<p>Underrated: HYP
Overrated: Every other school</p>
<p>How can they be underrated when they are perennially ranked 1-3 in the US News rankings for undergrad?</p>
<p>Yale has the best law school, Harvard has the best business school (maybe with Wharton and Stanford), and Princeton has the legacy of Einstein. They are great and are recognized thus in nearly every ranking. </p>
<p>It was a joke. I was quoting, not directly in case you were going to comment about it, many kids on CC who believe it’s HYP or die.</p>
<p>Underrated:
- Webb
- Olin
- Mudd</p>
<p>Underrated: The school you are going to.
Overrated: The school that didn’t let you in.</p>
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<p>Join fraternities and sororities – about two thirds of eligible students (half of all students since frosh are not eligible) at Dartmouth join. (And no surprise that they sometimes have issues with fraternity and sorority related problems.)</p>
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<p>Not all of them are. Consider Minnesota, SUNYs, Virginia Tech, NCSU, CSUs including Cal Poly SLO. Also, students looking for small schools but interested in engineering can look at the low cost SD and NM Mines schools.</p>
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<p>From the PhD production patterns, it isn’t perfectly clear how strong a correlation there is between college admission selectivity and PhD production. Grinnell College has higher PhD production rates than all the Ivies. Wabash College has higher PhD production rates in science and math than all the Ivies. Earlham has higher PhD production rates in the life sciences than all the Ivies. From this perspective, I’d say some of these small colleges are under-rated.</p>
<p>As far as I know, nobody has examined PhD outcomes and selectivity in the same way Krueger and Dale have examined earnings outcomes and selectivity. It may or may not turn out that for PhD outcomes, as for earnings, there is no clear benefit to attending a more selective college, per se. What may matter as much (or more) are “engagement” factors such as the percentage of classes taught by professors (not TAs), class sizes, scope and frequency of challenging writing and lab assignments, essay/short answer v. multiple choice testing, thesis requirements, etc. Some of these factors seem to be under-measured and “underrated” in our college assessments. Often (but not consistently) the most selective colleges happen to be strong (but not necessarily strongest) in these factors. </p>
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<p>Yes … but the total percentage of CS + engineering + math/stat + life sciences + physical science majors tends to be fairly high at some of the top state universities. At Berkeley it’s 34%, at Michigan it’s 32.5%, and at Illinois it’s 32% (according to CDS section J data.) At Wisconsin, it’s 28%.</p>
<p>At Brown, the percentage of majors in these fields is 27%. Yet Brown’s S&E PhD production rate (on an institution-size-adjusted basis) is higher than all these other schools. At Grinnell (per 2011-12 CDS), the percentage is 26%. </p>
<p>Is an economics major at Harvard really going to be getting a better education than one at Berkeley? </p>
<p>I admit, it’ll probably be much easier for the Harvard student to land a job at GS upon graduation. But purely in terms of education, why is Harvard better? </p>
<p>I’m using economics as an example because it’s a very common major at both schools, but I think my question could extend to other letters and science majors. </p>
<p>^ In my opinion, for the best answers, what you really need to compare is not the department reputations (which may be heavily based on research production), but the quality of undergraduate classroom instruction. How many classes does each school offer? How big are they? Who teaches them? What kinds of assignments and tests are used? How frequent are they? Who grades them, and how much feedback is provided? How much classroom discussion takes place, and how well is it managed? Is a thesis required? How demanding are the workloads and grading standards? How often do professors meet with students outside class? etc. Unfortunately, most of these features are under-measured, under-reported, under-compared. </p>
<p>It seems pretty clear to me that for research universities (thus excluding LACs), PhD production correlates heavily with admission selectivity, with only a few outliers. Using the PhD production rate of LACs to say that admission selectivity does not correlate with PhD production for research universities is rather disingenous to me.</p>
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<p>For economics specifically, both Harvard and Berkeley offer less-math and more-math versions of their economics courses. A pre-PhD economics student at either school should choose the more-math versions, as well as take additional math courses from either school’s good math department.</p>
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<p>Engineering is most commonly taken as a pre-professional major leading to bachelor’s degree level employment, so mixing engineering in clouds the analysis. So does CS to some extent, and perhaps math/stat to the extent that actuarial preparation is a goal for some students. Then there is also the relative popularity of pre-med, especially among biology majors. Point being, it is not a given that Brown and Grinnell are necessarily better for pre-PhD preparation with the confounding factors of student pre-professional versus pre-PhD interest and admissions selectivity, not even considering that where any such differences really matter is by department, not school as a whole.</p>