<p>This trail was originally created for the seniors of Class 2009. As shown on #10, please feel free to re-arrange or re-rank these schools based on your preference assuming that you were admitted to each school on the list THIS year.</p>
<p>I sort of agree with modelingliao-</p>
<p>1-5 is a 5 way tie with HYPSM</p>
<p>6-15 is basically a tie with the lower ivies, gtown, hopkins, wustl, northwestern, chicago, duke, etc. Idk why LAC’s are included here, and of course, UCLA and UCB deserve rankings around here but since they’re public they can’t nearly be as selective as smaller privates.</p>
<p>1-5 (extremely selective super-schools)
Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, (MIT – in a separate category, really)</p>
<p>6-14 (knowledge factories: schools with excellent research facilities and productive, world-class faculty who actually teach undergraduates)
Columbia, Penn, Chicago, (Caltech)
Duke, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, WashU, Rice </p>
<p>15 (like 6-14, but a little more like a LAC; research facilities not quite as strong; pass-fail grading system; may be more desirable than 1-14 for students seeking a more “laid back” atmosphere)
Brown</p>
<p>16-17 (like 6-14, but losing points for large class sizes)
UC Berkeley, Michigan</p>
<p>18-21 (not world-class research universities, but excellent schools of arts & sciences with strong undergraduate pre-professional programs that may make them more attractive than 6-17 to some students)
Georgetown, Vanderbilt, Northwestern, Notre Dame</p>
<p>Criteria:
Faculty distinction, in research & teaching, and their availability to undergraduates
Intellectual caliber of the students
Class size
Facilities (especially the library system and the labs)
Research productivity in the arts and sciences</p>
<p>Tk, I like yours, although I think Northwestern fits somewhere up in the 15-17 range.</p>
<p>Edit: You also omitted (I’m assuming it was unintentional) Dartmouth.</p>
<p>I think some other school rather than an ivy should be number one like Duke or Stanford.</p>
<p>Summary of findings</p>
<p>Tier approach is deemed acceptable. I didn’t see any attempt to further breakdown HYPSM’s tie to see who is real number 1. Up to now, nobody disagreed that the top5 spots belong to HYPSM. Starting from Tier 2 we had different opinions. Whereas, five other ivies, Caltech and Duke held steady in Tier 2. Therefore, 12 spots were taken. At the moment, we don’t include any LAC. The remaining 13 spots may be selected but not limited to the following 17 universities:
Georgetown, WUSTL, UVA, Berkeley, Chicago, Northwestern, JHU, Vanderbilt, UCLA, CMU, Emory, Rice, Notre Dame, NYU, USC, UNC, and Michigan.</p>
<p>Please continue posting your new top25.</p>
<p>Cut the sissy tiered crap;</p>
<p>1)Stanford
2)Princeton
3)Harvard
4)MIT
5)Yale
6)Duke
7)Columbia
8)CalTech
9)Cornell
10)Brown
11)Chicago
12)Pennsylvania
13)Northwestern
14)Notre Dame
15)Dartmouth
16)Michigan
17)Berkeley
18)Vanderbilt
19)Georgetown
20)Virginia
21)John Hopkins
22)Rice
23)North Carolina
24)USC
25)Wisconsin</p>
<p>WashU may not be #12 (ala USNWR), but I can’t agree with leaving it out of the top 25 completely. Any reasoning?</p>
<p>^ well, clearly all these lists are based on opinion like Ron_Paul’s. How else would a school like Notre Dame beat out schools like Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins and be inches away from Chicago, etc?</p>
<p>i think the best list belongs to tk21769</p>
<p>mvmanno, yes, I intentionally omitted Dartmouth. Not because it is not wonderful, but because it is more like a LAC, and it is hard to fit LACs into the same model. </p>
<p>I would agree, too, that Northwestern in some respects seems to fit qualitatively with the 15-17 (or higher) schools. It’s more of a “knowledge factory” than Georgetown. Compared to Georgetown it has a much more robust library system. Quite a few of its departments, many more than Georgetown’s, show up in the NRC rankings of the top 15 or 20. So o.k., let’s stick it up there with Hopkins, Rice, etc. It is more like those schools than like Berkeley or Michigan, and Brown is kinda its own special place, I gather.</p>
<p>I think it’s kind of interesting that you find Dartmouth really shouldn’t be compared, but also think that Brown’s uniqueness is not enough that it gets removed from the list but is enough to put it in a special tier.</p>
<p>Ah, the problem of rankings-- comparing drastically different places that may not make sense to compare.</p>
<p>^^ “sissy tiered crap”. Gotta love it!</p>
<p>No, I’m going to persist steadfastly in sissy-ness.
