The True Top 15 US Colleges

College Search & Selection
1

<p>Here is my ranking:
1. Harvard
2. Yale, Princeton, Stanford (tied for second)
5. MIT
6. Caltech and UPenn (tied for sixth)
8. Brown
9. Duke
10. UC Berkeley
11. Georgetown
12. Columbia
13. Northwestern
14. Notre Dame
15. Chicago</p>

<p>Note: I am only looking at Universities, not LACs.</p>

<p>Here is my methodology:
1. New York Times Cross Admit Data
[The</a> New York Times > Week in Review > Image > Collegiate Matchups: Predicting Student Choices<a href="Harvard%20beats%20everybody,%20YPS%20beats%20the%20rest%20convincingly">/url</a>.</p>

<ol>
<li><p>Wall Street Journal Prestigious College Grad School Feeders
[url=<a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB106453459428307800-search,00.html%5DWant"&gt;http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB106453459428307800-search,00.html]Want&lt;/a> to Go to Harvard Law? - WSJ.com<a href="Again,%20HYP%20dominate.%20The%20other%20schools%20on%20my%20list%20follow%20that%20order">/url</a>.</p></li>
<li><p>US News
[url=<a href="http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities%5DNational"&gt;http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities]National&lt;/a> University Rankings | Top National Universities | US News Best Colleges<a href="Harvard%20and%20Princeton%20are%20tied%20for%20first">/url</a>. </p></li>
<li><p>Forbes College Rankings
[url=<a href="http://www.forbes.com/top-colleges/list/%5DAmerica's"&gt;http://www.forbes.com/top-colleges/list/]America's&lt;/a> Best Colleges List - Forbes<a href="Williams%20is%20first.%20Yale%20ranks%20poorly%20here">/url</a>. </p></li>
<li><p>TIMES Top 400 World Rankings
[url=<a href="http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/2011-2012/top-400.html%5DTop"&gt;http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/2011-2012/top-400.html]Top&lt;/a> 400 - The Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2011-2012](<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2006/09/17/weekinreview/20060917_LEONHARDT_CHART.html%5DThe"&gt;http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2006/09/17/weekinreview/20060917_LEONHARDT_CHART.html)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li>
<li><p>General prestige in common conversation in the US</p></li>
</ol>

<p>Thoughts?</p>

2

<p>1 is wrong because its sampling is inaccurate and it’s heavily in favor of Northeast universities; 2 is wrong because it includes a very limited number of professional schools that it considers “prestigious”; 3 is wrong for reasons widely debated; 4 is completely wrong because it uses many statistical measures that are just wrong or stupid, like membership in Who’s Who. And how did you measure “general prestige in common conversation”?</p>

<p>In other words, this is a bunch of junk rankings consolidated into one junk ranking.</p>

3

<p>What is tied with caltech for 6th? There’s only one listed.</p>

4

<ol>
<li>I would recommend that you read the entire study here: [A</a> Revealed Preference Ranking of U.S. Colleges and Universities by Christopher Avery, Mark Glickman, Caroline Hoxby, Andrew Metrick :: SSRN](<a href=“http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=601105]A”>http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=601105)
It is not biased to Northeastern Universities. </li>
</ol>

<p>2.The prestigious schools they use are almost universally accepted. For example, everybody knows Stanford Law or Harvard Medical School are prestigious. I think WSJ is a good approximation. </p>

<ol>
<li><p>How is US News wrong? They seem to be very fair.
[How</a> U.S. News Calculates the College Rankings - US News and World Report](<a href=“http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/2011/09/12/how-us-news-calculates-the-college-rankings-2012]How”>http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/2011/09/12/how-us-news-calculates-the-college-rankings-2012)
They specifically deny any regional bias. I would agree that Stanford should be ahead of Columbia and at least tied with Yale at third. I think they also overrank Chicago. Would you agree?</p></li>
<li><p>Forbes looks at economic diversity/graduating debt free, which is important. </p></li>
</ol>

