<p>“If I were the Super Moderator, I would’ve banned both you immature jerks who have set terrible examples of yourselves and the schools you both represt, lesdiablesbles and rjkofnovi.”</p>
<p>Thesaiyans666: I thought we were becoming friends. :-(</p>
<ol>
<li>Williams & Amherst</li>
<li>Swarthmore</li>
<li>Middlebury </li>
<li>Bowdoin/Pomona</li>
<li>Wellesley</li>
</ol>
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<p>Like I was saying earlier, many guidance counselors remember (and may only remember) a time when Chicago was easy to get into, mediocre applicants were being accepted, students who did attend came back despairing, etc. That would negatively impact Chicago’s ranking among guidance counselors, which US News is proposing to incorporate into the broader ‘National Universities’ ranking.</p>
<p>If you look at last year’s high school counselor ranking ([Best</a> Colleges - Education - US News and World Report](<a href=“http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/national-counselor-rank]Best”>http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/national-counselor-rank)), Chicago was ranked 17th with Carnegie Mellon and Virginia. By comparison, on the National Universities ranking Chicago was 8th with Columbia and 14 and 16 ranks ahead of Carnegie Mellon and Virginia, respectively.</p>
<p>Of course, the counselor rankings are rather new and subject to variation, so who knows?</p>
<p>And Chicago was tippy top as a newborn university, thanks to dear Old Man Rockefeller :). In fact, IIRC, there was a non-rigorous ranking in 1925 that put Chicago at #1.</p>
<p>All of this Duke and U Michigan “debate” is silly. Within the world of academia, both have high achieving grad programs and lots of research and professional school visibility and thus both receive high marks in things like PA scoring. No one should have a problem with this conclusion.</p>
<p>As it relates to undergraduate education, however, difficulties arise as partisan posters on each side will use data points (relevant or not) to make their case. The schools have different mandates which result in different institutional realities starting with very, very large differences in size. This has a massive impact on the nature of the setting that each school can provide. Again, no one should have a problem with this conclusion. </p>
<p>For undergraduate education, both are very good places, but on traditional comparisons involving</p>
<ol>
<li>Quality of student peers</li>
<li>Size of classroom</li>
<li>Quality of classroom instruction</li>
<li>Depth of financial resources and willingness to use on undergrads</li>
</ol>
<p>the comparisons would all favor Duke and often by a sizable margin. </p>
<p>Duke’s truest peers are the non-HYP Ivies, Stanford, Northwestern, Emory, Vanderbilt, Rice, Notre Dame. For undergraduate education, Duke is a consensus Top 10 school. </p>
<p>U Michigan’s truest peers are UC Berkeley, U Virginia, UCLA, U North Carolina, U Illinois, U Wisconsin, U Washington, U Florida, Penn State, U Texas. Like the others mentioned, U Michigan’s strength is its faculty reputation within academia which is mostly forged from a history of research prominence which itself has mostly occurred at the graduate student level. </p>
<p>While all of these public colleges will have a subset of undergrads that are statistically comparable to those at a place like Duke, there is also a material (perhaps even larger) subset that is more comparable to the average student at places like George Washington or Boston University. This is definitely not the case at a place like Duke or its peers. </p>
<p>IMO, the student body quality comparisons are a major part of the differences here. U Michigan posters like to identify themselves and their school with the higher achieving, more elite part of the student body while Duke posters more commonly view U Michigan’s student body as a heavily-diluted blend. </p>
<p>The differences are even more clearcut in the class size comparisons and in the financial resources/willingness to spend comparisons.</p>
<p>rjkofnovi: I meant that’s what I would have done before we became friends. :)</p>
<p>^^^^ hahahaha… Glad you have come to understand one another. :-)</p>
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Because you obviously have a fascination with the best university on the planet.</p>
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<p>What does this even mean, hawkette? You’re really clueless about how research universities work, aren’t you? If you told any group of faculty at any research university in the country that their research “mostly occurred at the graduate student level,” you’d be laughed out of the room. Research is done mainly by faculty in labs, libraries, faculty offices, and/or in the field, depending on the discipline. Grad students in the sciences sometimes work as lab assistants or participate in field experiments, but so do undergrads; in all disciplines grad students are generally expected to do their own original research, while faculty do theirs. Research is an important part of the mission of research universities; and research and scholarly writing are an important part of the triad of faculty duties–research/scholarship, teaching, and service—at every research university in the country. It works exactly the same way at Duke or Harvard as it does at Michigan. And at every major research university I know of, including Michigan, the very same faculty who are advancing the frontiers of human knowledge through their research teach undergrads as well as grad students. To attempt to malign a great research university like Michigan by falsely suggesting that faculty research there is somehow done by or for the benefit of grad students, or perhaps is uniquely accessible to them, is risible.</p>
