<p>"The same faculty that teach graduate programs aren't always the same faculty that teach undergraduates. I don't think what is known about graduate school faculty can just be extrapolated to undergraduate faculty like that."</p>
<p>Except in RARE cases this is an outright lie. Ridiculous.</p>
<p>
[quote]
The same faculty that teach graduate programs aren't always the same faculty that teach undergraduates. I don't think what is known about graduate school faculty can just be extrapolated to undergraduate faculty like that.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>lol what? Have you been to college?</p>
<p>Someone just do the big three: Business/Law/Medicine ranking, stop considering all the subjects, curious on how the results turn out.</p>
<p>For Berkeley you must add its de facto Medical School -- UCSF.</p>
<p>I have a spreadsheet showing the NRC rankings as they have them grouped into 5 general areas of study, plus the three trade schools (Law, Medicine, Business). I have taken the rank number for each school, in its four highest areas out of the five possible.</p>
<p>Without the trade schools, Berkeley is #1 followed closely by Stanford.</p>
<p>Including the trade schools (and couting UCSF Medical as de fact UCB Medical), it is Harvard, Berkeley, Stanford, in that order. Harvard is stronger in its trade school ranking than it is in academic Ph.D. rankings, which pulls it up considerably.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Like I'll say time and time again, Cornell is an EXCELLENT school, but they have benefited greatly from their inclusion in the Ivy League since this athletic coalition was formed in the mid-20th century. Let's say Colgate had joined. They would no doubt have traded places with Cornell in the department of "prestige and elitism".
[/quote]
</p>
<p>With all due respect, the amount of disinformation on these boards is borderline absurd. If you don't know what you are talking about, please don't open your mouth.</p>
<p>If you go back to the turn of the last century through the 1950s, Cornell more than stood on its own merits and was widely regarded as one of the top five research institutions in the country -- along with Harvard, Princeton, Michigan and Berkeley, with the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins not very far behind. What made Cornell so prominent was its particular approach to education and research -- mixing the theoretical and the applied, and its advances in engineering, agriculture, and basic science earned it respect from all of the world. The fact that so many great authors and historians were associated with Cornell during this time -- from E.B. White to Nabokov -- added even more to its reputation.</p>
<p>And then there was the little fact that Cornell was a defiantly progressive institution -- accepting and enrolling women, Jews, Catholics, and other minorities with little concern. Most of our peers wouldn't enroll females until more than 100 years after Cornell was founded.</p>
<p>Dartmouth and Brown were really just small colleges in comparison. So was Colgate. I've read many first hand accounts from the 1920s that after Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, and the military academies, Cornell was the oft most-considered school for top students. And for engineering you went to MIT or Cornell.</p>
<p>At the same time, Upstate New York and the Erie Canal were the modern equivalent to Silicon Valley. The cities of Rochester and Syracuse were research and manufacturing powerhouses, and Buffalo was the second busiest inland port after Chicago. So Cornell also had geography on its side.</p>
<p>If anything, I think most historians of higher education would agree Cornell's relative standing and prestige has declined since it helped to form the Ivy League. This has been due to a number of factors, but I'll only cite three:</p>
<p>1) The secular U.S. population trends southward and westward. Ironically, it was Cornellians who invented the modern air conditioning machine for industrial purposes which helped make this development possible.
2) The secular U.S. trend towards large cities over the last 25 years. In terms of gaining access to research money, venture capital dollars, and political power connections, it has become increasingly valuable to locate oneself in a large metropolitan area. Maybe not for undergraduate education, but certainly for graduate education.