<p>Would you not deny that saying “I go to Stanford or Princeton” carries more prestige in a conversation that saying “I go to UC Berkeley”? That is what I meant by that comment.</p>

<p>But post your own rankings on this thread, phantasmagoric! I am curious about what other people think.</p>

5

<p>Kpackett makes great points. Wholly agree with them all</p>

6

<p>kpackett,</p>

<p>You haven’t been on CC for very long so I’ll forgive your lack of knowledge on this. The revealed preference study you cite has been debated innumerable times; general consensus is that it’s biased toward Northeast universities. Search the forums for it and you’ll find plenty of discussion about it.</p>

<p>Prestigious schools are most certainly not universally agreed upon. Sure, we can say that Harvard is prestigious, but it becomes mucky once you reach the ‘gray area’ of prestige, wherein it’s difficult to say whether X or Y is more prestigious. For example, which is more prestigious, Northwestern or JHU? The difference in general doesn’t matter, but if you’re going to incorporate it into an overall ranking, you should at least attempt to be scientific about it.</p>

<p>US News is “fair” only in the sense that it isn’t idiotic in the criteria it chooses (rankings like Forbes are considered “idiotic”). I’d allow the US News ranking to be included in a composite ranking, but on the whole US News is pretty controversial.</p>

<p>The fact that you think Forbes is legitimate tells me just how much you know about college rankings. *No one<a href=“worth%20his/her%20salt”>/i</a> takes the Forbes ranking seriously. It includes Who’s Who membership (completely stupid - practically everyone is in Who’s Who), data from RateMyProfessors (which makes no sense, since most universities have their own internal review system, so students don’t use RMP), PayScale data (completely erroneous, since all of it is self-reported; self-reporting = automatic statistical insignificance), and “awards” that Forbes decided are prestigious. None of these makes sense. The resulting ranking also makes little sense.</p>

<p>

</p>

<p>I never indicated that all top universities are equally prestigious. I was wondering where you got your data re: prestige. For each criterion, you included a linked source, but for #6 (prestige) you don’t even mention where you got such data or how you incorporated it.</p>

<p>

</p>

<p>There are literally hundreds (if not thousands) of rankings that have been posted on this site. They’re all flawed and nobody agrees on any ranking. If I had the time and will to make a ranking, there’d still be no point in discussing it, since it always happens the same way. I can tell you now that this thread will end as follows: people will argue about your criteria, they’ll go on tangents vaguely related to the topic (for example, this thread is fertile ground for a multi-page debate on PhD production), the thread will fizzle out once people are bored (or once a mod locks it), and few if anybody will have gained much insight, most likely none. When it comes to rankings, I’ve never seen a thread on this site that didn’t progress this way.</p>

7

<p>

</p>

<p>**Notre Dame ahead of Dartmouth and Cornell?</p>

<p>ha!</p>

<p>good one**</p>

8

<p>^^^Georgetown and Notre Dame ahead of Chicago? That is even funnier.</p>

9

<p>

What about peer assessment as a ranking for “academic prestige”? We haven’t had a “good” discussion about PA on this site for a while… :D</p>

10

<p>^ pfft, not spicy enough - we need strongly-worded statements about the counselor rankings to really get the party started.</p>

11

<p>Although I think revealed preferences are not a bad way to do college rankings, the Avery study is unfortunately quite outdated. I think the data is something like 15 years old. The Avery study also had a rather small sample and was primarily designed to show that such a ranking could be done and was reasonable instead of being an authoritative study. Hence, it was published in an economics journal and not as a college ranking. I also question your use of the revealed preference study as you claim “(Harvard beats everybody, YPS beats the rest convincingly)”. Yet, according to the study, Caltech is #2 and MIT is #4 [Admittedly, HPYSMC beat everyone else convincingly]… </p>

<p>As many other commentators have pointed out, some of the rankings you use are totally worthless. It’s also unclear how you compiled your ranking from those sources but I suspect such aspects such as a well defined methodology do not exist for this ranking.</p>