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<p>Alex, you probably are unaware of this, but calling Duke student “Dookies” is EXTREMELY insulting. It’s spelled incorrectly on purpose to compare its students to feces. So, it’s equivalent to calling Michigan students “Wolversh**s” or something like that. The correct spelling is “Dukies” and that is fine to say that. “Dookies” was created by UNC fans as “dook” is a slang term for poop. Clearly, RJK does NOT respect Duke and I personally find his posts offensive constantly putting down Duke and its “dookies” for no reason. </p>
<p>Having said that, sometimes ldb does Duke more harm than good in his posts, although it’s mostly just in retaliation. Michigan is the school I grew up being a fan of and tons of my family went there. I respect it greatly as an institution, but if I only knew RJK as the only representative of the university, I’d think it’s not the place for me…I guess that goes to show you that people should NOT form opinions of universities based on posters on some random site. If you’re doing that, you’re going to be led astray! Alex, how you defend and profess your pride in Michigan doesn’t rub me the wrong way in the least, as you talk calmly, rationally, and with supportive evidence. Just thought I’d clear that up…if RJK and others could stop using the pejorative spelling, that would be appreciated. Carry on…</p>
<p>Duke and Stanford are 2 of the best universities in the US. For academics, campus atmosphere, athletics, weather, and alumni networks, few if any of the Ivies can match the Cardinal and Blue Devils.</p>
<p>bc,
What a pleasure to hear from you again. :rolleyes: Here I make a positive comment on your school and its strength of research reputation and you go loco and accuse me of maligning your school. Jeez, why should I bother with you guys? I was trying to be nice. </p>
<p>Perhaps my comments were not optimally phrased or perhaps you misinterpreted my comments (not surprising given your prior hair-trigger responses re U Michigan), whatever. But hopefully my meaning and view is clear to most readers, ie, that the institutional priorities and the nature of the undergrad experience are NOT the same at all research institutions. Despite your and others’ many attempts to wish this away and associate, if not equate, your school with more prestigious/selective/intimate names, there are differences. And IMO working to understand those differences is hardly maligning your alma mater. </p>
<p>My suggestion to aspiring undergrads is to investigate these differences and divine the institution’s priorities, including how they treat different subsets of students (grad vs undergrad, IS vs OOS, different majors, etc) and how they prioritize the conflicts between the multiple faculty responsibilities. </p>
<p>I encourage students to learn about the UNDERGRADUATE experience at the college. Trust your own judgment, rather than the corruption of academia PA scoring that has little to nothing to do with the average undergraduate. </p>
<p>My advice to aspiring undergrads is look at colleges and evaluate based on a variety of datapoints, eg, compare the quality of the students, view the class sizes and see how much interaction you get in the classroom with the profs and with your (hopefully) intelligent classmates, inquire of many sources about the quality of the classroom instruction, compare the financial packages, etc. </p>
<p>Hopefully you do not disagree with this advice, but I suspect that you do because such comparisons might reach a conclusion out of sync with your personal framework. Tant pis…. </p>
<p>par72,
Ditto.</p>
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<p>Hawkette, I wholeheartedly agree. </p>
<p>
Let’s look at some of those datapoints, shall we? :p</p>
<p>NAS Members, NAE Members, School:
127, 92, Stanford
21, 3, Duke</p>
<p>“Having said that, sometimes ldb does Duke more harm than good in his posts, although it’s mostly just in retaliation.”</p>
<p>YOU’VE GOT TO BE KIDDING!</p>
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<p>Ok, fine, in my mind you’re equal offenders, with lbd having a few particularly egregious posts, while yours are typically more subdued in nature. But you still won’t even acknowledge the fact that you continually refer to Duke’s student body in an offensive manner. In any event, you shouldn’t care what I think. I was just trying to explain to Alex why the term is offensive. Now time to get back on topic…</p>
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<p>Wow, Duke has one more NAE member than Chicago does, and Chicago doesn’t even HAVE an engineering department.</p>
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<p>That 3 must be outdated - Duke actually has four. Dowell, Petroski, Plonsey, and Calderbank are all members of the NAE. So, Duke has double UChicago’s number. 
