<p>The last two posts are like a little battle of ignorance. Where to begin?</p>
<p>PIC2016 is right that Chicago has a bigger international reputation than Duke or Dartmouth, but it’s not so much because Duke or Dartmouth are inferior academically as because Chicago has much bigger graduate programs and has been famous for longer. (Dartmouth, of course, has been around for almost 400 years, but , yes, primarily as an undergraduate institution – although its graduate programs are roughly the size of Princeton’s, and it has well regarded business and medical schools.) High school and college students tend not to be aware of Chicago’s importance in areas other than economics during the first half of the 20th century, when Duke was not really a world-class institution at all.</p>
<p>ennis has a whole bunch of things backward.</p>
<p>Duke is clearly a peer institution to Chicago. No one reasonably disputes that (except maybe the Dookies who keep insisting that it is clearly superior). There are plenty of things one can dislike about some aspects of Duke undergraduate culture, but it’s a great university.</p>
<p>No Nobel Prize in math. The vast, vast majority of Chicago’s Nobel Prizes are in Economics.</p>
<p>There are plenty of world-famous academics at Dartmouth. Its formal name is Dartmouth College, but it’s no more a liberal arts college than Harvard.</p>
<p>It’s an open question for lots of people (other than USNWR) whether Brown or Georgetown is superior to Wisconsin in any dimension other than how much they cost. Personally, I rate Wisconsin in between the two. Georgetown is a university with fairly minimal PhD programs in all but a few areas. Its undergraduate program is twice the size of Dartmouth’s, but it only awards a few more PhDs per year.</p>