@MWolf : The Curtis Institute, which is tuition free to all students, is meaningfully more difficult to get into than much larger Juilliard, which charges tuition to many of its students. Of course, Juilliard has acting and dance departments, too; Curtis is just music.
@ProfessorPlum168 : Because UC-Berkeley has a strong CS department in addition to a convenient location for recruiting. (Santa Clara University & San Jose State also place well in Silicon Valley.)
The SAT scores & student: teacher ratio were part of the list provided by “50 Hardest Colleges To Get Into”. and UCal-Berkeley was the only school to have a 25% SAT score below 1300 and had, by far, the highest student : teacher ratio.
The poster who shared the list in this thread brought it over from another thread where the list was the topic being discussed.
@surelyhuman , I too liked Kronman’s critique and kept thinking as I read it that the Chicago faculty and administration and even many Chicago students just might have what he found lacking at Yale. This isn’t simply a matter of smarts or rankings but a more fundamental belief in the purpose of higher education as a sphere set apart and devoted to excellence and accomplishment. These are not inherently democratic virtues, as De Tocqueville noted long ago, and yet democracies also need to foster those qualities in at least some of their citizens. The danger is that in sweeping away all that is bad in the aristocratic temperament and tradition, all that is good may be lost and be replaced by an irritable resentment. We will thereby be deprived of the great spirits a democracy needs as much as any aristocracy. The great universities are where these spirits have most flourished in American society and where that fluorishing is now most threatened.
This is all a bit over the top. However, it’s a useful way of thinking of the mission of education, especially at schools that claim to be “elite” (a word he doesn’t use very much). By all means open the doors and break down the barriers to admission in democratic fashion, but once on campus all concerned enter a different world - where you are judged by what you are able to understand and achieve. That is very different from how you are treated in democratic institutions - in a court or a voting booth - or around the family dinner table. You can no longer appeal merely to your feelings or personal experience, you can no longer shout out your views as if you were on Speaker’s Corner. You are now part of a community of conversation where you must listen as well as speak and where he or she with the best arguments and the best knowledge - normally one’s teachers - will prevail over those who have not yet fully achieved those things. The paradigm is Socrates and his interlocutors.
Over the top, yes, but stirring stuff. I hope some of that royal jelly is still to be found at the University of Chicago.
@sushiritto On Californians and UChicago (I’m also in the Bay area) - the next-door neighbor kid graduated from there 2 years ago. Then a new family moved in across the street last year and the husband is a professor there still… he commutes(!) (I’m not sure exactly how that works… I know they still have a condo or another house in Chicago). It was also my 2nd choice undergrad school back in the day, although that was back before I moved to CA and it being in the midwest was a feature not a bug (I got in but Wash U gave me $$ and Chicago didn’t).
Wow. This is all really useful.
It’s that time of year, when all are merry and happy. Arguing over where in the top ten you are. We all have our own criteria on who fits our definition of best. Those of us who think our school is best will not be convinced by your opinions and those of you who think your school is best won’t be changed by ours. But, lets keep doing it cause it beats the daylights out of work.
It’s kinda a funny though comparing with graduates you’ve worked with or people you know who are attached to a university to get an understanding of school ranking. In the Midwest, I worked with a ton of people from UofM, Purdue, IU, Northwestern, etc. and nobody from the HYSPM group. Why is that? I guess the Big Ten rules academia. Those that didn’t go to the Big Ten went to Ball State, Kent State, Bowling Green State University. Are they better than Cal Tech?
This board needed perking up. Nothing better for that than a good old-fashioned dust-up over rankings. Hat’s off to the OP.
I trust that though he and all of us have achieved enlightenment the last words have not been said!
One of the things that I love about USNews rankings is that a graduate University of Cincinnati and Michigan State University is the one who is determining which of the expensive private colleges “deserves” to belong in the Top-10 club. His helpers have degrees from Brandeis/American University, and UMB-College Park.
The best part is that this person does not have a degree in statistics or in data science, but in Business. His helpers are two political scientists. Not one has more than an MA/MBA, not one has ever worked in academia, and not one has actually has a degree in either statistics or data science.
I just really love the idea of the High and Mighty Administrators of the HYPSM, of the rest of the Ivies, of such colleges as Duke, and Vanderbilt, and Chicago, all waiting for the judgement of the graduates of these much-disdained public universities. All of these administrators of the private “Top-20” colleges investing hours of work and millions of dollars to pander to the decisions of these graduates of much lower ranked public universities. Most of these administrators have degrees and higher degrees from these same “elite” colleges, BTW.
