<p>Hey,</p>
<p>I am a bit curious about this issue... I wanted to know the opinions of Rice students... which colleges do you all consider to be Rice's peers (academically, reputation wise etc.) Disregarding rankings and such, what are all fo your opinions? Thanks</p>
<p>A general question like this doesnât make much sense, unless you just want people to respond based on rankings. For what area of study? Reputation with employers, grad schools, or laymen? Unless you narrow this down a bit, youâll get a bunch of opinions, but I donât know how helpful that will be.</p>
<p>Let me quote myself again⊠âI wanted to know the opinions of Rice studentsâ nothing more⊠nothing less.</p>
<p>Taking a holistic approach, I think that Rice has no peers.</p>
<p>Academically, Iâd say weâre on par with any other top university. I canât speak in any great detail for any other school, but I know Iâve been seriously challenged academically here.</p>
<p>As far as quality of life goes, weâre #1 for a reason.</p>
<p>OK, I think this is what you want to hear:</p>
<p>Duke, Northwestern, WashU, Emory, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, etc.</p>
<p>The non-Ivy top 25 schools barring Stanford, MIT and Caltech, basically.</p>
<p>Happy?</p>
<p>If you want to get more specific on departments, thatâs a different story. But what I said above is strongly based off USNWR and quite simply, student caliber and cross-admits/cross-applicants.</p>
<p>Princeton, Cal Tech, MIT, Chicago, Dartmouth, Wake Forest, Tufts, Brandeis, Lehigh, and Case Western Reserve - all top 40 universities with the resources of a major university + the intimacy of a campus with 5,000 or fewer undergrads.</p>
<p>I would argue that weâre peers with all the top 25 universities, including Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. One of my professors met with one of his colleagues at Stanford, and she even said that Rice and Stanford are peers. Yes, students and professors might be a smidge smarter and more amazing at the Ivies and Stanford and they have more resources, but in the grand scheme of things, there isnât that big of a difference. Especially since the Ivies (w/ exception of Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth, and Brown) , Stanford, and MIT tend to be less undergraduate focused than Rice is anyway.</p>
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<p>Please.</p>
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</p>
<p><a href=âhttp://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/626-new-revealed-preference-ranking-released.html[/url]â>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/626-new-revealed-preference-ranking-released.html</a></p>
<p>**1 Harvard
2 Yale
3 Stanford
4 Cal Tech
5 MIT
6 Princeton **
7 Brown
8 Columbia
9 Amherst
10 Dartmouth
11 Wellesley
12 U Penn
13 U Notre Dame
14 Swarthmore
15 Cornell
16 Georgetown
**17 Rice **</p>
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<p>And Rice is less âundergraduate focusedâ than any LAC. Whatâs your point?</p>
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</p>
<p>I choked on my Diet Coke when I read this. You owe me one.</p>
<p>Merely a cursory glance of dimsumâs forum history revealed a litany of bitter, crude, and altogether inflammatory posts. Ignore the â â â â â .</p>
<p>OP: Based on where the majority of my friends/classmates here were admitted: Duke, Northwestern, Chicago, WashU, Hopkins, Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth and Penn. In other words, pretty much anything outside of HYPSM.</p>
<p>When you cannot discredit a personâs arguments, the default option is to discredit him or her with the ââ â â â â â label. Is that the best you can do with your Rice education?</p>
<p>lmao, and this is what you do with YOUR college education, dimsum?
