<p>What, in your opinion, are the differences between schools ranked by US News and World Report as being in the Top 10 national universities in the country and those being ranked in the Top 25 national universities in the country? Are there differences? Do you see significant qualitative differences between those closer to #1 and those closer to #25 or is the quality of education largely comparable in your eyes?</p>
<p>Thanks in advance for your comments.</p>
<p>depending on the professors, you can get a fantastic education at a community college, for that matter. Being a great teacher and being a great writer or researcher, are not necessarily correlative. At some places, undergraduates are taught by TA’s or Teaching Fellows, and they are guinea pigs for future tenure track profs. All that said, I really think, given the number of PhD’s wandering the wilderness of part time work, it is possible to get a really great education all over the place in the US. What that will translate to in the job market, I can’t say. Over time, though, I think it tends to even out, with very hard workers and intelligent employees gaining ground over time.</p>
<p>The rankings are painted in such large brushstrokes, using criteria that may or may not have significance to a given student, that they’re meaningless. Within the pool of Top 50 universities and Top 30 or so LAC’s…you’re making an error if you leave them out…the answer usually is, “It depends.” Sometimes Middlebury would trump Harvard. Heck, sometimes Texas A&M trumps Yale.</p>
<p>Give me some info about the student’s temperament and interests, along with proposed major, and I can give you a better idea.</p>
<p>Obession with USNWR ratings is up there with perusing astrological charts.</p>
<p>Agree with TheDad. The primary difference between Top 10 USN&WR and Top 25 USN&WR is that alums of the top 10 like USN&WR slightly better :). </p>
<p>The validity of these rankings is so utterly open to question. To believe that USN&WR can determine the difference between and accurately rank #1 vs #10 vs #25 vs #26 is a bit absurd.</p>
<p>Certainly some institutions are better than others. But the question is “for whom” and “for what” as others have said. And there are no absolutes even when very specific questions are asked. There are legitimate differences of opinion on “best economics” department, “best small LAC for xyz major…”</p>
<p>Agree with TheDad and Andale. You need to be very careful with rankings. While few would disagree that there is a difference between Stanford and Slippery Rock State, when you’re trying to distinguish #1 from #25, or #6 from #19, it gets to be kind of, well, silly. </p>
<p>Focus on what you want to study and where you can get in. If you want a degree in creative writing, #25 might be a better choice than say MIT. If you want a degree in engineering or science, it may be the reverse decision is better. </p>
<p>It doesn’t make sense to say you want “prestige,” so the higher ranked school is always best. What do you want to study? Harvard isn’t #1 at everything. In reality, it might not be #1 at anything, other than showing up in a ranking by a magazine that I’ve heard referred to for other reasons as “Useless News and World Distort.”</p>
<p>And don’t forget the Liberal Arts Colleges. Any of the Top 20 LACs might be better for your purposes than the Top 20 national universities. Or not.</p>
<p>I’ve posted on this type of topic before, but there are a bunch of things kids can get out of college (social skills, orientation towards the world, etc.). I’m going to focus on three.</p>
<p>Education. I believe that one can get a good education at a variety of schools, top 10, top 25, top 1000. Top 10 schools that do not pay attention to undergraduates may provide a worse education than top 100 LACs. Even here, I would not be categorical because an astute Harvard undergrad with useless TA’s may (or may not) learn as much from his/her classmates as kids at other schools learn from professors. So it is hard to say.</p>
<p>For kids who want to become academics, being at a top research university can (but need not) enable a student to have as an advisor/thesis advisor/supervisor in research one of the world’s great researchers in an area. If the kid does a good job, this will grease the wheels for getting into grad school and beyond. This happened to me. This is unlikely to happen at an LAC or a 2nd tier or 3rd tier research university. But this comes from research rankings and not USNWR’s rankings that combine school reputation with admissions selectivity with lots of other stuff. So, there are clearly schools in USNWR’s top 25 that are decent but not fabulous research universities. Some great people there to be sure, but not overall. [Based upon my incomplete knowledge of a number of academic fields, I’d guess that schools in the top 25 like WSUTL or Emory get their rankings more from their students than from their faculty. I don’t see Georgetown pop up in rankings of academic departments at all, outside of the political science/international relations areas. Even Brown is pretty spotty. Some very good departments and others that are relatively undistinguished]. This is not damning – as the really good LACs will obviously not be on the list of great departments in any field – but it does mean that while you get bigger classes than an LAC and may get TA’s in many cases, you are a lot less likely to have access to research greats who can help you in your career and provide you a window on the most cutting edge work in the field.</p>
