<p>In MN mostly, my own cohort plus my parents friends in their 40s/50s. I shouldn’t exaggerate – they did seem to know that it was a big college in the South-East, and that it was known for basketball. But my admission there didn’t gather many congratulations. But when I got into Harvard, people wouldn’t stop talking about it.</p>
<p>Undergrads from MIT, Stanford, Chicago Harvard, etc. will have things in common-they are smart, had good scores and wanted to go to a private college and wanted to try to distinguish themselves in a way that they thought their private would provide (along with wanting to be around like minded peers and alumni and possibly get a bump in the prestige factor). There are many kids at many schools with comparable scores and accomplishments that were happy to go to their state schools or more local privates. </p>
<p>Please don’t ad hominem me. But you shouldn’t buy too much into the propaganda about how little Oxbridge pays – people get confused by the junior research positions, but for fellows (roughly equivalent to an American professor), the total compensation (including free housing) might touch £100k, which is not too far off what one would get at a US research uni. Oxbridge professors (equivalent to US endowed chair holders) often earn much much more.</p>
<p>@prezbucky There is no disputing the fact that Chicago is an academic powerhouse! However, in my opinion, research is not the only factor that should be considered while assessing the relative quality of institutions. I feel like Chicago’s liberal arts college lags behind its peers on certain fronts (like employment opportunities and professional school placement). The objective data would seem to corroborate this view. </p>
<p>In contrast, Stanford is a virtually flawless educational institution. Few schools in the world can match its comprehensive excellence.</p>
<p>I’m not trying to disparage Chicago by any means. I applied and was admitted to the school in 2011. It was one of my top choices. I just happen to hold Stanford in exceptionally high esteem! </p>
<p>It’s more a question of what distinctions matter. General rankings/tiers are good for bragging rights and not much else. In terms of IB and MBB consulting opportunities, Stanford does better, but UChicago can get you there as well. In economics and the basic sciences, UChicago is most certainly on par with Stanford (if not better). In terms of b-school and law school, Stanford is better, but not by much. In engineering, Chicago isn’t even competing with Stanford (and in terms of the Silicon Valley network, Chicago trails far behind). But say you’re a kid looking to major in economics & you know you want to get on Wall Street and you got in to both with the cost being the same. Pick Stanford over Chicago? Sure. But say Chicago gives you $15K a year more. In that case, I think Chicago is the smarter choice as Chicago can get you there just as well. Because in the end, the person matters more than the school. Like I said, I know Chicago grads that would blow away the MIT folks I know, and while I know some really high-achieving Stanford grads, some aren’t so spectacular and one kid had been unemployed for 2 years when I saw him last.</p>
<p>BTW, I’ll have to look again, but I don’t believe Duke outperforms Chicago (or if they do, not by much) by the criteria I consider (expect a post soon).</p>
<p>“But you shouldn’t buy too much into the propaganda about how little Oxbridge pays – people get confused by the junior research positions, but for fellows (roughly equivalent to an American professor), the total compensation (including free housing) might touch £100k, which is not too far off what one would get at a US research uni.”</p>
<p>That’s about what the top universities in the US pay their non-tenured assistant professors who are just starting out in STEM and the social sciences. The folks who get tenure would earn more.</p>
<p>BTW, it doesn’t surprise me much that folks of the older generation outside the south don’t think of Duke as elite academically. They really only started rising in the past few decades. However, getting congratulated for Harvard doesn’t mean people outside CC think only HYPSM are elite. I’m curious: What was the reaction of the older folks in MN to acceptances to Northwestern and Chicago (and UMich)? </p>
<p>Right, that’s what I meant by an ‘American professor’. In the humanities at least, American salaries don’t get all that much higher than that. It would be pretty unusual to break the $200k barrier.</p>
<p>So you’re saying that Oxbridge is only uncompetitive for STE(if not M) and social sciences.
