<p>Ben i miss you! I'll be leaving for Vietnam today, and possibly stopping by Malaysia and Thailand. Tell Matt I said hi too =)</p>
<p>Absolutely..Now that we have ben on the thread.Please tell me somethjing Ben.
Can I send some softwares I have made on a CD ROM as submission of the
creativity question or as a supplemental research project material.</p>
<p>Vampiro - sure! You may wish to include some sort of explanation as well.</p>
<p>oh thanks a lot.</p>
<p>I'm wondering why you think that Duke and Penn are overrated. The reality of undergraduate recruitment is that there are quite a few Duke engineering students who turned down MIT and CalTech (or who didn't apply though they would likely have gotten in), and there are quite a few Duke and Penn liberal arts majors who turned down HYPS. And the ratings aren't meant to simply compare average SAT's or the achievements of graduate students and senior faculty; these latter ratings would quickly nudge MIT and CalTech alongside HYPS and above Penn and Duke.</p>
<p>Penn will never drop very far (the publisher of US News is a Penn graduate), and Duke hasn't dropped below 8th since the thing began a dozen years ago. I'm afraid that this top 10 isn't going to change very much unless they change the rating system itself.</p>
<p>Well, USNews does tend to change their methodology from year to year. Just a few years ago, Caltech was ranked #1 (the formula was more number-based back then, I believe), but quickly dropped after that. Even among the top 10 schools, there seem to be small changes every year. It's probably just a marketing strategy to keep everyone in suspense.</p>
<p>Haha, I'll bite: I think Duke and Penn are overrated because I don't automatically respect the intelligence of Duke and Penn students.</p>
<p>I have automatic respect for the intelligence of anybody who graduated from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT (duh), Caltech, Stanford, and perhaps a few others. Duke and Penn aren't on my mental "whoa" list. (As a corollary, I'd much rather be up against a Duke or Penn student for a spot in the grad program of my choice than I would anyone from the above list.)</p>
<p>Harsh, but there you have it.</p>
<p>Quite honest, molliebatmit, and thanks for saying it. That was almost exactly my response, but I was too shy to add it to the discussion. :)</p>
<p>Hee, thanks MM. The subtlety... it's a gift. ;)</p>
<p>cleareyedguy --</p>
<p>Nobody denies that there are good people at Duke; there are good people at the University of Arizona, too. It's just that many people in the academic world believe that the average intellectual level -- math included -- is stronger at many of the schools molliebat mentioned than at Penn and Duke. I'd agree with her that knowing nothing else about the student, I'd much rather be up against a Duke or Penn graduate in a job interview than an MIT or Caltech or Harvard guy (or girl!).</p>
<p>I hope that the distinction between the maximal value of a set and its average value is not an exceedingly subtle one.</p>
<p>I could do this, by the way, all day for Duke as well as for any of a dozen other schools. I could also do it for people who attended these schools and who have frittered away their lives. These schools are very similar, and only the narcissism of small differences fuels the intense discrimination between equivalents.</p>
<p>No matter how many excellent Dukies you can find, there are undoubtably more excellent students from HYPSMC, at least in the eyes of the general public. There indeed may be a negligible difference in student quality, but that's not what we're discussing here. We are discussing the reasons behind the fact that Duke and Penn are considered overranked, whereas MIT is considered underranked. Molliebatmit got it right; to most people, HYPSM students are in a league of their own (this is demonstrated by their 4.9 peer assessment scores). Are there outstanding Duke students who can hold their own against them? Certainly. Does the general public think so? Probably not.</p>
<p>I don't know quite why I'm pursuing this on an MIT thread, but...</p>
<p>I think that you're right that the 50th percentile MIT student is better at math than the 50th%ile Dukie. And you're right that a random MIT student is almost certainly less academic than the random Duke Rhodes Scholar. </p>
<p>I'd guess that the average Ivy Leaguer views Duke and Penn as a notch below HYPS overall and below MIT and CalTech in terms of math/science, but much of that view is tainted by their personal preferences that led them to choosing HYPSMC in the first place. The average citizen lumps them all together in a big pile of elite colleges.</p>
<p>I've been on the admissions committees at a couple of Ivy League medical schools, and I can clearly tell you that these committees don't differentiate among the top fifteen schools, and they're pretty sophisticated about this sort of thing. If anything, they worry a bit about the personal skills of the Tech grads. This is, of course, a skewed sample, since only A students get interviews. A family friend is on the executive committee of a well-known Fortune 100 company. Among his duties: he oversees hiring. He is interested in very smart and very well balanced people, and he has a clear bias against people who imply that intelligence is unidimensional (e.g., I'm smart because I did well on the math SAT) or those who believe that intelligence is an end in itself. In hiring, he'd be MORE skeptical about someone from MIT and CalTech than about someone from Penn or Duke, where the public perception is that these schools accept larger percentages of well rounded nonvaledictorians. Fair or not, that's the way it is there.</p>
<p>My point is that your later professional success will hinge on your passion and focus, talent and luck, over a broad spread of intra and interpersonal categories. And, in these categories, I remain unconvinced that Penn and Duke (and Brown and Columbia and Cornell) students are separable from their counterparts at HYPSMC.</p>
<p>
[quote]
The average citizen lumps them all together in a big pile of elite colleges.
