@Chrchill don’t you think there are more important things in life to get upset over than freaking college rankings?
Absolutely. The smiley face should have indicated that this was tongue in cheek.
I think people are overreacting and taking the ranking too seriously. I can’t speak of the subject areas outside of my profession. But I am going to quote an example to illustrate how ridiculous to say whether U of C strength is declining or ascending just base on ranking.
I went to GSB in the 1980’s but I did go to Department of Economics to take some graduate classes there. There were ground breaking work done by Lucas, Sargent, Wallace and Hansen in understanding how the whole economy works (Professor Sherwin Rosen then explicitly stated that true U of C economics profession did NOT talk about marco or microeconomics. Those were Keynesian term used by east coast schools). Gary Becker had pioneered the study of economics and social behavior. On the business school side of course Eugene Fama had been strongly advocating for efficient market since the 1960’s. Black and Scholes seminal paper on option pricing was then just starting to be popular in the trading industry.
Yet overall, there was a common perception that Fama, Lucas and the whole quantitative approach to finance and economics was heresy and mathematical fantasy. Indeed some of my GSB professors were outraged that east coast schools treated Fama, Lucas, Becker and others as crackpot that should not be taken seriously. Hence if you took a ranking of economics and finance of U of C in the 1970’s and 1980’s, you might find it rank much lower Harvard, Yale and all of east coast elite schools. However, fast forward 30 years Becker, Lucas, Scholes, Fama, Hansen and Sargent had all won Nobel Prize. Their thesis that was once sneered upon is now the mainstream tenet of every economics department. The Chicago quantitative approach has taken over much of the economics and finance academia as well as Wall Street,
This is my main point: unless you are in that field, how do you know which school is leading the way in research? And even if you are in that field, there are professional disagreement/hostility/jealousy. Are you expecting a Keynesian economist to have a unbiased view of the Chicago school? Using a local sports analogy: do you expect a fair and balanced assessment of the Cubs from a Sox fan 
? Or do you expect a Bears fan to have an objective view of the Packers 
?
Another major shortcoming about ranking is the diversity of the field of study which makes ranking irrelevant and inaccurate. Last time I check in the field of economics there are specialized areas like: Price Theory, Theory of Income, Asset Pricing/Theory of Finance, Labor Economics, International Trade, Growth Theory, Econometrics. Behavioral Economics and the list can go on for another page. So how accurate or fair is it for a Labor Economist from XYZ university to evaluate the strength of research of International Trade at ABC university?
In summary, ranking is a beauty contest. It is neither objective nor fair. Above all, it is NOT precise. Indeed it is just pure entertainment. To use it as an accurate and exact measuring stick for an university performance is sheer lunacy.
P.S. sorry for the long post.
@Chrchill So hundreds of messages getting all excitable about rankings are all tongue in cheek? Never seen anyone so dedicated to sarcasm.
@HydeSnark I am glad you find my posts interesting enough to follow them. Also – I do find rankings interesting and valuable with caveats. That is different from as you claimed that “I was getting” upset.
Post immured in moderation purgatory yesterday sorry didn’t type this for it to remain unread (probably) for such a reason.
Just to be clear, I mentioned UC Hastings Law which just like UCSF Med is also in SFand just like UCSF is an independent UC school (peer of UCLA, UCB, UCSB, UCI, etc).
Berkeley “has” Lawrence Berkeley Lab. Hmm… To be clear, the reference to Berkeley and Livermore on the lab names of Lawrence Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore are names of towns where they are at. Even so, UChicago “has” (as in co-manages) Fermi Lab and ta dah… drum roll please… ARGONNE NATIONAL LABORATORY… the brightest biggest baddest bestest kahuna of them all in the USA! UChicago wins that line of argument, any day of the year.
Shoutout:
Ernest O. Lawrence, the recipient of the 1939 Nobel Prize in physics for the invention and development of the cyclotron, a type of particle accelerator, the guy that they named the Lawrence Berkeley lab and the Lawrence Livermore lab… and the guy whose name is the basis for Element 103?
That Lawrence is a UChicago Alum! (And Yale, UMinnesota, and St Olaf alum)
Fun tidbit: Back in the Olden Days, Cal-Berkeley was just known as the University of California. There was no “UC system” in those days. UCSF was the original med school (called The Medical Dept. at the University of California) and Hastings the original law school.
The relationship between Cal and LBL goes back to Ernest Lawrence himself, of course. Could be wrong but Fermi-Lab is too big to be operated just by UChicago and not sure it was ever managed by just one university (although in fairness it’s probably the UC “system” that funds that funds the management and operation of LBL . . . ). Both are outstanding research opportunities - even for undergraduates - but the physical proximity of LBL to Cal and the joint history with the department of physics make the Cyclotron a pretty cool thing.
Another fun tidbit: The first director of Fermi-Lab got his start at LBL under Lawrence himself (and was fired twice for messing up a couple of experiments LOL). He came to Fermi-Lab from Cornell but after leaving his directorship he joined the physics dept. at UChicago.
@FStratford and @CU123
Well, if you’re going to use university breadth, average ranking (and knock Berkeley) as the guideposts, here are the universities ahead of UChicago:
Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, U. of Penn
If you want to use eminence and allow for niche schools, here are the universities ahead of UChicago:
Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Cal Tech, Columbia
UChicago doesn’t enter the top 5 in either ranking.