Hard to agree with that and still state that they’re in the top top tier in the English-speaking world.</p>
<p>So what was the reaction of the older folks in MN to acceptances to Northwestern and Chicago (and UMich)?</p>
<p>I didn’t agree to that. I pointed out that Cambridge is arguably the top math department in the world. As for STE… I don’t know. Probably they could stand to pay a bit more, but it doesn’t really seem to be affecting research output. Almost every global ranking seems to put Oxbridge in the top 10. Nobody denies that stars can earn more in the US, but money isn’t everything. There may come a time when more money is needed.</p>
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<p>Don’t know personally – didn’t apply to any of them. But certainly everybody had at least heard of the schools. It was seen as really good news, but not ‘world-beating’.</p>
<p>@PurpleTitan I don’t want to make this a Duke vs Chicago thread but here are some links that you should peruse. I’m sure I missed some rankings but overall it does seem like Duke is better at placing students at top graduate schools and that Duke alums give more generously to their alma mater. I will refrain from commenting on this particular issue again because I feel like it is a sensitive one that is liable to cause tensions to flare. I also wanted to add this caveat: They are both phenomenal schools! You can’t go wrong with either of them. Please don’t take this post the wrong way!</p>
<p>@hidall1: Not <em>that</em> sensitive. Note, however, that most of the rankings you listed correlate with each other, as they’re mostly pre-professional/money-focused rankings.</p>
<p>I’m in the process of putting together rankings myself from 4 components. 2 of them are pre-professional and 2 are academic. One of them is actually the WSJ top feeder list. The other 3 are the “American Leaders” (business and government leaders with some arts thrown in), “Student Awards”, and “PhDs” sub-categories from the Forbes ranking.
Chicago has Duke beat in those 3 categories: 15th vs. 22nd, 14th vs. 27th, 10th. vs. 30th.</p>
<p>BTW, everybody seems to be ignoring the LACs for some reason. If you did the rankings based off of alumni outcomes like I did, the LACs do <em>really</em> well (and Vanderbilt drops in to a black hole).</p>
<p>Swarthmore and Amherst are just as good as HYPSMCaltech (actually, Swarthmore and MIT lead HYPSCaltech by a nose and Amherst is a nose behind).</p>
<p>Williams is next along with Chicago, Cornell, Dartmouth, & Duke.</p>
<p>13 of the next 16 are LACs along with Columbia, Brown, and Northwestern in that order.</p>
<p>UPenn is surprisingly quite a bit behind the rest of the Ivies (you go through more LACs, Army, Navy, as well as Cal & JHU before you come across UPenn tied with UMich & Georgetown (and New College of Florida!)</p>
<p>That’s a whole interesting category of its own, schools ranked by the top combination of elite athletics and academics.</p>
<p>It’s a small list. Off the top of my head, among the top ten academic schools, Stanford, Michigan, and Duke are the elite scholar/athlete schools. What counts in college athletics, to be honest, is football and basketball. Among these three Michigan probably has the best combination of those two sports, Stanford next, and Duke last–although it’s the best in basketball. I think Berkeley is on the bubble sports wise.</p>
<p>If you open this list to non-top ten schools you get Notre Dame, Texas, maybe Wisconsin, Ohio State. I’m sure I’m missing some.</p>
<p>There’s different ways to do this. If you widened the net to look at only basketball you’d get Georgetown and whichever Ivy is in March Madness.</p>
<p>From a hockey player’s point of view, Yale, recent NCAA national championship, number 1.</p>
<p>Also, I just realized something rather interesting. It seems like the best Chicago students and faculty members outperform the best Duke students and faculty members, but Duke students and faculty members are marginally superior to their Chicago counterparts on average. I’ve reached this conclusion by looking at the number of major awards won by faculty members (Chicago soundly beats Duke in this category) and the productivity of faculty members on average (Duke is markedly superior in this category). You can extend the argument to students as well but it is slightly less convincing. Placements at top graduate schools and graduate incomes are good indicators of the overall quality of the student body. This is where Duke performs better. Major awards like the Rhodes are only awarded to a tiny fraction of each graduating class. You assert that Chicago performs better in this category and I will take your word for it at the moment. </p>
<p>UChicago traditionally has been more eclectic (and had a relatively high admit rate) compared to peers. “Self-selecting” is the word people used often to describe it. Kids who loved the fit would choose Chicago over peers (or even HYPS). So would kids who did not get in to peers. So your finding would not be surprising.</p>
<p>Also, if by “grad schools”, you mean professional schools, yes, Duke seems to do better. It’s more pre-professional than the U of C. UChicago is more academic and does better at producing PhDs.</p>
<p>@Latichever: Well, if you’re going to include UMich football, you should include Northwestern as well (though not Vandy, which has seemed to have engaged in a rankings push by focusing mainly on high test scores, as they’re not in the top 50 of the alumni results categories that I looked at). In football, until about a few years ago, Northwestern was roughly equal to Stanford (in the past couple decades).</p>
<p>Note that PayScale does not account for Chicago BA grads with PhDs. Given that a relatively high proportion of Chicago graduates have gone on to get PhDs, the PayScale report would skew towards schools that have a strong “business” culture.</p>
<p>However, overall ARWU rankings seems weighted towards basic science research while I daresay that more kids interested in STEM in the US are interested in engineering & CS than in basic science.</p>