12

<p>^ I read in a Caltech document that of the students who are admitted to Caltech and to Stanford or MIT, 90% turned Caltech down. Caltech also has a yield rate of about half (or less) of HYSM’s. It doesn’t seem likely that Caltech would be #2 in preference.</p>

13

<p>I have also read similar things about Caltech’s cross admit woes although I think they win more than 10% against MIT and Stanford. Yet the Avery study which is linked in this thread puts Caltech at #2. I think the most likely explanation for this seemingly inexplicable discrepancy is that the year the data for Avery’s study was collected was the year Caltech was ranked #1 by US News. My guess is that Caltech’s desirability spiked that year after jumping from 9th to 1st in US News and Caltech did unusually well in cross-admit battles that year.</p>

14

<p>It’s clear the OP didn’t even run his own numbers, but instead listed his own subjective preferences and justified them by handwaving in the direction of a bunch of other lists. Proof? How is it that OP ranks Brown at #8 and Chicago at #15? Let’s look at the data OP claims to rely on.</p>

<p>US News: Chicago #5, Brown #15
THES: Chicago #9, Brown #49 (or among US schools Chicago #6, Brown #30)
Forbes: Chicago #8, Brown #21
WSJ “Top Feeder” Schools: Brown #12, Chicago #14 (pretty much a dead heat)
NY Times Cross-Admit Data: no Brown-Chicago match-up</p>

<p>So that leaves the sixth category, “general prestige” (as subjectively calculated by the OP) to trump all other statistical categories in which it’s no contest, Chicago a runaway winner over Brown. But because in the OP’s mind Brown has more “general prestige” than Chicago, Brown ends up in the middle of the pack of 15, with Chicago barely hanging on at the bottom.</p>

<p>Complete, utter fail in the credibility department.</p>

15

<p>Best for intellectual atmosphere and overall quality of undergraduate education, with small classes (more than 60% < 20, less than 5% >= 50), few distractions (understated Greek & D1 sports scene), selective admissions (75th percentile M+CR >= 1500), and strong academic outcomes (PhD production, medical and law admissions): </p>

<p>Amherst, Carleton, Chicago, Harvey Mudd, Pomona, Swarthmore, Williams</p>

<p>Small miss on one of the above criteria:</p>

<p>Caltech, Grinnell, Haverford, MIT, Oberlin, Reed, Rice, Wellesley</p>

<p>Many other schools are similar to some of these. They offer essentially the same kind of undergraduate experience and would be worth choosing over the above schools if you could attend at a significantly lower net cost (or had any other good basis for personal preference). There isn’t any “true” top 15; it all depends on your preference criteria (though of course some criteria are more compelling than others).</p>

16

<p>Perhaps we ought to have a FAKE TOP 15. That or a list of schools that are most definitely NOT in the top XX. The true lists are boring.</p>

17

<p>“The true lists are boring.” </p>

<p>True lists?</p>

<p>Are there such things as true lists???</p>

18

<p>kpackett,</p>

<p>Soooooo, after hours of reading, studying, collating and synthesizing your conclusion is that Stanford, most of the Ivies, the two big Techs and a handful of the usual subjects are the top schools in the US.</p>

<p>Wow! Thanks for sharing.</p>

19

<p>Let’s see now…there’s a ‘top 400’ (world rankings); a ‘top 100’ (isn’t there?! – I’m think I saw that somewhere…); a ‘top 50’ (I’m SURE I saw that…); a ‘top 25’ (yes, indeed, it’s right there…); now there’s a ‘top 15’ (this very topic!). I think we should just cut to the chase – I want to see the TOP COLLEGE IN THE UNIVERSE LIST – everything else is just so second, third, fourth, fifth,…rate…and those of us unaffiliated with NUMBER ONE will just have to learn – isn’t that what education is all about?! – to live with it…somehow…</p>

20

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<p>RML, did you happen to miss those glorious titles of late? If the SAT students love to start every thread with the obnoxious “OFFICIAL” label, it seems that the new trend here is to add “true or TRUE” to the title. </p>

<p>

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<p>:)</p>