvard University 4.9
Massachusetts Institute of Technology 4.9
Princeton University 4.8
Stanford University 4.9
Yale University 4.8
TIER 2 (schools with peer assessment scores of 4.3-4.7)
Brown University 4.4
California Institute of Technology 4.6
Columbia University 4.6
Cornell University 4.5
Dartmouth College 4.3
Duke University 4.4
Johns Hopkins University 4.6
Northwestern University 4.3
University of California-Berkeley 4.7
University of Chicago 4.6
University of Michigan-Ann Arbor 4.4
University of Pennsylvania 4.4
TIER 3 (schools with peer assessment scores of 4.0-4.2)
Carnegie Mellon University 4.2
Emory University 4.0
Georgetown University 4.0
Georgia Institute of Technology 4.1
Rice University 4.1
University of California-Los Angeles 4.2
University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill 4.0
University of Notre Dame 4.0
University of Southern California 4.0
University of Texas-Austin 4.0
University of Wisconsin-Madison 4.0
University of Virginia 4.2
Vanderbilt University 4.1
Washington University-St Louis 4.0
^ thank you. This tier-thing discussion is getting same old, same old.