<p>byerly: are you becoming a saint? alumother gave you a flyball and you..........slept.</p>
<p>I think Stanford was #1 for a year or two in the 90s.</p>
<p>Colleges change less than rankings do. I've always thought that most knowledgeable people have an "inner list" that doesn't change much through the years. Mine is pretty well summarized by the "Laissiez Faire" list that cc headlines on it's homepage:
1. H
2. P,S,Y
5. MIT, CIT
7. Amherst, Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth, Swarthmore, Williams
13. Duke, Rice, Penn</p>
<p>yours may be different, but not by much.</p>
<p>I like how when Caltech comes in first, it's naturally an "anomaly" that needs to be corrected, although Caltech has the highest SAT scores, the most honors (Nobel Prizes etc... this has been discussed before) per faculty member, the lowest student/faculty ratio, and (compared to the other top ranked schools) the lowest price.</p>
<p>Of course, the research expenditures calculation that put Caltech first was deeply flawed. Much more flawed, however, is the absurd "value added" evaluation that slaughters Caltech, year after year. Somehow, US News has decided that the "value" a college adds can be approximated by real graduation rate minus an "expected" graduation rate - the "expected" rate is calculated from the SAT of the incoming class and a school's academic expenditures per student.</p>
<p>Caltech, because it has such high SAT scores and expenditures per student, is assigned a very high (usually 99%) "predicted" rate, while its actual graduation rate is a fair amount lower. This, in turn, is because it has the hardest core curriculum of any university in the US. Should this reflect badly on Caltech? Caltech could easily make its core a joke (like many other colleges) and inflate its grades, achieving a 99% graduation rate. However, it chooses not to, precisely because its aim is to add value. This US News measure is logically absurd, and reflects very poorly on the rankings that it helps to produce.</p>
<p>Simba,</p>
<p>Although I want to thank you for joining me in the trenches on the Princeton board if Byerly wants to let my post above go I am really happy to support him in that choice. I'm not a real big taunter and the post was made with no ill will. I'm just happy and proud that Princeton did so well, even though I understand the weakness of the rankings. It means we will continue to get great kids flocking to Old Nassau.</p>
<p>Alu</p>
<p>"Of course we could start this rumored list off:</p>
<ol>
<li>Princeton</li>
<li>Harvard</li>
<li>Yale...."</li>
</ol>
<p>Alumother--Do they not teach alphabetizing at Princeton? It must just be another one of those crazy Harvard snobberies.</p>
<p>You are right sunglasses. I am sure that is all Byerly had in mind. My mistake.</p>
<p>Wasn't there a thread on the Princeton board last year asking that Princeton change its name to "Arinceton" just to deal with pesky issues like that? </p>
<p>By the way, I think Byerly's typo of "rakings" for "rankings" in the thread title here is very apropos.</p>
<p>If we want to talk about "rakings" lets talk about the treatment Harvard has accorded the Tiger football team for the last 9 years running. That's <strong><em>9 years</em></strong> with no "bonfires"!</p>
<p>No wonder the Daily Princetonian is lobbying to get the football coach fired. Enough is enough! How much humiliation should the Orange and Black be required to absorb?</p>
<p>hey, if we have to share this top spot for another year, we may as well be civil in our relations. after this year, however, we're sexiling you to second place.</p>
<p>college2go, I have the same problem. . . I don't see how Berkeley can be below Notre Dame, how Cornell and Chicago can be below WashU, or even that low at all, etc. Berkeley, Cornell, and Chicago are serious, good schools. . .</p>
<p>I think these rankings should be subjective. Throw away these stupid objective formulas, because these rankings are bogus.</p>
<p>I posted this on the main boards, but I'll post it here too since it disappeared among the barrage of posts. </p>
<p>I think the problem here is that CC'ers, being so competitive, assume selectivity is the most important factor when judging a college. Is Stanford harder to get into Penn or Duke? By a few percentage points, yes. But also take a look at how many people are in each school.</p>
<p>Penn has 9800 undergrads while Stanford has 6500. This gives Penn room to accept many qualified applicants that Stanford would be forced to turn down due to lack of space.</p>
<p>How many times do you hear about people with perfect SAT scores and wonderful extra-curriculars being turned down from great schools for no apparent reason? It's simply because there are more qualified kids out there than available spots. Penn is a bigger school, so they accept more people, but the quality of their student body is by no means sacrificed.</p>
<p>Also, don't dismiss Penn's reputation as being less than Stanford's - Penn's regard by the international community as a school with a "preprofessional" atmosphere is great for job placement straight out of college. Stanford has it's star programs like engineering, but Penn has it's own, like The Wharton School. What puts Penn over the top in a very close race (don't forget that the difference was only one point) was it's student-faculty ratio, high student retention rate (which hurts schools like MIT and CalTech - Yes, they're prestigious, but what good is that when unhappy students choose to leave?) and financial resources (allowing, among other things, a lot of great research opportunities for undergrads).</p>
