USNews Prestige Rankings

Parents Forum
21

Why not use a combination of everything?

Among the top 10 Research U’s in all 4 of USNews, USNews academic survey, Business Insider, and Forbes:
HYPSM

Among the top 20 Research U’s in all 4 (listed alphabetically; 10 of them):
Brown, Cal, Caltech, Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Northwestern, Penn

Among the top 30 Research U’s in all 4 (listed alphabetically; 7 of them):
CMU, Georgetown, JHU, UMich, WashU, Vandy, UVa

This is not very different from the Ivies/equivalents and Near-Ivies tiers based off of alumni achievements that I came up with:

Ivies & equivalents (16 RU’s):
8: HYPSM, Brown
7: Chicago, Cornell, Rice
6: Columbia, Dartmouth, Duke, Northwestern
5: Caltech, Georgetown, UPenn

Near-Ivies (8 RU’s):
4: Cal, UMich, UVa, ND
3: NYU, Tufts, UCLA, Wisconsin-Madison

22

Not sure this is a “ranking” but plenty of public universities (and the US Naval Academy) are listed in the top 25. I saw this on another thread, where only the first 10 schools where listed.

http://qz.com/498534/these-25-schools-are-responsible-for-the-greatest-advances-in-science/

23

21, more examples:

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/2016/reputation-ranking#!/page/0/length/25/country/93/sort_by/rank_label/sort_order/asc

http://www.theunipod.com/making-your-choice/university-rankings/ranking-of-rankings/2013/us

http://www.stat.tamu.edu/~jnewton/nrc_rankings/nrc1.html#TOP60

http://publicuniversityhonors.com/rankings-academic-departments-private-elites-vs-publics/

http://cwur.org/2015/usa.html

24

^ UWfromCA, you’re mixing graduate program rankings into that list.

25

Yes.

26

I would be remiss not to point out that CC already established the prestigiosity rankings: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/978040-ranking-colleges-by-prestigiosity-p1.html

27

The Economist College Rankings is, IMHO, the best system available for university rankings.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/10/value-university

As a result, all of my kids are going to Alderson Broaddus University and will major in petroleum management.

28

@Zinhead Haha! You’re comment made me laugh hysterically. Haha :slight_smile:

We all know that the quality of education for most top 100 universities are the same. They all have top faculty, use the same text books, curriculum, etc. This however doesn’t translate when students become candidates in the real world and are judge by peers from which institution they received their degrees from.

For example, even though I don’t think Dartmouth’s academics are anywhere near Michigan’s, a Dartmouth grad will be afforded more opportunities and place in better jobs than a Michigan grad.

29

This simply isn’t true. There are plenty of employers who will view Dartmouth and Michigan as six of one, half dozen of the other. Please do not make the mistake of thinking that all employers are magically like the banking industry on Wall Street.

30

Not in Michigan. (and probably not in a lot of other places too)

31

Not anywhere outside of the Northeast. In the tech industry, Michigan would win easily, particularly on the west coast.

32

The US Grant & World B Free prestige ranking:

1-5: HYPSM
6-9: CCCP
10-16: Berkeley, Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, JHU, Northwestern
17-25: Rice, Vandy, Wash U, Georgetown, Notre Dame, Michigan, Virginia, Emory, CMU
26-36: UCLA, UNC, UW, UW, UT, Tufts, USC, NYU, BC, GIT, UIUC

:wink:

33

CCCP - is that Caltech, Chicago, Columbia, UPenn?

34

I’ve always known it as Сою́з Сове́тских Социалисти́ческих Респу́блик.

35

@prezbucky Chicago and Penn do not have a lot of lay prestige.

36

I also want to push back against the trope that academics at the top 100 are all the same. That’s simply not the case. @bernie12 has spent the time of looking at various science courses at different schools, and there are differences even at schools with similar lay reputations. I’ve looked at CS OS finals, and there is a difference in difficulty between a school known for CS/elite and regular state school. The differences, however, do seem to be reflected in alumni achievements.

37

@PurpleTitan : I still don’t understand why people subscribe to that idea. There is a reason the student bodies at these schools look different in terms of academic interests and social inclinations. Like a bunch of party type of students are not typically going to flock to an institution, elite or not, where the academics are unusually “pushy” in their department of interest. And students who have specific academic academic interests ultimately know which schools do it best. It takes significant scholarship or need based aid to sway students away from the best academic fit (what elite schools do to sway students away from more elite schools to pump up stats) and often those who fall for it are underwhelmed and should have maybe sucked it up payed for the other school if they could have OR have gone to an honors program at a solid public college offering them merit aid (typically curricula in these programs are a bit more interesting than the general curriculum at many elite schools). Even between elite schools, you can often be hinted by differing major distributions (though economics seems to be an exception where schools who aren’t great at it still get lots of majors). For example, given the popularity of biological sciences at schools among pre-healths and non, it is telling when one elite has that in say, the top 5 and another of similar size has substantially less majors in it. It would suggest that one school has a bigger reputation for that and typically it is for a reason, whether it be the rigor, stronger teaching, or resources affiliated with it. I’m willing to bet it is a combination.

Like subscribing to that idea is like saying UGA and Georgia Tech are similar in fields where they overlap. Hint, typically not the case. One can say that Georgia Tech in its specialties (STEM) definitely competes with or is better than several of the very top schools for it (academic equivalence to these plus a more supportive and vibrant UG STEM community makes them a place to be). Or one can for example, tell that WashU, JHU, and Emory are maybe different (not better) than VU and Cornell where the former three have the Big 3 pre-professional fields represented in extremely high numbers (perhaps because they have UG business and/or an undergraduate health program such as nursing, public health, or even health majors within the Arts and Letters entities. Political Science is also fairly big at all 3 as far as I know…no surprise pre-law is big at least two of them). VU and Cornell have actual pre-professional schools represented in unusually high numbers that have nothing to do with the Big 3…so naturally have a different vibe. Cornell is more interesting because of how well it does engineering.

38

@NoVADad99 That is weird orthography. Those stress marks are never written in Russian. You must have looked up a pronunciation guide.

39

Yes. Those marks are not used in standard Russian. I copied and pasted from Wikipedia. Too lazy to hunt for the Cyrillic fonts in Word.

40

@NerdyChica

It’s my personal list, given a weird name.

I really wanted to form CCCP, and you can’t do that without Penn. (and among those who know colleges, Chicago belongs in that group.) Actually, we could include Cal and it would be CCCCP. hehe

@hebegebe

Yeah – Chicago, Columbia, Caltech, Penn. Could just as easily have been Chicago, Columbia, Cal-Berkeley, and Penn. I was having fun with it. I think @NoVADad99 got my attempt at humor.