<p>Horizons. The top 15 schools (or something like that, and I would include universities and LACs in making this list) differ from other schools in their influence on the aspirations and horizons of the students. Kids at McGill may want to be the best in Canada. Kids at the University of Georgia may want to be the best in Georgia (or a well-situated lawyer in Atlanta). Many kids at Harvard and Princeton come to want to be the best in the world at what they are doing. Some of that is the drive/ambition of the kids, but some is clearly the institution. Somehow the scale and scope of the ambition is different and this is influenced by the schools.</p>
<p>Contacts. The top 15 schools (university and LAC) give kids contacts that can be very powerful. My college friends include the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, the Dean of a highly-ranked law school, the head of a large charity, several private equity folks and VCs (of course), medical school professors, World Bank economists, etc. HYPSM are probably the strongest at this, but we were touring Amherst and the guide had an internship the summer before at Goldman, Sachs that an Amherst alum there kept for Amherst kids. I think Dartmouth is similar. Some schools, like BC, do this on a regional basis. [It is possible that as the expansion of the Ivies from largely regional to national to global applicant pools over the past 50 years has pushed so many good kids to other schools that this effect may diminish over time.]</p>
<p>In short, I think that it is hard to know where one gets the best education. It need not be in the top 10 or top 25 and may not be correlated well with USNWR ranking. But, I think the top schools (my list would differ from the USNWR ranking) shape horizons and offer contacts in ways that other schools don’t. These latter two effects can change the course of kids’ lives. You may think that those effects are good or bad (e.g., setting really high expectations both increases performance on average and probably leads to depression or other psychological issues for some of the kids who don’t meet the elevated expectations). </p>
<p>So the messages are: a) Since the top 10 schools generally would be in my list of 15 or so, there may be a difference between top 10 and 25; b) you have to ask what benefits you want and then ask if these are conferred by particular schools.</p>
<p>mathson turned down number 1 (or 2 or 3 depending on the year), for number 24 (plus or minus one depending on the year.) For him the difference is that number 24 is much stronger in his major (computer science.) He hasn’t found the courses outside his interests (math and physics as well as cs) particularly interesting, but I think that is as much his failing as the school’s. The biggest difference is not the quality of the teaching or research, or the intelligence of the students - the biggest difference is in the culture of the two schools.</p>
<p>More student dependent than college dependent IMO. You get as much out of the college as you put into it, particularly at the undergrad level. I did my undergrad at UCSB and my grad at Harvard. Would not have changed a thing in hindsight, and believe my undergrad experience was academically as good as an Ivy League education. I was able to do primary research, sit in on graduate level classes, and had great access to professors. I will admit that the Harvard contact network proved quite valuable, but that is another metric altogether. OT-I do advocate doing the East Coast/WestCoast educational experience for anyone going beyond the undergrad level.</p>
<p>MathMom brings up an often overlooked point: the culture, academic and otherwise, of a school and figuring out what in a school’s culture will bring out the best in a student’s overall performance and experience (again, two different qualities). Two schools can be very similar on paper and have similar stats in multiple dimensions and yet one will be a much better fit for one student, the other a better fit for the other.</p>
<p>My D figures she had a better result attending her Top 20 LAC than she would have attending the Ivy that turned her down EA…and I agree. I still haven’t found the upper limit of where she can go from here (and she’s starting the grad school prep/search/application process) and that’s a little unnerving, actually.</p>