I still think that the USNews team isn’t qualified to create a ranking system, and that their ranking system is bunk, but I do love the irony.
I mean, how infuriating must it be for the President of Harvard, with his MIT undergraduate and his Harvard PhD, to be told by somebody with a U Cincinnati BA and an MSU MBA, “sorry, I have decided that you are not #1 anymore”.
^ Yes, but isn’t it great that the elites don’t get to decide absolutely everything? Talent matters, regardless of where you went to school.
I think the President of Harvard is going to be ok and can sleep at night as Forbes and Times Higher Education (THE) has them #1 in U.S. colleges.
I wrote this a few days ago. I forgot to post it but it is still true.
Ranking is a beauty contest and is totally subjective. In short it is stupid. No one should spend too much time arguing about it.
My top 5 ranking of universities/SUVs/Wagner operas recordings/, does not imply that everybody else has to agree to it. Why do I want to waste my breath to change other’s subjective utility functions? .
I think you know the difference between having an opinion on which Wagner operas are the best and a ranking system that uses some actual quantifiable numbers (such as 6 year graduation rates, number of students per faculty, amount of endowment $, etc).
US News rankings are far from perfect, I’ll be the first to admit, but they certainly are more objective than one’s personal opinion of which opera one likes better.
I, as a parent, am also not losing any sleep over any rankings, but happy and snug in the knowledge that my son is getting a world-class education, and enjoying his time there.
But, like BrianBoiler said, ‘…lets keep doing it cause it beats the daylights out of work.’ lol.
Ranking the top college is for me as difficult and subjective a task as ranking the best opera of Beethoven.
I assume that’s tongue in cheek because it is actually quite easy to rank Beethoven’s operas 
“And class of 2023 parents asking online whether a laundry service will pick up their kids’ laundry from dorm rooms, or whether their kids will have to drop the laundry off for staff to wash it.”
In all fairness to the issue, RISD (where approximately 22% of incoming are Pell recipients) offers a laundry service in the res halls. Their reasoning is that with the amount of work loaded on the student body, it made sense because this way they’d at least get their laundry done. I think the basic wash/dry/fold is probably 2x the price of doing this yourself but you get your stuff back neatly ironed and folded and they don’t lose your socks. I’m sure lots of East Coast colleges and prep schools offer this as well, but sometimes it makes sense. When I lived in London on study abroad many years ago there was a washing woman who serviced our house and we gladly paid to have our laundry done. It wasn’t expensive at all (I didn’t have much money to spare) and she never lost a single sock. Not once. Even our underwear was ironed - for many of us it was the first time ever LOL. The woman was a joy. We loved her. And - we Americans were supporting someone in a small business who wasn’t at all wealthy. She was just trying to make a living. If someone on the South Side community offered the same, I think many students in the res. halls would go for it if it made economic sense. After all, the students aren’t expected to cook their own food 
There is a price for convenience. IIRC there was linen service, once upon a time, but those days are probably over for good.
I went to Notre Dame in the '80s and there was free laundry service for the guys but not for the women!! This service wasn’t available to women even if they were willing to pay for it. We women could do a “sheet exchange” each week though. When the women complained, the unofficial response was “girls wouldn’t want their wash done by the university laundry service - they wash everything in hot water.” So outrageous even back in the dark ages!
"When I lived in London on study abroad many years ago there was a washing woman who serviced our house and we gladly paid to have our laundry done. It wasn’t expensive at all (I didn’t have much money to spare) and she never lost a single sock. Not once. Even our underwear was ironed - for many of us it was the first time ever LOL. The woman was a joy. We loved her. "
My husband is British and grew up with a very traditional English stay at home mom who lovingly ironed their sheets and underwear. He still gets a dreamy look on his face when he describes how wonderful freshly ironed sheets are. I’ve let him know that he is free to iron anything he wants at any time. Apparently freshly ironed sheets and underwear are only wonderful if someone else is doing the ironing…
^ When I retired from my demanding corporate finance job, I went on an ironing jag. Lasted about a week.
Ironed sheets? Really? Ours don’t wrinkle that much or at all. Neither does my underwear. I’ve only ever ironed my dress shirts.
At Purdue in the 80s, we had sheets done for us if we bothered to take them off the bed. I think we may have made it two or three times a semester.