[/quote]
I don't think so. Honestly? I think far fewer people have even heard of Duke than have heard of the others mentioned by molliebatmit, and when you say "Penn" many people will assume you mean Penn State. (And I know that will be another harsh-sounding comment.) People involved in academia or top corporate hiring likely know differently, but not the average person (unless they live in NC or follow some college sport or something).</p>
<p>Your point about the qualities necessary for later professional success is valid, I'm just taking exception to your assumption that "the average person" lumps all these schools together. I truly doubt that to be the case.</p>
<p>I'm not sure who the general public is, but, if you do watch Duke basketball on tv (they're watched every week for four months by millions of members of the general public), the announcers always talk about the academic credibility of the players and joke about the screaming kids with the 1500 SAT's with blue on their faces. Sports fans put Stanford and Duke in a league well above that of HYPMC when it comes to putting a face on smart college students. </p>
<p>I'd agree that MIT has enormous and well-deserved name recognition (much more than Cal Tech; I'd guess that only a small percentage of the general public has even heard of the place and so, even if it can enroll an entire freshman class with 800's on the math SAT, it doesn't really fit with HYPS when it comes to name recognition). </p>
<p>I guess I'd tend to clump the schools like HYP with the rest of the Ivy League; put MIT and Cal Tech in a league of their own; and then clump together the midsize private schools that field big-time major sports teams: Stanford, Duke, Northwestern, Tulane, Rice, Notre Dame, etc. I'd think this speaks to the actual college experience of the students, even if a school like Stanford has a student body that more approximates Harvard than it does a school like Vanderbilt. I'd do this partly because when you ask schools withn these groups aginst whom they most directly compete, MIT students would probably say cross-town Harvard but mostly Caltech, while Stanford would say Berkeley, Duke would say Carolina, and Vandy would say Tennessee. They aren't generally competing for the same students, but that is who their real rivalry is with once they get there.</p>
<p>I should say that I agree that Caltech's name recognition isn't at the level of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, and Stanford -- or Berkeley, for that matter. After all, we're five times smaller than the smallest of them! I say this with no bitterness at all, since I happily turned down five of them (including H) to come to Caltech.</p>
<p>But I fear we've confused two conversations which are both pretty silly to begin with ;-). "Man-on-the-street name recognition" is one topic, and one I think that has been plentifully discussed at CC in general, but not the one at issue in the original thread. </p>
<p>The controversial claim by molliebat is that people "in the academic elite" tend to have a mental "whoa" list which MIT is on and Duke isn't. I think that's a pretty fair claim. That's all the original point was. And that's why people say Penn and Duke are overranked, as somebody above me points out.</p>
<p>Is the "whoa" list justifiable? I'd say probably yes. After all, Duke hasn't produced any presidents and its alumni haven't won many Nobel prizes. Harvard&Yale have the first covered, MIT&Caltech the second. There are amazing Duke grads, but I'd say historically HYPMSC have played a slightly more intense ballgame academically. So it makes sense that when people who know about the relevant field think "engineering and science" the first names that pop up are MIT/CIT (and Stanford for engineering), and when people think "humanities" the first names that pop up as the elite are HYP. I just don't think Duke or Penn are as well known for excelling as brightly at any one thing or constellation of things.</p>
<p>Of course, that can all change. All we're talking about is the present perception... but I'm pretty sure mollie's got it right as to what it is right now.</p>
<p>Duke and Penn are good schools similar in quality to Cornell, Dartmouth, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, and Vanderbilt. However, I must agree with the consensus on this board that Duke and Penn are not in the same academic league as HYPSMC.</p>
<p>Since college prestige is a zero sum game, one cannot use the argument that schools like Duke and Penn are improving rapidly and should be placed right alongside HYPS. Because there are limited spaces at the top, I don't think Duke and Penn can ever reach the apex of college prestige unless they drag down one of the HYPSMC schools. And even though US News tries to show that this is indeed happening by publishing that Duke and Penn are unequivocally better than MIT and Caltech, I don't think the general public buys this for one second.</p>
<p>I agree with almost everything, except I'd replace "the general public" with "well-educated people who are knowledgeable about colleges." The general public judges on things like basketball... so it's an indicator limited value.</p>
<p>I'd also add that I don't think the spaces at the top are really all that limited... there's room for two more. It's just a question of whether they've made it up there, and I'm not really sure they have.</p>
<p>I dunno. Whenever I think Harvard or Yale I think of, as Ben mentioned, presidents and the political elite. Whenever I think of Caltech I think of NASA, JPL, the scientific future of America. Whenever I think about MIT I think of industry standards and incredible ingenuity.</p>
<p>More importantly, whenever I think about these schools, I think about raising the bar. Historically speaking, alumni from all of these institutions have not just been among the best in their field, but they've actually invented a new best, if that makes any sense.</p>
<p>So yes, Duke (and many other universities) have produced so many people who are among the best in their field. But it's schools like MCHYPS that pave the way for them to do that, that invent the very thing other people are "best" at. Perhaps more importantly, they also go out and take it one step further, leaving everyone else behind.</p>
<p>To use a bad computer analogy, it's like MCHYPS invent the 386, and then you have all these other universities pumping out scholars that are consistently pumping out people who've mastered the 386 system. Students from each university have mastered it, but look at who invented it? More importantly, if in the coming year MCHYPS invents 486, 32-bit, 64-bit, what does that say about the institutions?</p>
<p>You can look all you want at the people schools put out. There are plenty of C++ coders just as skilled as Soustroup. But none of them could be there without him. That's what I think, especially when it comes to MIT and Caltech. Other schools can gloat all they want, but where would we be without these two? </p>
<p>It's late, and I just got out of a three and a half hour robotics engineering session, so my brain's a little fried. Sorry if this post made little-to-no sense.</p>