<p>take your turn, need to add some excitment to these boards.</p>
<p>I would put the following in the top 16: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, Caltech, Columbia, Duke, Johns Hopkins, Brown, Dartmouth, Penn, Chicago, Northwestern, Berkeley, and Cornell.</p>
<p>I would remove Chicago from the above list and replace it with Vanderbilt.</p>
<p>I might also replace Cornell and Berkeley with Williams and Amherst.</p>
<p>Williams and Amherst aren't universities. We can do a most prestigious LAC list, though.</p>
<p>gtown?????????</p>
<p>Ah, I misread. I stand by my Vandy/Chicago switch, though.</p>
<p>You cannot be serious. Chicago is a great academic institution, and schools like Emory and Vanderbilt are just pretenders.</p>
<p>Hardly. Chicago is the land of social misfits and square pegs. Vanderbilt is the place for the kids who do it all--people who excel at being both intelligent AND personable, quite a valuable skill.</p>
<p>"Square pegs do not a bad school make." - Unknown</p>
<p>Besides, this thread is about prestige, not actual academic quality--plenty of people can tell you that MANY institutions far outshine Harvard's undergrad department, but nobody's going to try to tell you that Harvard isn't one of the most prestigious.</p>
<p>Chicago has virtually zero name recognition among the general public. Vanderbilt is the "Harvard of the South".</p>
<p>There are plenty of prestigious universities. The most prestigious domestically are probably all 8 of the Ivy League Institutions, Stanford, Duke, Northwestern, the University of Chicago, the University of California-Berkeley, John Hopkins University, MIT, and Cal Tech. This is just what I perceive.</p>
<p>in so specific order:</p>
<p>Polytechnique in france...if anyone knows about the french higher education system you will kno that this school is unfreakingbeleivalby hard 2 get into</p>
<p>Cambridge
Oxford
Harvard
MIT
Yale
Stanford
Berkleley
Zurich (Switzerland)
Princeton
Caltech
UPenn
Cornell
Columbia
JHU</p>
<p>Sorry, Duke is the Harvard of the South, not Vandy. Chicago has much more prestigious professional and graduate schools, and no one has heard of Vandy undergrad outside of the south, either.</p>
<p>If Vanderbilt is so prestigious then how come I just heard of it not that long ago? </p>
<p>To me prestigious equals a "house hold" name.</p>
<p>Vanderbilt is definetly a household name, however duke is definetly "the harvard of the north" although I prefer to call harvard the "duke of the north"</p>
<p>wait. what? my feeble mind is confused. if duke is the harvard of the north, then where's harvard?</p>
<p>jk.</p>
<p>i would certainly agree that duke is in the top 25 list, but i disagree with vanderbilt being there; it is very prestigious in the south, but it has a severely regional appeal.</p>
<p>Oh, and Polytechnique is DEFINENTLY not ranking near harvard/oxford. the two schools are so far ahead in prestige its almost not funny. </p>
<p>regionally, i don't know, but international, no way. think about the population of asia, to whom harvard is the shangri-la of college educations.</p>
<p>I think he/she meant "Harvard of the South"</p>
<p>Don't worry about it</p>
<ol>
<li>Harvard</li>
<li>MIT</li>
<li>Oxford</li>
<li>Stanford</li>
<li>Princeton</li>
<li>Cambridge</li>
<li>Yale</li>
<li>Berkeley</li>
<li>Columbia</li>
<li>Caltech</li>
<li>Penn</li>
<li>Cornell</li>
<li>Chicago</li>
<li>JHU</li>
</ol>
<p>Well, if prestige comes from what others perceive than this may be of interest:</p>
<p>Shanghai Jiao Tong University's Rankings of the world's top 500 Universities
<a href="http://ed.sjtu.edu.cn/ranking.htm%5B/url%5D">http://ed.sjtu.edu.cn/ranking.htm</a></p>
<p>1 Harvard University
2 University of Cambridge
3 Stanford University
4 University of California, Berkeley
5 MIT
6 California IT
7 Columbia University
8 Princeton University
9 University of Chicago
10 University of Oxford
11 Yale University
12 Cornell University
13 UCSD
14 UCLA
15 University of Pennsylvania</p>
<p>32 Duke University
39 Vanderbilt University</p>
<p>That ranking is only reflective of presitge in science.</p>