(I’m mostly kidding in case you can’t tell.) 18 Duke alumni are NAE members…Not trying to say those numbers are even close to Stanford levels though. </p>
<p>If we go by NAE numbers, UWashington destroys Wash U at 16 to 2. Heck, UNC has FIVE and no engineering school, while Dartmouth has 2 and Brown has 4. Maryland has 14 and Arizona has 11. NAE numbers, as with any other metric, should not be viewed in a vacuum. Of course, Stanford is more well-recognized than Duke in engineering and I wouldn’t dispute that. But going by NAE numbers, Washington, Maryland, Arizona, and UNC are superior to Dartmouth, Brown, and Wash U. (I realize not all of those have engineering schools, that’s why I at least included UNC which doesn’t.) It personally wouldn’t faze me at all, for example, to attend the BME program at Wash U despite the fact it has only two NAE members. I could care less; the professors there are still very accomplished and I’d be able to participate in high quality research as an undergrad.</p>
<p>yes the dookie stains</p>
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<p>Hawkette, Hawkette!</p>
<p>Does that mean that Stanford’s truest peers are Northwestern, Emory, Vanderbilt, Rice, Notre Dame? </p>
<p>Does that mean that Stanford truest peers are the non-HYP Ivies? Will we have to abandon the familar HYPS for a simpler HYP and a more complicated SMCDCBC --or a something similarly moronic? </p>
<p>Obviously, one could make a statement that all the schools listed on the first page of the USNews have to be considered peers, but since you DO attempt to establish meaningful differences among the groups, we have to discard such a large group of peers. </p>
<p>Further, why are keeping “U Michigan’s truest peers UC Berkeley, U Virginia, UCLA” separated from Emory, Vanderbilt, Rice, Notre Dame? If the intent is to simply separating public schools from private schools, there are few reasons to introduce different metric. </p>
<p>At the end of the day, the only conclusion that makes senses is that all the schools that are debated here are MUCH MORE different than people pretend them to be, and that said schools easily defy all the silly attempts to create groups of peers. </p>
<p>For instance, the reputed members of HYPS are ONLY peers in their selectivity and prestige, but are immensely different from one another. And that is why you are not about to see something such as HYPDS anytime soon.</p>
<p>Xiggi,
I agree that Stanford is the outlier in the peer group that I listed for Duke. In this case, I was thinking about well-roundedness of the undergraduate experience at Stanford, ie, its ability to achieve at very high levels academically, have a dynamic social environment and be athletically competitive on the national level in high profile sports like football, basketball and baseball. On this basis, I think that Duke is Stanford’s closest peer followed closely by Northwestern, Vanderbilt, Rice and Notre Dame. In strictly academic terms and for prestige comparisons, I concur that Duke lags the HYPSM group.</p>
<p>As for your point about the schools being very different, I agree. That is why I grouped the publics as I did. Due to their unique missions, I’ve concluded that the state Us are best and most fairly compared to one another. </p>
<p>Outside of PA scoring, the Top 20 privates consistently outscore the top publics and there is good reason why no public presently cracks the Top 20 for UNDERGRADUATE. For the average undergraduate, there are measurable differences in the selectivity, classroom environment and dedication to undergraduates of financial resources between what any of the USWNR Top 20 privates will offer and what the top publics have to offer. Still, not all will care about these differences and certainly cost/value considerations will play a role in college choices as well as specialty programs at certain publics that will raise their status with certain students. </p>
<p>Ucb,
If it makes you happy, post away with your comparisons of NAE/NAS members. For an average undergraduate, I place the value for this at close to zero, but if it’s important to you, then go for it. But I’ve never understood why so much attention is paid to this, especially given that the technical fields rarely account for more than 25% of an undergraduate population.</p>
<p>“Ok, fine, in my mind you’re equal offenders, with lbd having a few particularly egregious posts, while yours are typically more subdued in nature.” </p>
<p>My offenses are typically more subdued? I need to try harder.</p>