<p>IMHO, top national universities, overrated:</p>
<p>Harvard, UPenn, Chicago, Northwestern, WUSTL, Emory, Vanderbilt, UCLA</p>
<p>IMHO, top national universities, underrated:</p>
<p>Stanford, Brown, CalBerkeley, Carnegie-Mellon, Georgetown, UVA</p>
<p>IMHO, top LACs, overrated:</p>
<p>Middlebury, Wellesley, Bowdoin, Carleton, Haverford, Vassar, Harvey Mudd, Smith, Hamilton, Colby, Colorado College</p>
<p>IMHO, top LACs, underrated:</p>
<p>Pomona, Colgate, USNA</p>
<p>i think colgate is overrated…</p>
<p>^I agree. What’s Colgate’s deal?</p>
<p>With the OP, I’d agree that Penn, Emory and Vanderbilt are overrated. I’d also add Wake Forest to that list. I don’t understand how it’s in the USNWR Top 30. I’ve never of the place. Is it big in the South or something? </p>
<p>I agree with your underrateds as well, even though I don’t think Stanford is underrated. Well, maybe on the East Coast because we don’t feel like going that far to a school when we have at least good dozen peer schools here.</p>
<p>In terms of LACs, I’d say most if not all of them are severely underrated.</p>
<p>Overrated: people who can’t distinguish between -rated and -ranked.</p>
<p>Underrated: people who saved 15% by switching to Geico.</p>
<p>Overrated: UPenn, WUSTL, Emory, Vanderbilt, UCLA, Middlebury, Wellesley</p>
<p>Underrated: Brown, Rice, Georgetown, Haverford, Pomona, Wesleyan</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>IMHO, top national universities, underrated:</p>
<p>Harvard, UPenn, Chicago, Northwestern, WUSTL, Emory, Vanderbilt, UCLA</p>
<p>IMHO, top national universities, overrated:</p>
<p>Stanford, Brown, CalBerkeley, Carnegie-Mellon, Georgetown, UVA</p>
<p>Underranked: Berkeley, UCLA, Michigan, Cornell, JHU</p>
<p>Overranked: Notre Dame, Washu, UVA, Duke</p>
<p>also add BC to the underrated list.</p>
<p>You guys constantly saying so and so school/s is/are overrated are getting really annoying, especially since 90% of you guys just say blank school is overrated and leave it at that. No numbers, no facts, no rationale, just a blanket statement. If you insist on saying a school is under or overrated, at least have some sort of explanation as to why.</p>
<p>How many of these threads are we going to have?</p>
<p>What does “overrated” mean? How about “underrated”? What do those even mean? How do you qualify? How do you categorize what “overrated” and “underrated”?</p>
<p>And saying that a school is overrated just because you’ve never heard of it only evidences ignorance on your part, not a failing on the U.S. rankings. As a matter of fact that could lead to the school being underrated, if one thinks logically.</p>
<p>Underated: Stanford, Brown, and perhaps Cal</p>
<p>Overrated:So many schools don’t even want to start…</p>
<p>^misspelled underrated (sorry, had to point it out) </p>
<p>…and you listed your school as underrated, which is just as annoying as saying X school is underrated and not writing an explanation as to how you’ve come to that conclusion.</p>
<p>WashU is overrated. We know that they “game” the rankings. Therefore, their high rank is largely due to their sneaky strategies to please one magazine. Therefore, their rank is higher than deserved. Therefore, WashU is overrated.</p>
<p>Sure I’m biased but I could write paragraphs about why those three schools are underrated (got it right this time ;)). But we don’t need to go there becuase that’s how CC devolves into craziness.</p>
<p>I think Notre Dame is consistently underrated (PA score) because:</p>
<p>a) It is not heavily research oriented; rather, it has an undergraduate focus.</p>
<p>b) It is Catholic; Many seem to believe that a religious affiliation takes away from the education</p>
<p>c) It is viewed as a football school.</p>
<p>Boston College deals with the same issues. Georgetown isn’t really affected that much because it has distanced itself from its Catholic affiliation to a certain degree.</p>
<p>As juillet said, please provide your reasoning for deciding whether a school is over or underrated, otherwise this thread is simply one of baseless and moronic list making. bdl108- just because you have never heard of Wake Forest does not mean it doesn’t deserve to be a top 30 university… the fact that you have not heard of it and it is ranked #28 actually makes it underrated rather than overrated.</p>
<p>As for me, I would say that schools like Stanford and Pomona are underrated because of an east coast bias shown through PA, and would say that NYU and Georgetown are overrated (their high stats are simply a result of their great locations and thus high selectivity.)</p>
<p>^ PA score:
Stanford = 4.9
Harvard = 4.9
MIT = 4.9
Princeton = 4.9</p>
<p>An East Coast bias? Not in 'furds case.</p>
<p>
</p>
<ol>
<li>Marketing aggressively =/= gaming the rankings (although less trees would be nice). Marketing aggressively = increasing awareness of the school.</li>
<li>Trying to improve their rankings through legal and intelligent admission tactics without resorting to cheating or lying =/= gaming the rankings. EVERY school tries to do this (minus Harvard), some more successful than others.</li>
<li>Their PA pulls them down, a lot. Therefore, they are UNDERRATED more than anything because they clearly lack in prestige.</li>
<li>WUSTL is a good undergraduate university by almost any measure.</li>
<li>IDK why people look down on WUSTL just because it’s high on one ranking.</li>
<li>There is a difference between OVERRATED and OVERRANKED.</li>
</ol>
<p>Georgetown at number 12 in selectivity and number 11 or 10 in percentage accepted is underrated.</p>
<p>lol, Good for Georgetown for being highly selective. In doing so, Georgetown robs many of the opportunity to live out the American dream. If the mission of a university is to make landmark discoveries and to educate individuals, then how can a person find pride in an institution which boasts about the hundreds and thousands applicants it rejects each application season? :P</p>
<p>WashU is overrated and overranked. Even if WashU is aggressively advertising to many students, I never heard of it before I applied to college. When I first applied to colleges, I honestly forgot to apply to WashU because I thought it was a community college. Why would my guidance counselor recommend a community college to me? I had no clue WashU was so highly regarded and highly ranked…</p>
<p>
***PA scores normalize everything. If we use your logic, UMichigan and UC Berkeley are overrated because of their PA scores. Most ppl would disagree and would say that UMich and UC Berkeley are highly underrated in USNews.</p>