<p>Let’s not be so quick to diss the rankings. Because the rankings are so sensitive to things like faculty resources and admitted student background (both directly through SAT score and indirectly through selectivity), the rankings do give us some useful information. </p>
<p>For example, while the difference between two closely ranked schools may not be meaningful, you would find a noticeable difference difference between a top 5 school and one in the 20s, both in faculty and student body. I’ve worked at both and could see the difference among faculty, to use my own experience. </p>
<p>You will also find significant resource differences. </p>
<p>Whether these differences matter to any particular student is a different question.</p>
<p>I took apart a couple of different rankings and looked at what they describe as their methodologies. My conclusion was that they grouped roughly, as in top group, middle group, next group. It wasn’t possible to figure a good error for each piece and thus an overall error for the actual rankings but I found some data used to rank that showed very small differences.</p>
<p>To explain, some of the pieces translate to simple scales, mostly 5 point, which means you get a bunch of schools with the same score on a piece and, if there’s any error at all, you get an even larger bunch that could have the same score. Even if you take the numbers as is, the differences are small. Some of the data I found had a huge number of schools in a small band - which is to be expected because how many 2 colleges are there in the US?</p>
<p>I assume people who know numbers work on this stuff - some obviously, as in a diversity index that converts reported data into a 0 to 1 scale. But I see no discussion of standard deviation or discussion of multiple trials. </p>
<p>People have a need to list things in order. Maybe it’s as basic as in Genesis when God brings the animals to Adam one by one so he can name them. </p>
<p>Ever look at how they weight the metrics? What is the sensitivity in that? Who does it favor? And penalize? What are the rankings if you exclude one metric and then another and then another? These are important things to do with data. </p>
<p>No. They list basic methodologies and weighting and then a list of results. No 10,000 trials. No confidence intervals - which I’d love to see for each metric and overall. </p>
<p>One could easily make the case, as noted above, that number 63 is actually number 38 on a different simulation. (And I’m not picking the outlier, like if you simulate a baseball game enough you’ll get not only a perfect game but all strikes.) </p>
<p>I alway say to find a place you like, which has a program you like and go from there. But kids argue over number 42 versus number 47 and the “prestige” difference.</p>
<p>In regards to prestige, which is the real focus of this thread, there is a prestige advantage but the data says it’s really you, not the school which makes you successful. I’ve posted about this before, but data says that kids who get into “prestige” schools but go to “lesser” schools make as much money. And, interestingly, the large studies of earnings show relatively small differences between a large variety of schools - with the main factor being location; you make more in NJ or CA than in MS or AR (not talking about cost of living). </p>
<p>The story is different at the grad school level. A good study - I think - looked at earnings of academics and found more prestigious grad programs led to better jobs and that advantage lasted for almost 10 years. The differences grew smaller as the prestige gap narrowed, which makes the study less important but still interesting.</p>
<p>As to prestige, it is also local. A degree from the state school generally has more meaning in that state because the alumni are more important. The idea of a “prestige” school is that its prestige extends over borders. That’s true for name recognition - and certainly everyone has heard of Yale - but it doesn’t automatically give you the local prestige of a local alumni network.</p>
<p>(I also wanted to note that some rankings are really weird. As in a program ranking that’s compiled from surveys sent to deans and 2 senior faculty. I still can’t figure out how that is useful except by almost accidently correlation.)</p>
<p>I don’t think that the quality of education is all that different.</p>
<p>If, as I suspect, your tastes run to a college somewhere in the 20s, I don’t think you should feel obligated to apply to other schools with higher rankings simply because of the rankings. There can be excellent reasons – specific programs, location, cost, campus “feel,” etc. – for preferring Carnegie-Mellon or Georgetown or UVA, for example, over Princeton or Harvard.</p>