3) Declining New York State funding relative to the increasing costs of higher education. Even twenty-thirty years ago Cornell was considered to be the fourth wealthiest research institution when measured on a per student basis. As higher education has turned to a more private funding mechanism, Cornell -- which offers a rather unique public-private hybrid model -- has found itself strained relative to its peers.</p>
<p>noobcake, here it is: Bus/Law/Medicine (Research, not Clinical)</p>
<p>Harvard: 2/2/1
Berkeley: 9/6/5
Stanford: 3/3/8</p>
<p>These are NOT NRC rankings. These are taken from USNWR for Law and Medicine, and for Business from a compilation of equal weight of USNWR, London Times and BusinessWeek.</p>
<p>Clearly Berkeley sees its mission as less of a trade school, and more of a doctoral level research institution.</p>
<p>And where are the service academies?</p>
<p>^^^^^
They're typically not private universities (as far as I know) and typically not in the loosey-goosey realm of top 20 by most conventional rankings.</p>
<p>Kind of like public schools, they just have a very different mandate.</p>
<p>Igellar, I agree that class size is important. But most top universities have small classes once you get past the intro-level. And if you look at the percentage of classes with fewer than 30 students (instead of fewer than 20 students), you will find that almost every single top university have similar stats. At any top university, only 20%-30% of classes have more than 30 students, and most of those classes are intro-level classes.</p>
<p>
[quote]
No need to needlessly bash one and place the other upon a pedestal.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>But it's so much fun!!!!</p>
<p>This is a terrible way to rate the quality of undergraduate education at each of these schools. Are you going to say that Amherst and Williams offer terrible undergraduate education because they have no top graduate programs? Obviously not. The top twenty schools have a wide range of focus. The schools ranked lower are those which are primarily focused on undergraduate education. Sure, there are some who excel at both, but that doesn't mean that good graduate programs are a prerequisite for a good undergraduate experience. A department gets a good graduate school ranking based on the quality and quantity of the research it produces as judged by peers. There is not necessarily a (positive) correlation between that and the quality of undergraduate experience. A professor doesn't need to be breaking ground in string theory to teach undergraduate physics or even most graduate level physics well. Undergraduate education is affected mostly by the amount of energy professors put into teaching. Another thing to take into account is research opportunities, but these are not necessarily more abundant or better learning experiences at schools with strong graduate programs, as those schools with have strong graduate students who are better able to fill the positions. I don't doubt that big public institutions provide good undergraduate educations or even that this approach is a possible way of judging the overall strength of universities, but it's dishonest and transparently opportunistic to suggest that they much relevance to undergraduate education.</p>
<p>^^Amen! !</p>
<p>It's funny how people on this board like to talk about the undergrad experience being so important...and yet lots of people then say, "it doesn't matter where you go for undergrad, grad school is more important."</p>
<p>OK, so let these "rankings" be for top grad schools - which is what they are.</p>
<p>Besides, top students who attend top universities generally end up taking several graduate-level classes in their Junior and Senior years. I know I did. And undergrads at the College of Engineering get to work on cutting edge research with those leading professors. It is difficult to separate graduate and undergraduate at top universities. There are many synergies that driven students can benefit from.</p>
<p>dartmouth - very underrated for these reasons</p>
<p>
[quote]
A Series of Unrealized Plans (A History of the UCSF School of Medicine: Chapter 3 - Towards a Unified Campus 1919-1927)
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I stand corrected. But I'm still sticking to my assertion that UCSF should NOT count as Cal's "de facto" medical school. A brief association a century ago doesn't mean that one gets to claim the other simply to stroke the ego. If that's the case, then perhaps Mexico should be able to claim the Southwest United States as a de facto territory.</p>
<p>^ I'm not using it to stroke Cal's ego...Cal has many top programs and it doesn't need a medical school to prop itself up. </p>
<p>Consider though that UCSF is the only UC that doesn't have undergrads. It's the only stand-alone UC medical school and has joint degrees with Berkeley, and has close proximity to Berkeley...analogous to USC's health sciences campus and UCLA medical center. Let's call UCLA's medical school, UC Santa Monica...;)</p>
<p>Blowing past the graduate schools' effects issue and other public relations effects, PR's view:
"Best Overall Academic Experience for Undergraduates."
<a href="http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/%7Eptps/students/courses/workshops/colleges/rankings.pdf%5B/url%5D">www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~ptps/students/courses/workshops/colleges/rankings.pdf</a></p>
<p>Although Carleton's treatment at PR seems only a little better than Reed's treatment at USNWR. Carleton has several extremely favorable measures of undergraduate experience e.g. highest giving rate. Strangely enough, at least from other decades, the Carls seem to frequently get married, even well after college.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Let's call UCLA's medical school, UC Santa Monica...
[/quote]
Except Geffen actually has ongoing official ties to UCLA... not something that last existed a century ago like UCSF and Cal. Kind of a big difference :)</p>
<p>"Besides, top students who attend top universities generally end up taking several graduate-level classes in their Junior and Senior years."</p>
<p>I've already taken 12 graduate courses, and I should be up to 20 by the time I graduate.</p>