Think tank ranks top colleges

Applying to College
1

Princeton first in The Consus Group’s university rankings

LOS ANGELES, California—Princeton University ranked first in The Consus Group’s annual survey of undergraduate universities. Harvard and Yale tied for second, with Dartmouth and The University of Chicago completing the top five.

The Consus Group generally analyzes contracts, industries, and companies. Occasionally, however, TCG displays its analytical expertise on other subjects of interest to the business and legal communities. Its university rankings are one of these periodic exercises.

TCG determined the nation’s best undergraduate universities using a sophisticated methodology. This approach canvassed numerous factors, including: published rankings, selectivity, placement and salary statistics, and class yields.

Published Rankings: A proxy for prestige, published rankings proved a useful metric for assessing a university’s reputation. To eliminate the vagaries of published rankings, The Consus Group incorporated both current and historical ratings from numerous sources.

Selectivity: TCG measured the quality of universities’ admitted candidates using SAT scores, high school GPAs, and the percentage of applicants admitted. Typically, the best schools attract many of the best candidates—providing another proxy for prestige.

Placement & Salary: Placement and salary statistics provided objective measures of universities’ performance placing their graduates. To reduce annual fluctuations in placement and salary statistics, TCG used current and historical placement and salary statistics.

Yield: Yield measured the percentage of admitted candidates actually matriculating to the admitting university—another indication of a school’s appeal.

While many university rankings fluctuate wildly from year to year, TCG’s methodology produces a stable, accurate picture of America’s best undergraduate universities.

About TCG

Founded by attorneys and management consultants, The Consus Group provides crucial intelligence about contracts, industries, and companies. TCG’s research products clarify complicated legal agreements, explain industry structures and relationships, and provide unparalleled competitive intelligence. TCG also provides complementary professional services, including customized contract and industry analyses.

The Consus Group’s intelligence products are state-of-the-art. TCG uses a sophisticated infrastructure to amass and process enormous amounts of information from many sources. This information is compiled in massive databases, dissected with powerful statistical tools, and synthesized by experts.

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<p>Atlantic Monthly ranks top 10</p>

<ol>
<li>MIT </li>
<li>Princeton</li>
<li>California Institute of Technology</li>
<li>Yale</li>
<li>Harvard</li>
<li>Stanford</li>
<li>Columbia</li>
<li>University of Pennsylvania</li>
<li>Brown<br></li>
<li>Swarthmore.</li>
</ol>

3

<p>What do you think of Times' world rankings?</p>

<p>The rankings, as I understand, is mostly based on international peer review, faculty ratio, the number of international students, and the amount of research.</p>

<p>Overall
1. Harvard
2. UC Berkeley
3. MIT
4. Caltech
5. Oxford (tied)
5. Cambridge (tied)
7. Stanford
8. Yale
9. Princeton
10. ETH Zurich </p>

<p>(The next leading US. universities are Chicago, UT-Austin, Columbia)</p>

<p>Science
1. Cambrdige
2. Oxford
3. Harvard
4. UC Berkeley
5. MIT
6. Stanford
7. Tokyo Univ.
8. Princeton
9. CalTech
10. Imperial College London</p>

4

<p>The Times isn't very accurate IMO - there are a lot of placement issues, where some colleges are definately overranked or underranked, and it doesn't consider LACs. The Times ranking seems based only on world prestige, which says very little about the educational environment and quality at the schools ranked.</p>

<p>For example: UT-Austin between Chicago and Columbia?? And what about Duke?</p>

<p>They also list University of Chicago as "Chicago University", causing me to question their competence.</p>

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<p>forzagiovanni, the Atlantic Monthly ranking seems a bit odd... is it ranking based on prestige, or educational quality, or what? Swarthmore should be higher, other LACs should be on the list, MIT and CalTech are hardcore in math/sci but weaker in humanities (poorer balance).</p>

<p>That said, I think it's naive and silly to try to rank these obviously great schools in relation to each other.</p>

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<p>Another thing that's suspicious is that Oxford and Cambridge have the same rating in a numberical score of three digits and two decimal places. </p>

<p>But I think its ranking of international prestige is pretty accurate.</p>