what are the new top25 universities as a senior for class 2009?

College Search & Selection
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<p>ModestMelody:</p>

<p>Both Brown and Dartmouth are well-known universities not just because they are ivies. They did attract high quality students year in and year out. In fact, they are the only few universities announcing the percentages of high school valedictorians in their admitted student bodies. Who can undermine these two well-respected universities who turndown greater than 85% of their applicants? Both universities have their own strengths: Dartmouth in business and Brown in liberal arts. Brown remains a strong research powerhouse regardless of the size of their programs. This was evident by their constant strong showings on international ranking organizations, e.g., ARWA, THES-QS, and HEEACT. Teaching instead of researching is focus for Dartmouth. BASIC, a well-known programming language, was invented by two Dartmouth faculties and it was mainly used as a tool for teaching. Both schools deserve our Tier 2 ranking.</p>

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<p>^^ ARWU instead of ARWA</p>

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<p>This is a modified version of my above list. It includes a full 25. It emphasizes these criteria: the average of NRC departmental rankings for 30+ academic departments, and average 75th % SAT scores. Drop Georgetown, Notre Dame (which rank relatively poorly in the NRC ratings, faculty salaries and % of classes <20); drop Rice (which also does relatively poorly in the NRC rankings). Add Carnegie Mellon and a bunch of publics. </p>

<p>All these schools (a) are in the top 35 for average NRC rankings and (b) in the top 40 for SAT scores. </p>

<p>1-6 (extremely selective super-schools, in the top 5 for both dept strengths and SATs)
Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, (CalTech, MIT – in a separate category, really)</p>

<p>7-16 (knowledge factories: schools with excellent research facilities and productive, world-class faculty who actually teach undergraduates)
Chicago, Columbia,Duke (5-10 for both average dept strengths and SATs)
Penn, Cornell, Brown, Johns Hopkins, WUSTL, Northwestern, NYU (10-25 for both average dept strengths and SATs)</p>

<p>17-23 (public versions of 7-16; but losing a few points for large class sizes, lower faculty salaries and SAT scores)
UC Berkeley, Michigan (1-10 dept strengths, 20-30 SATs)
UCLA, Virginia, Illinois, Wisconsin, U. North Carolina CH (10-20 dept strengths, 25-40 SATs)</p>

<p>24-25 (not top-25 as research universities, but excellent schools of arts & sciences with strong undergraduate programs)
Vanderbilt, Carnegie Mellon (~30 department strengths, ~30 SATs)</p>

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<p>Vanderbilt’s middle 50% for ACT scores of admitted students this year was 31-34. I think it’s a bit more selective than some of you are giving it credit for.</p>

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<p>Uhh - Penn, Cornell and JHU have significantly more highly rated depts than Duke and among the depts most popular w/ undergrads (Economics, Biology, Chemistry, English, History, Psychology, Sociology, etc.) - other schools like NU also do better than Duke.</p>

<p>Duke is a fine school, but let’s not make it what it is not.</p>

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<p>haha this thread just confirms the pre-existing top 25 universities.</p>

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<p>hey, should public universities be given a slight boost since they’re public? or should they be treated as private institutions when making these rankings?</p>

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<p>I’m surprised that no one is trying to further divide the schools into actual places – does everyone really agree that the top five are all essentially equal (just asking)?</p>

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<p>Read a little closer. You’ll notice I go to Brown and, if you go through my posts, you’ll see that I’m one of the few on this more central page that defends the Brown/Dartmouth model all the time.</p>

<p>I wasn’t saying it was undeserved, just that having such a different model/approach has made it hard to measure them in ways that are easily compared to other schools.</p>

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<p>Before crunching my numbers, I would not have expected Duke to come out quite as high as I found. Not for any particular reason, but that would have been my bias.</p>

<p>Here’s where I got my NRC data:
[NRC</a> Rankings in Each of 41 Areas](<a href=“http://www.stat.tamu.edu/~jnewton/nrc_rankings/nrc41indiv.html]NRC”>http://www.stat.tamu.edu/~jnewton/nrc_rankings/nrc41indiv.html)
Do you have a better set of data from somewhere?
Admittedly, these numbers are a little problematic because they are a few years old. But I don’t think quality is likely to change all that fast at most schools. And I think these rankings are better than broad peer assessments of universities as a whole (because how many “peers” really have insight into academic quality of the whole?)</p>

<p>I examined the rankings across the 41 departmental area, minus the engineering programs (I’m trying, really, to rank national liberal arts universities, though I’ve kept MIT and CalTech). I calculated the harmonic mean of the individual rankings. Here are the results I found (with the number indicating the mean departmental ranking, and the order within rows indicating fractional differences):</p>

<p>3: Harvard, MIT, Yale<br>
4: Berkeley, CalTech, Stanford
5: Chicago, Princeton
7: Columbia, Duke
8: Michigan, Cornell, UCLA, Wisconsin<br>
11: Penn<br>
13: Washington<br>
14: NYU
16: Hopkins
18: Illinois, Virginia<br>
19: Brown<br>
20: UNC
23: Northwestern<br>
24: Cal SB, WUSTL<br>
28: Vanderbilt<br>
32: Emory<br>
33: Carnegie Mellon
42: Rice<br>
46: Notre Dame<br>
49: Georgetown</p>

<p>Note on methods: If a school did not make the rankings for a department, I gave it the lowest score plus 1. This has the effect of penalizing schools most for not showing any strength in departments where many other schools do have ranked programs. The exception was MIT and CalTech (which I did not penalize for not appearing in most of the Humanities and Social Science rankings – this is why they really belong in their own categories).</p>