Just because you cannot with great precision rank all these schools without ties.
And you really can’t justify a ranking without stating criteria and measurable evidence.</p>
<p>Here, I’ll re-state my criteria, with the measurable evidence (or at least standards based on expert opinion) for each one:</p>
<p>*Faculty distinction, in research & teaching, and their availability to undergraduates
Criteria: Number of major faculty awards especially Nobel Prizes (Chicago highest on my list, Georgetown low; faculty compensation (most of these schools are high; Harvard is highest; Georgetown and Hopkins relatively low.)</p>
<p>*Intellectual caliber of the students
Criteria: Average SAT scores, the only widely available, standardized measurement that is comparable across high schools (all these schools are high; Harvard is highest on my list, Vanderbilt lowest by 75th percentile)</p>
<p>*Class size
Criteria: percentage of classes <20 or >50, available in most school’s Common Data Set and aggregated in this forum in another thread (Of the schools on my list, Chicago has the fewest with >50; Columbia, Harvard, Yale, NW, S, Penn, P, Chicago, WUSTL, Duke, Brown have the most with <20; Georgetown,Notre Dame, Michigan have the fewest with <20; Berkeley and Michigan have the most with > 50.)</p>
<p>*Facilities (especially the library system and the labs)
Criteria: # of volumes in the library system (Harvard by far the largest; Vanderbilt and Notre Dame are among the smallest, Georgetown not even among the top 100); endowment per student as an indicator of funds available for capital improvements (Princeton is the highest of the schools on my list, Georgetown the lowest)</p>
<p>*Research productivity in the arts and sciences
Criteria: # of academic departments among the top 25 in the NRC’s 10-year ranking of 41 programs (my top-ranked schools tend to have many, my low-ranked ones have few or none. Chicago for example is in the top 25 in almost every physical and biological science, Georgetown is in the top 25 in none.)</p>
<p>As for Brown vs. Dartmouth: yes, I have a little trouble with this. But Brown is about twice as large as Dartmouth. It shows up quite often among the NRC’s 41 department rankings; Dartmouth consistently is ranked much lower, or is not ranked at all. Brown has one of the 100 largest library systems in the USA, Dartmouth does not. So, I conclude Brown has more of the characteristics of a major national research university.</p>
<p>Oh it certainly does, tk, it’s just funny about how anyone can draw a line. I don’t think the line is so clear on overall quality between these two schools and 6-14 on your list.</p>
<p>FWIW, I think library resources is a ridiculous way to look at undergraduate education and it cracks me up how students used to ask me about this stuff on my tour (and how much of it I had to learn about to be a guide).</p>
<p>Also, I’d say it’s pretty obvious that tiers are the way to go. Nothing sissy about admitting that the differences really are small.</p>
<p>FWIW, I don’t think the perpetually listed HYPSM top 5 are necessarily the top five for undergrads.</p>
<p>^ I agree. For the most part, students just use the library to do homework, work in groups, study, and/or nap…lol. The library is also the semi-social hub at Hopkins here…lol. (sad I know, but hey, we are proud nerds 
)
Library research is mostly ever done by grad students, or upperclassmen, though even then, the online resources are much more easy, and often more direct than old dusty and often outdated books, lol.</p>
<p>If you really want to know which schools are the standouts in terms of academics, just check out the peer assessment rankings.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Well, sure. As if having 15 million volumes at Harvard means you’ll get twice as good an education as you will at Chicago with 7 million. Please don’t think I’m that naive.</p>
<p>What I try to do – and of course this is all just good fun – is try to come up with a balanced set of criteria, and some published metrics that correspond to each one. The idea of peer assessments (a large part of the USNWR rankings) makes me very uncomfortable.I prefer “objective” metrics (though they have limits too).</p>
<p>I do think library size is not a totally meaningless data point. Not because it is so important to you, directly, as a student. But because it is an indication of the breadth and depth of research that the university can support.</p>
<p>But yeah, it’s slicing things a little fine to try to distinguish Brown qualitatively from Hopkins, etc.</p>
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<p>Man I’m sorry, I really jumped on you…but I guess I just get annoyed by the east coast bias that you were just pointing out. Don’t know what was in my wheaties the other day…</p>
<p>tk:</p>
<p>Good job for your in-depth. Do you have your 22-25? Could you share with us?</p>
<p>Hope2:</p>
<p>Your list impressed me. It reflected the dynamics of this years’ college selection. Could you tell me more about how you came up with it?</p>
<p>Hope2:</p>
<p>Where should Georgetown be if you re-consider adding one fine university to your list?</p>