<p>Why is Vandy ranked so high? What is it known for?</p>
<p>I mean, it doesn't have a business program for undergrad, the engineering school isn't really ranked very high... which leaves pre-med stuff I suppose? I think a lot of Vandy kids are pre-med?</p>
<p>I'm looking for the pros of Vandy from an academic standpoint.</p>
<p>Should international students learn pre-med ?</p>
<p>Every rankings uses different criteria to rank the schools. What all the top schools (including Vanderbilt) have are great resources, great faculty and a very high achieving student body (some would say over achievers). Regarding the school of engineering, with the exception of MIT and Cal Tech the other top 20 schools are similarly ranked (if memory serves me right, Harvard’s school of engineering is even lower in USNWR). Most of the top 20 are not “technical schools” but I would put both their resources and student body up against any higher ranked engineering program. Any school regardless of what it is ranked is what you make of it. What makes Vanderbilt (and other schools) so great is the amount of opportunities you will have and the reasources you will have available to take advantage of the opportunities.</p>
<p>What makes Harvard ranked so high? It doesn’t have a undergrad business school, its engineering is 100 times worse than Vanderbilt (exaggerating). What makes Caltech ranked so high? It doesn’t have a undergrad business school either, and it pretty much has a horrible humanities/social science (if you can even call it that) program (considering that they don’t even have half the major that a normal university would have). It’s not what schools a university has or doesn’t have, it’s the teaching. There is a reason why Amherst is the equivalent to Harvard (and that’s not lie) even though Amherst is 10 times smaller.</p>