@Chrchill - don’t backtrack - you said: “We can all agree that it is one of a handful of top elite schools in the world.”
I don’t agree with this. Show me all the world university rankings that matter that have Chicago in the top 5-6 in the world.
do your own Googling and try Time and QS rankings.
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/2017/world-ranking#!/page/0/length/25/sort_by/rank/sort_order/asc/cols/stats @cue7 just because you are so delicate.
this is the 2018 ranking just out . Uchicago is up a spot actually https://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-university-rankings/2018
@Chrchill - I asked because I’m coming up empty in my searches…
Times Higher Ed has Chicago at #10 in world, not 5-6 in the world: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/2017/world-ranking#!/page/0/length/25/sort_by/rank/sort_order/asc/cols/stats
QS rankings has Chicago at #9 in the world, not 5-6 in the world: https://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-university-rankings/2018
So what are you talking about when you say we can all agree UChicago is in the top handful in the world? Even the publications you cite don’t agree with you.
@Chrchill - we just posted the same stuff, and Chicago is not in the top 5-6 in the world in any of these rankings. What are you talking about?
I said top 5-6 in the US in world university rankings, not the world !
@Chrchill said, in post #454: “We can all agree that it is one of a handful of top elite schools in the world.”
No, we, can’t. “Handful of top elite schools in the world” means top 5-6. You didn’t say US, you broadened it to world. And the rankings don’t help you here. Don’t backtrack.
@Cue7 QS world university rankings 2018 of US universities
MIT
Stanford
Harvard
Cal Tech
Uchicago
Time ranking of US universities 2017
Cal Tech
Stanford
MIt
Harvard
Princeton
Uchicago / Berkeley
this is all the more impressive because Uchicago has no engineering
I contest that they are top 5-6 in the US, but I more vehemently contest that they are top 5-6 in the world, @Chrchill - which you asserted - without substantiation - that we could “all agree on”… Even the publications don’t agree that they are in the top handful in the world.
Now, would you like to retract that, and go back to just saying “top 5-6 in US”?
This is what I asserted #458 : " world university rankings that matter in recent 2-3 years have Chicago at a top 5-6 university in the US and the College is third. " see my post above. In your zeal to poo poo Uchicago at all cost, your reading comprehension is taking a severe hit …
@pupflier I happen to be someone who put two kids through Chicago at full pay. I let one of them turn down a full tuition merit scholarship at a first-rate university in order to go to Chicago, although I felt somewhat ambivalent about it at the time, and I still do now. I was happy to be able to afford the luxury of that not-really-rational decision, and my kid, while now being able to acknowledge the non-rationality, is really happy, too. Over the past x years, I have met various other parents who also paid full freight, or close to it, or whose kids turned down cheaper alternatives, so their kids could attend Chicago.
I would say that each of us was indeed concerned about what all that money was buying for our children, but not a single one of us ever thought that the phrase “brand juggernaut” described what we wanted. Not that we mind if Chicago’s brand becomes more powerful – that’s fine – but what most of us wanted was a rich intellectual experience for our children, with a chance to mature, to become more sure of who they were, and to get engaged emotionally and intellectually with doing things that were worth doing in the world. And we wanted them to be reasonably happy most of the time, reasonably safe, and not horrible people. And to have friends. All of that worked out really well.
We were certainly aware that Chicago was a brand. We hoped/expected that Chicago’s brand would enhance our children’s opportunities. We didn’t worry about that too much, because we knew that in our circles the Chicago brand was very strong. That has worked out great, too. One of them has had a series of interesting jobs in New York where it’s clear the Chicago branding was important to getting the opportunities; the other has never really left the university.
We and our kids are also aware that the more Zimmer and Nondorf do to enhance the brand, the more value our children get from it. They, more than we, worry about Chicago becoming too indistinguishable from a generic Ivy. But, with some experience in the world, they don’t labor under the assumption that everyone who didn’t go to Chicago is anti-intellectual and poorly educated.
@Chrchill - what you did in #458 was hardly a retraction - you just qualified your first, incorrect statement (in post #454) to force it to be true.