go â â â â â â â â on collegeconfidential?</p>
<p>Let me repeat myself: âWhen you cannot discredit a personâs arguments, the default option is to discredit him or her with the ââ â â â â â label.â</p>
<p>^Youâre mean :(</p>
<p>WhateverâŠ</p>
<p>Dimsum, isnât that list almost 6 years old? A guy on the original thread you linked to summed up a rejection of this list pretty well:</p>
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</p>
<p>So the poll is outdated, and was flawed even at the time of its release - more popular doesnât necessarily mean a better institution. The fact that UChicago doesnât even place on the list is some proof of this, I think.</p>
<p>UChicago places on this list:[ARWU</a> 2009](<a href=âhttp://www.arwu.org/ARWU2009.jsp]ARWUâ>http://www.arwu.org/ARWU2009.jsp). Where is Rice again?</p>
<p>1 Harvard University Americas 1 1 100 100 100 100 100 74.8 100.0
2 Stanford University Americas 2 2 39 78.7 87.1 67.3 70.1 66.9 73.1
3 University of California, Berkeley Americas 3 3 67.4 77.1 68.4 71.1 69 53.2 71.0
4 University of Cambridge Europe 1 1 89.4 91.5 53.8 53.9 65.4 65.5 70.2
5 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Americas 4 4 71 80.6 65.7 67.9 62 54.4 69.5
6 California Institute of Technology Americas 5 5 51.5 69.1 57.1 66.2 47.7 100 64.8
7 Columbia University Americas 6 6 70.6 67.7 55.7 49.1 69.6 46.5 61.7
8 Princeton University Americas 7 7 57.8 85.2 61.6 41.5 45.7 61.4 60.2
**9 University of Chicago Americas 8 8 65.8 84.3 49.7 38.6 51.6 41.8 57.0 **
10 University of Oxford
11 Yale University Americas 9 9 49.8 43.6 57.6 55.7 62.7 49.5 55.2<br>
âŠ
99 Rice University Americas 58 54 18.9 21.9 21.8 18 30.7 29.5 23.9</p>
<p>âMy school is better than yoursâ posts. </p>
<p>Truly the worst continuing (not to mention incessant) feature of College Confidential.</p>
<p>Oh please, those ARWU rankings are based on research put out by the universities. It is biased toward bigger, more research focused schools. LAC-like schools, like Dartmouth and Brown, and schools like Duke and Northwestern are ranked much lower than places like University of Washington, NYU, Wisconsin-Madison, etc. I truly think most people will agree that for undergrad, Dartmouth, Brown, Duke, and Northwestern will offer a better education than University of Washington. Rice is a small school and as a result does not attract as much research funding, as a result it gets penalized in these world rankings.</p>
<p>I personally do not think Rice is better than any school but I think the claims that âSchool Xâ is better than Rice are bogus. DimSum, go spend some time taking classes here, meet professors, talking to students, before making such claims on a list of numbers.</p>
<p>BTW, I think Dim Sum, Interestingguy, and MeanGirl are screen names from the same person.</p>
<p>I agree with DimSum in that the post placing Rice on the same level as Harvard, Yale and Princeton is just ridiculous. But I also think that Rice might be on par with a couple of the Ivies like Cornell holistically and perhaps a couple more for Pre-Med studies specifically.</p>
<p>The âmy school is better than yoursâ thing is very contentious if using the âholisticâ approach. Comparing schoolsâ departments is much more feasible. For example, I could say that Riceâs Pre-Med program surpasses that of MITâs, and most people would agree. But that alone would NOT be a reason to say that Rice is on the same level as MIT holistically.</p>
<p>I called Rice a peer university to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton and all the other top 20 schools. The way I define a peer university is that the overall quality of education is of similar caliber in the grouping of universities. As I also stated, I agree that Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and some others offer more resources and sometimes better teaching than Rice and the other top 20 schools. However, in the big picture among the 4000 or so colleges in the U.S., Rice and all the other top 20 or 25 schools are on the same level. Yes, there are differences if you focus intently on the top 20 (as the prestige obsessed people on CC do), but not on the macro scale. You only think HYP are the best because our society has constantly emphasized that Harvard, Yale, and Princeton are the best. Stop reading and worshiping those biased rankings. Go spend some time on the campuses, in classes, and with students and decide for yourself. I did this with schools like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Duke, Northwestern, Brown, etc, and to be honest, the difference is not as big as the media and CC likes to portray it. I challenge you to think unconventionally about what schools offer the best education.</p>