Sorry everybody, none of these other schools have any major ranking as low as UChicago’s #32 finish for NIH funding. UChicago can’t play for top 5 until it fixes this glaring weakness.
In terms of “meteoric rise” here are the real contenders for overall U. rise:
Undisputed: Stanford (went from a regional player in the 50s and 60s to one of the greatest research Us on earth)
More recent meteoric rise: University of Pennsylvania (college went from unranked in the late 80s to #8 today, endowment went from #15 in the 90s to #8 today, NIH funding went from top 15 in 90s to top 5 today, Law School went from #13 in 90s to #7 today, med school went from top 7 in 90s to top 4 today, etc. etc.)
Sorry UChicago optimists - going from #5 college (in the 80s) to #3/4 college now, and #2 in wealth to #14 now (with other drops across the board) doesn’t constitute a “meteoric rise”.
This post is bizarre from my perspective. I don’t understand how Chicago could have “displaced” either of them, much less both.
I don’t follow USNWR’s law school rankings year to year, but I have floated around the edge of the legal-academic world for 40 years, and there has never been a time to my knowledge when either NYU or Columbia had a more highly regarded law school than Chicago. The best either of them might have achieved was a tie, and that would have been pretty ephemeral. When I was first interested in law schools, in the late 70s, Columbia was basically running on fumes. Stanford had conducted a famous raid on the Columbia faculty in the mid 60s, taking 5 young tenured faculty in one or two gulps, including Gerry Gunther, the premier constitutional law scholar of his generation, Marc Franklin, a seminal scholar of art law, and Charlie Meyers and Howard Williams, dominant traditional natural resources scholars. Fifteen years later, they (and a few others largely poached from Ivy League law schools) were the core of the Stanford Law faculty as it firmly cemented itself as a peer of Harvard and Yale, while Columbia never really replaced them with people of equal distinction. NYU was the up-and-comer, with Marty Lipton’s money, and it was beating Columbia head-to-head for students and faculty more often than it lost.
Neither could hold a candle to Chicago, which had a stunning cohort of conservative scholars with a smattering of well-regarded liberals for balance. What hurt Chicago Law the most was Reagan appointing so many of its faculty to federal Court of Appeals positions. But they remained very much part of the University of Chicago intellectual community, and the law school did a fine job replacing them. If anyone ever ranked Chicago lower than #5 or #6, it was b.s., and that’s the very highest I could ever imagine Columbia or NYU obtaining.
Until the last ranking Columbia has been ahead of U Chicago for many many years in the past decade.
@jhs NYU was ahead of Columbia law in rankings only many years ago. Columbia law invariably beats NYU law for students.
@Chrchill - @JHS was saying the law ranking doesn’t at all reflect reality.
Now, if you can get UChicago into my top 5, we’d be all set. Maybe you should call the NIH and get them to see the light (or at least get Chicago back into the top 30).
I’ll take your word for it, but I can’t imagine why Columbia would outrank Chicago, other than simply being in New York. It’s not that Columbia is horrible or anything, just that it doesn’t have the oomph Chicago does.
I suspect your “many years” and my “many years” are different numbers of years. The phrase “many many years in the past decade” doesn’t make any sense to me at all.
Few clarifications and done (what about the Harvard and Columbia points…?):
- UCLA point directed to CU123, who did not seem to understand why some have claimed UCSF as Berkeley's medical school.
- I would not say that Berkeley "has" UCSF and LBL, though it may have uncommonly close affiliations with those institutions. Not that Berkeley's "hasses" matter, because Berkeley trumps Chicago, Yale, Princeton, and conceivably MIT, in research scale and distinction, even without those affiliations. (c.f. The Nature Index, ARWU, QS, and Times Higher Education reputation and research/citations ratings)
- The Nature Index places the Berkeley Lab well ahead of Fermilab and the Argonne. I would not use that fact to prove a point, but it suggests that the research primacy and supreme "badness" of the Argonne is not clear-cut. (Also compare the extent of UCB's collaborations with UCSF and LBL to UChicago's with its proximate national labs: https://www.natureindex.com/institution-outputs/generate/All/global/All/weighted_score)
Or are the “UChicago Optimists” adducing a weird amalgam of ranking and street knowledge to justify their belief in the school’s top-5-ness? (If so: admit to doing that and explain your cherrypicking of rankings in that context.)
@jhs Typos, sorry. NYU Law was ahead f Columbia by one spot only once many years ago.
@Parapraxes well you can certainly claim it, but UCSF is its own university with its own undergraduate colleges and graduate colleges, I wonder how UCSF thinks about UCB claiming its med school as a UCB enterprise. Anyway not a reasonable claim at all and most wouldn’t say a valid claim. UCB does not have a med school.
@CU123 - what is your response to @Parapraxes claims that Berkeley - even without a med school - outpaces Chicago in terms of research output?
@Cue7 Nope, Berkeley is known worldwide as a top research institution, however it’s very large public university which makes comparisons difficult at best. If your just talking about research output, size and numbers will win most of the time between top universities. If that is your criteria I would put UCB at the top of ALL others. Its just that big.
UCSF does not have undergrad programs. Hastings, while located in SF and part of the UC system, is not part of UCSF.