<p>For those complaining about why MIT and CalTech are so low, keep in mind that in addition to retention rate, graduation rate also works against engineering schools. It is common students at eng. schools need to stay for 5 years to complete the requirements if they don't plan their schedules well or if they change concentrations. The extra year,(and subsequent extra tuition) works against them in rankings. Even if it only counts as 5%, it is enough to hurt them when the numbers are so close to begin with.</p>
<p>Recognize that ranking schools purely on selectivity would be a poor indication of quality, especially given that many schools have a self-selecting applicant pool (in other words, inferior but popular schools may have low acceptance rates, but also have a lower quality of applicants).</p>
<p>Do we really want to get into Stanford versus Penn?</p>
<p>Stanford deserves a #2 spot, far and beyond any other school. </p>
<p>Penn's ED program artificially inflates the yield rate, and the admit rate. 21% versus 12% is a big difference. Our RD matriculation rate is much higher and our early program much less forgiving. Penn's only top-3 world-class program is Wharton, while Stanford can say that about CS, engineering, economics, political science, the biological sciences, psychology (a clear number one for decades now), and so on. </p>
<p>Stanford consistenly kills Penn in cross-admits. The best students will pick Stanford over Penn at a very high rate (as I did myself), and that alone SHOULD ensure a higher ranking. But meaningless crap like "faculty resources" is instead used to guarantee a neverending HYP monopoly. </p>
<p>And even with the hugely biased WSJ rankings as they are, Stanford ranks #4, well above Penn, preprofessional atmosphere and all. If the rankings bothered to include SLS and SBS, we would probably have passed Princeton.</p>
<p>I find it very amusing that we are so concerned about selectivity and admissions rates that something like faculty resources gets denotated as "meaningless crap"</p>
<p>Well, how can you measure faculty resources?</p>
<p>The most important indicators of a college's excellence are academics and the quality of the students attending. </p>
<p>If you visit Stanford's campus, you'll realize the facilities are better and the campus is larger.</p>
<p>Right, because naturally the students attending Penn are all crap-for-brains...Also, I agree that academics and quality of students are extremely important, so naturally Stanford's larger campus makes it better...somehow i didn't what the hell that had to do with your point.</p>
<p>eighteenforluck,</p>
<p>If I remember what I read correctly, the faculty/student ratio and retention rate are about the same for Penn and Stanford. Stanford has a bit higher % of class over 50 students but Penn has quite significantly less % of faculty being full-time (like 88% vs 97% at Stanford). Somehow, Penn is #1 and Stanford is 11th in faculty resource! To me, having more faculty being full-time is more important than slightly more % of class with less than 50 students. That's one piece of puzzle.</p>
<p>Then Stanford somehow has predicted graduation rate of 95% and got penalized because the actual rate is 93%. Penn has predicted graduation rate of 92% and got rewarded because the actual is 93/94%. I have no idea how they came up with those predicted rates. I don't think they can really. This works for Penn's favor for no reason.</p>
<p>Your view of financial resource is rather naive. If you do more research, UPenn has 480 millions research grants in 2004 for its med school. To give you proper perspective, UPenn's engineering school, which probably has the biggest research grants among its schools that have undergrad programs, had only 48 million dollars of it--tiny compared to that for med school. So most of the money are for a school which got nothing to do with the undergrads. How is that being a fair indicator of financial resource? </p>
<p>Being a foreign student, I can kinda speak for the international community and around the globe, Stanford definitely has better reputation. Quite frankly, many people don't know about "preprofessionalism" at Penn. Just because you have researched about Penn and read about it doesn't mean most people know that too. I think you are projecting a bit too far. If you don't believe me, visit other countries and do the experiment. Most people know HYPSM much more than Penn.</p>
<p>You seem to have inflated view of Penn's academic program relative to Stanford. Granted, Penn has actually more number of programs in the top 30 than I previously thought. However, it's still nowhere near Stanford. If all you know about Stanford is engineering, then you are probably less informed than many. Stanford's law is awesome; 4 (now down to 3) of the SC judges were from Stanford. Stanford's biological sciences/physical sciences/social sciences and humanities are dead even with Harvard in terms of ranking. Penn is nowhere near the top in those areas and engineering. So I woudn't call it "holding its own", not when compared to Stanford. You said Penn has Wharton; but do you know Stanford's business school is ranked sometime higher than Wharton, depending on which publication you look at? It doesn't matter if it doesn't have undergrad program; I am just talking about reputation.</p>
<p>In terms of feeding the top programs, even Stanford is >3000 miles from Yale and Harvard, it still has many more students at the Harvard/Yale's law schools' class than Penn and is #4 in terms of that. This says a lot about the caliber of the Stanford undergrads.</p>