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<p>Michigan has lost relative standing and status to the top privates (universities and LACs) since your great uncle, grandfather and aunt went there.</p>
<p>A generation ago, it was a no-brainer for a typical Midwestern student to choose Michigan over, say, Carleton or Macalester. This is no longer the case.</p>
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<p>I’d estimate that only the top 2-3% from Michigan is comparable to the top 10% at HYP…</p>
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<p>Careful, your Penn bias is showing…</p>
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<p>Who do you suppose is dragging Duke into every thread???</p>
<p>PABank,</p>
<p>Your post is probably just about right if Prestige were established by only the undergraduate experience and program.</p>
<p>However, even though we are mostly concerned at this website with undergraduate, the strength of the graduate programs highly if not mostly influences Prestige.</p>
<p>Your ranking for Stanford (behind Princeton/Yale) I think illustrates this. The 41 NRC Ph.D. fields of study ranking shows Stanford (and Berkeley) tied with Harvard for the #1 overall position. This position is notable ahead of Princeton’s and far ahead of Yale’s. Then we need to take into account the three graduage professional schools (Medicine, Law, Business). Here, Stanford is ranked either #2, #3 or #4 on the list if we look at the various ranking lists for these three professional schools – while Yale and Princeton are considerably lower in an average of the three schools’ rankings – well actually, Princeton recuses itself by not participating at all!</p>
<p>In both cases (41 Ph.D. programs), 3 professional schools, Stanford has considerably more prestige than Princeton or Yale.</p>
<p>Even based on the prestige and selectivity of the UNDERgraduate “experience and program,” Penn is no Columbia, let alone MIT and Stanford…</p>
<p>PABank’s username gives him away…</p>
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Uh, which ranking are you looking at? 
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<p>NRC Rankings - Nonzero
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<p>Maybe he or she is looking at something similar to the following. Just my guess…</p>
<p>[United</a> States National Research Council rankings - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Research_Council_rankings]United”>United States National Research Council rankings - Wikipedia)</p>
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<p>[NRC</a> Rankings](<a href=“NRC Rankings”>NRC Rankings)
“Nonzero” list doesn’t penalize more narrow-focused schools for not having a program.</p>
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OK, listen to these instructions carefully. Try to follow along.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Click on your link. The blue thing. Got it? Good.</p></li>
<li><p>Wait for the page to come up. Don’t be distracted by shiny objects.</p></li>
<li><p>Scroll down to “statistical analysis.” </p></li>
<li><p>Scroll over to “Top 30 universities by average of nonzero scores.”</p></li>
</ol>
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Agreed, but it’s equally unfair to penalize schools for having kickass programs in the vast majority of fields and none in a couple unpopular ones.</p>
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<p>DunninLA did not mention “non-zero scores,” you did…</p>
<p>By the way, your desperate attempts to pwn me are understandable, since I’ve already pwned you multiple times in this thread alone…</p>
<p>I was wondering, are there any other former Ivy presidents you want to cite as CC ■■■■■■???</p>
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DunninLA also mentioned Stanford and Berkeley being tied with Harvard, which they are obviously not in the overall list. Oops! 
The nonzero ranking much more closely resembles that.</p>
<p>In any case, any attempts to stack Stanford up against Harvard, Yale, or any other school are boring, unproductive, and irrelevant to this thread. Everyone can agree that Stanford is one of the top 15 most prestigious universities in the US, which is all that matters. </p>
<p>As I said nearly a year ago, [the</a> list is obvious](<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1062096759-post1630.html]the”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1062096759-post1630.html).</p>
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<p>That’s why I qualified my statement by saying: “something similar.” Double Oops!!</p>
<p>I was fully aware that DunninLA was citing from memory, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt, which you obviously didn’t.</p>
<p>You’d think classics students could be more meticulous with their reading…</p>
<p>EDIT: HAHAHA. I love how you edited out your “Oops!” comment after reading my subsequent post when you realized that YOU were the one making the “Oops!” </p>
<p>Cannot even (wo)man up to your own mistakes…</p>
<p>DOUBLE EDIT: I notice that you re-inserted the “Oops!” See, is it that hard to do what I say?</p>
<p>Incidentally, I wonder what happened to bball. He graduated from Rice this past May, I believe. No doubt it would amuse and surprise him to learn that this thread is still going.</p>
<p>^^^ I’d try to change the subject too, if I were you…</p>
<p>GAME. SET. MATCH.</p>
<p>Example: Assume school A has 3 ranked departments: math (score = 3.9), physics (score=3.9), and musics (score=3.0), while school B only has 2 ranked departments: math (score=3.8), and physics (score=3.8). Now further assume B doesn’t have a musics department or its musics department is so lousy that school B does not want NRC to evaluate it. In this case, B has a 0 score in musics. </p>
<p>Which school is better? Obviously school A, because school A beats school B in all 3 departments. </p>
<p>But if we calculate the average of non-zero score, school A has an average=(3.9+3.9+3.0)/3=3.6, while school B has an average score of (3.8+3.8)/2=3.8. So based on the average of none-zero score, school B is better than school A. This is a ridiculous result.</p>
<p>Using average non-zero score, the schools which sent a lot of programs for NRC to evaluate got punished somehow, such as schools like Stanford, Berkeley, and Michigan.</p>
<p>^ datalook, for some reason I’m indifferent to the “nonzero” and “average of all 41 scores” ranking… :)</p>
<p>Berkeley had 35 programs ranked in top 10 according to 1995 NRC ranking. </p>
<p>1) Berkeley (35 top 10 programs)
2) Stanford (31)
3) Harvard (26)
4) Princeton (22)
5) MIT (20)
6) Cornell (10)
6) Yale (19)
8) Chicago (18)
9) Penn (15)
10) Columbia (14)
10) UC-San Diego (14)
10) Michigan (14)
10) Wisconsin (14)</p>
<p>Yes, I can understand it. You should feel proud that you attended Berkeley’s chemistry department, which I think is the best in the whole world.</p>
<p>It doesn’t make sense for schools to automatically receive “zero” just because it doesn’t offer one/some of the selected 41 programs. After all, who can say these 41 fields should be the gold standard? Why shouldn’t accounting, finance, education, East Asian studies… PhD programs be included? There are way too many (7) fields just under biological sciences, while chemistry and physics only have one field each. Why? Schools that are strong in bio have a disproportionally large advantage and look good even when they su*k in chemistry and physics. </p>
<p>ranking 1995 University 1995 average score
1 MIT 8.70
2 Berkeley 8.50
3 Harvard 8.20
4 Princeton 8.03
5 Caltech 8.00
6 Stanford 7.95
7 UChicago 7.73
8 Yale 7.60
9 Cornell 7.47
10 UCSD 7.34
11 Columbia 7.32
12 Michigan 7.24
13 UCLA 7.19
14 Penn 7.09
15 Wisconsin 6.95
16 UTexas 6.78
17 UWashington 6.70
17 Illinois 6.70
19 Northwestern 6.63
20 Duke 6.61
20 Johns Hopkins 6.61
22 Carnegie Mellon 6.53
23 Minnesota 6.41
24 North Carolina 6.31
25 Brown 6.31
26 UC Irvine 6.22
27 NYU 6.20
28 Virginia 6.16
29 Purdue 6.12
30 Arizona 6.00</p>
<p>Non zero sore is not fair to schools such as stanford, berkeley, and michigan. Schools such as MIT and Caltech are boosted by this metric.</p>