Stand by your words, man! If you really think “We can all agree that it is one of a handful of top elite schools in the world,” don’t backtrack just because a couple rankings say otherwise.
@JHS That’s great. Currently putting one through UChicago and the other through the University of Cambridge. Both supremely happy with great opportunities ahead.
@Cue7 I really begin to wonder about you … To be clear I said then and said now. Uchicago in these key global rankings is 5-6 in the US (9-10 in the world) Only ivies ahead of it are Harvard and in one ranking Princeton. . It is third in college rankings in USNWR. What don’t you understand ?
And, wow, @pupflier , I just read your #457, and you have some stuff about Stanford dead wrong. The laughable part was “focusing on undergraduate nuts and bolts.” Uh-uh. The college was the weakest aspect of Stanford for a long, long time. It was an open debate when I was there around 1980 – how to bring the quality of the college up to the level of the graduate and professional programs? The advising was god-awful. I knew that personally because my sister was a god-awfully advised undergraduate while I was in professional school there.
There was a huge, fratty social C culture, like the Ivies had a couple decades earlier, coupled with the duck syndrome where everyone pretended not to work while working furiously in secret. It was heaven for a small segment of the undergraduates who really wanted to engage with the faculty, because they had little or no competition, and the faculty was desperate for undergraduates who showed some intellectual curiosity. The intellectual excitement which was palpable everywhere at my undergraduate Ivy was something you found only in subcultures among Stanford undergraduates.
From the day it was founded, Stanford, like Chicago, was a class act, no question about that. It benefited enormously simply by being the premier private university in California, which went from being an interesting remote region to being one of the most vibrant, high-growth places in the world. It also benefited enormously from holding a ton of real estate in what became one of the hottest real estate markets in the world, and from problems in the public-funding model its chief rival had.
If you want to know a lot more about which precise mistakes Chicago made, read John Boyer’s history of the university, or his monographs which are generally available online. But if you are talking about a comparison between Chicago and Stanford, a lot of what you are talking about is the decline of the Upper Midwest and the different fates of noncommercial inner city neighborhoods vs. suburbs and exurbs in the second half of the 20th Century.
@Chrchill I don’t understand you saying “We can all agree that [Chicago] is one of a handful of top elite schools in the world”
I don’t understand that at all.
Not to wade into the fray again, but, but–an extraordinarily high level of posts here! A brave world! Much desire of increase, the propensity to ever-increasing rigor, very Chicago-esque-an-istic. This intellectual lightweight dares to make a few contributions, unable to brook the perpetual itch of dissettlement and Freudian malaise from reading and not replying. (!!!)
How to create a world in which Harvard and Stanford are the “top two universities”:
- Rank Harvard and Stanford at the apex.
- Create a “methodology” to support that result–ignoring or trivialializing all the fields that at least one of those schools lacks (e.g. Geography, Public Health, Social Work, Public Affairs, Agriculture, Hospitality).
- Toss everything else.
How to convince yourself that rankings corroborate Chicago’s top-6 status as a research university;
- Cite QS, THES, USNews (but only the undergraduate rankings) assiduously.
- Ignore their methodologies. (“Very Un-Chicagoan!”)
How to turn a Chicago thread into an(other) ideological-political wank:
- Complain about “social engineering” at Harvard et al and throughout American society.
- Presume that Chicago does none of the same defect-ineering.
- Graft the mock-Nietzschean “your moral sanctimony is the most immoral thing of all” argument onto an ill-conceived “leftist-libtard-socialist versus principled conservative” spectrum.
- Disregard context: i.e. that calling colleges and businesses to some sort of moral responsibility is not solely the mainstay of “libruls”; that such harangues, apart from being boring and intellectually milquetoast–not very maverick!–straddle the bounds of both ethical nihilism and self-repressing sanctimony; that skepticism about such dubious concepts as “merit,” “desert,” and “(UChicago’s) institutional self-interest” is near-unavoidable.
As I said, a Brave New World of (com)po(e)(s)ting.
JHS - #471 - exactly.