<p>When you factor in SAT scores, the University of Washington goes down, Georgetown and Notre Dame go up. This discrepancy may be an indicator of whether a school is overrated or underrated (how underlying academic quality compares to the caliber of students they attract). Or, it could be an indicator that the NRC rankings are not the best way to capture the qualities that attract students to these schools. If the latter is the case, the problem becomes: how does one objectively and systematically measure those qualities?</p>

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<p>Those rankings are something like 16 years old though, aren’t they?</p>

<p>I think that there could be pretty significant changes in a department if not a school in that amount of time.</p>

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<p>ModestMelody, it was perfectly clear to me where you came from. The points I want to make were: it’s good that we have a model/method (credits to tk) that can be applied to predict/calculate clear-cut results/rankings. In reality, our world is not perfect. No model is perfect. Each model/method has its own limitations so we go with tiered instead of splitting hair rankings. It’s also ok to use our best professional judgement when modeling results were not so good (Brown’s and Dartmouth’s rankings projections) as long as we can defend it with strong evident.</p>

<p>Folks, I believe you became experts before you commit/invest 4 years of your lives and money to your targeted ad/or dreamed universities. For this very reason, I value your opinions. There isn’t any pre-existing list. As I mentioned previously, this thread was originally created for the seniors of Class 2009. As shown on post #10 or #26, 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. Up to now, nobody disagreed that the top5 spots belong to HYPSM. </p>

<p>Please continue posting your new top6—25 in a tiered format.</p>

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<p>Yup. Please, anybody, show me where I can a more up-to-date list (but ideally, one that is at least as easy to access).</p>

<p>There may indeed be pretty significant changes in a department. Funding gets cut, professors die. But, when you aggregate over 30 or more departments, I doubt you’ll see that much change in a decade or even more (especially in larger, well-endowed schools).</p>

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<p>Another point:<br>
I’ve looked at other “indicators” too (besides NRC rankings). You can count faculty salaries, books in the library, Nobel Prizes, the age of the bricks in the buildings. You can experiment with different weightings and averaging methods. Chicago may indeed be a little underrated by USNWR, but not wildly so (not that there is too much room for it to move up). Georgetown and a few other places may be a over-rated. The great public universities can go up or come down by 10 points (or more) depending on your criteria.</p>

<p>But so far, I have not been able to come up with an objective approach that knocks HYPS very far off their pedestals. I’ve seen rankings that do, but I do not know how to replicate their findings from accessible data. It seems you have to start appealing to factors that are hard to model and quantify. Class size for example seems very important to me, but I am not clear about how to put numbers together in a good, principled way.</p>

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I highly doubted that Brown was the hottest Ivy, so I did the math. I calculated the ratio of applicants to available spots (using 2012 class sizes). As I suspected, Brown was not at the top.</p>

<h1>1 Yale- 19.7:1</h1>

<h1>2 Columbia- 18.2:1</h1>

<h1>3 Princeton- 17.7:1</h1>

<p>Stanford- 17.7:1</p>

<h1>5 Harvard- 17.6:1</h1>

<h1>6 Dartmouth- 16.6:1</h1>

<h1>7 WUStL- 16.4:1</h1>

<h1>8 Brown- 16.0:1</h1>

<h1>9 MIT- 14.7:1</h1>

<h1>10 Rice- 14.6:1</h1>

<h1>11 Duke- 13.8:1</h1>

<h1>12 Johns Hopkins- 13.1:1</h1>

<h1>13 Vanderbilt- 12.2:1</h1>

<h1>14 Emory- 12.0:1</h1>

<p>Northwestern- 12.0:1</p>

<h1>16 Cornell- 10.8:1</h1>

<h1>17 Chicago- 10.2:1</h1>

<h1>18 Penn- 9.38:1</h1>

<p>Brown- 16.0:1 (24988, 1558)
Columbia- 18.2:1 (24428, 1341)
Cornell- 10.8:1 (34381, 3183)
Dartmouth- 16.6:1 (18130, 1095)
Harvard- 17.6:1 (29112, 1658)
Penn- 9.38:1 (22939, 2445)
Princeton- 17.7:1 (21964, 1243)
Yale- 19.7:1 (25925, 1318)</p>

<p>Chicago- 10.2:1 (13600, 1328)
Duke- 13.8:1 (23750, 1716)
Emory- 12.0:1 (15611, 1299)
Johns Hopkins- 13.1:1 (16123, 1235)
MIT- 14.7:1 (15661, 1067)
Northwestern- 12.0:1 (25000, 2078)
Rice- 14.6:1 (10818, 742)
Stanford- 17.7:1 (30349, 1711)
Vanderbilt- 12.2:1 (19300, 1585)
WUStL- 16.4:1 (23000, 1400)</p>

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<p>I think the point was growth. Check those stats versus where we were in previous years and there is a clearly stronger upward trend, for various reasons.</p>

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<p>In Brown’s 2008-2009 Common Data Set, the numbers I see look a little different from the above. For the Class of 2012, they report 20,633 applicants for 1550 places. I’m reading from their “Quick Reference” link at:
[Office</a> of Institutional Research at Brown University](<a href=“Office of Institutional Research | Brown University”>Office of Institutional Research | Brown University)</p>

<p>That would make the ratio 13.3:1. Still pretty hot. </p>

<p>I did not check the other numbers.</p>

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TK, I used the 2013 application numbers and the 2012 matriculation figures. It’s a bit of a mish-mash, but it’s the best I could do since most yield figures are not yet out.</p>

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<p>This looks a credible ranking to me except that I would bump Rice up.</p>

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<p>It’s fine but Princeton and Stanford should be bumped up to the same level as HYM, and Brown should probably be bumped up a notch or two as well.</p>