<p>Every post in this thread deserves the Lebowski retort: "Yeah, but like, that's just your opinion, man."</p>
<p>Hehe! Good one TourGuide. </p>
<p>Honestly, I think public universities should be ranked separately from private universities until there is enough accurate data to truly compare apples to apples. For now, people must read and interpret way too much on their own and come up with faulty and flawed assumptions and conclusions.</p>
<p>The OC89: "pretty much anyone who attends an elite private college (top 20 or so) would easily get into Michigan"...overgeneralization</p>
<p>haha....tell that to the hundreds of OOS students who were deferred EA and then waitlisted this year and then were accepted to top 20's in March and April.....(including Ivy league schools).....</p>
<p>To the OP: Agree with Alexandre....I don't think you can/should lump publics with privates because of the state mandates that are imposed on admissions in terms of mandatory % of instate students....there are categories which would match up (and would probably favor some of the publics mentioned on here), but unless USNWR eliminates other categories, it's like comparing apples and oranges.....</p>
<p>I'm gonna point out that Duke and other top privates have many, many more seminar classes than larger state schools.</p>
<p>Of course, I personally dislike small classes because they are harder to skip and are graded more subjectively, and instead focus on classes with the notes online or something, just in case I don't feel like class that day.</p>
<p>Michigan is a top school, in the real world you will realize it places better in traditional over-achieving professions (such as IB and MC) than many other schools, including Yale and Brown to name a few. Michigan just has a much stronger relationship with the top management of top companies. And its all about the people at the end of the day.</p>
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Igellar: I like how you bash the thread and then keep it going.
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Because if I don't post a response, no one else will either, right?
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Which undergraduate majors at Emory, ND, Vanderbilt, WUSTL are ranked higher than Berkeley?
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Where are undergraduate majors ranked?
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Notre Dame and Vandy yes...not Rice and Emory. </p>
<p>I would move Berkeley up, overtaking Duke.
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Honestly, how can you keep Rice in the top 20 but move Berkeley into the top 10? They're like complete opposites. </p>
<p>Overall, I'd say most of you are putting way too much emphasis on the school's PA. For undergraduate, common sense would dictate going to a school where you get plenty of personal attention and then for graduate school going for that brand name school.</p>
<p>This year alone, I have seen students get into Chicago, Duke, Northwestern, Notre Dame, Rice and even Stanford and they were turned down or waitlisted by Michigan. That is not the norm of course, but it is not uncommon either. In the case of most of those students, they all had Michigan as their number one choice with the exception of the one who was admitted into Stanford. Many are still holding out hope that they will come off of the waitlist.</p>
<p>Factors/weightings used in rankings that seem to hurt top (but with large student body) state schools include faculty resources (20% factors including class size, faculty/students ratio etc.), student selectivity (15%), financial resources (10%) and alumni giving rate (5%).</p>
<p>UC Berkeley has a respectable score in peer assessment (at 4.8 which should definitely put them on top 10 list in this respect) but has poor scores in selectivity and alumni giving rate. U Michigan is more or less in the same situation. Therefore, if rankings criteria were to be drastically changed, UC Berkeley might surge into top 10-15 list and U Michigan (with 4.5 score in PA which is about the top 10-12) should then be in top 15 list.</p>
<p>Which two are likely to be replaced by UC Berkeley and U Michigan? Any two out of vandy, notre dame, rice, emory and maybe GTown. This is not to downgrade these schools but rather upgrade UC Berkeley and U Michigan to where they deserve to be, considering the criteria to be drastically changed.</p>
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Where are undergraduate majors ranked?
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USNews ranks them for business and engineering disciplines.</p>
<p>I would say it is uncommon as Umich has a 50% acceptance rate with SAT avg that is way below that of those schools you mentioned.</p>
<p>Not this year. This year, Michigan received 30,000 applications and accepted 12,000 of those. At any rate, just go to the Waitlisted thread on the Michigan forum and you will see how many students were admitted into other peer institutions that are admitedly more selective.</p>
<p>"I would say it is uncommon as Umich has a 50% acceptance rate with SAT avg that is way below that of those schools you mentioned."</p>
<p>I'm pretty sure acceptance rates for Michigan are starting to get just below 40%. Not that it really matters that much. If you're smart and capable, you should have no problem rising to the top and finding peers that are equally if not more capable than you. Unless you're just afraid that some inferior human being with a lower SAT score will outperform you in college.</p>
<p>Also, somewhere recently Alexandre has pointed out that Michigan's ACT (and probably SAT) scores are skewed by the fact that we have colleges like Nursing and Kinesiology where other factors would be more important to admission than standardized test scores. If you just look at test scores for engineering, business and LSA (Literature, Science, and Arts) and at Michigan, which is generally all that the top private schools offer, there's not that much of a difference.</p>
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USNews ranks them for business and engineering disciplines.
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Well, yeah, but the person I was responding to made it seem like there were rankings for every undergraduate major under the sun.</p>
<p>other news ranked undergraduate majors. go look it up, it's everything under the sun.</p>
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I DON'T WANT to sit in huge lecture halls and never have small group discussion.
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That would happen if you never advanced pass your freshman year.</p>
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Which two are likely to be replaced by UC Berkeley and U Michigan? Any two out of vandy, notre dame, rice, emory and maybe GTown.
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Um... GTown is ranked at the same level as UVa, and just a hair (one point) ahead of Michigan and UCLA.</p>
<p>The major publics already are getting a huge advantage in the rankings from peer assessment. The biggest thing that should change would be to focus on where the top students attend. This would help the medium size schools like Tufts, William & Mary, Rice, Georgetown, Wake Forest, & Brandeis. All of these school are underrated by 8-10 spots if you focus primarily on quality of student body.</p>
<p>Schools like Michigan and Berkeley probably have many more "top students" than those schools listed. But because of their size, the quality of students has to start to trail off at some point, so they have a lower averages. However, if you're capable enough to be in the Honors College/upper echelon of these schools, your peers will be more "qualified" than those at the schools listed, and closer to schools around 5-15.</p>
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</p>
<p>And if you focus on faculty quality as opposed to student credentials, all these schools are overrated, as are WUSTL, Emery, Vanderbilt, and Notre Dame. You can get there several ways. USN's PA score is a crude proxy, or you can look at the "faculty quality" component of NRC rankings which is a pretty good indicator of how other faculty in the same field perceive faculty strength. By that measure, UC-Berkeley and Michigan soar above these other schools. My only interest in this is getting my D to the very best school possible given her academic interests, which are primarily in classics, literature, history, philosophy, and modern Romance languages. We'll look at some small LACs because she likes that environment, but if we're sending her to a major research university, I want her to go to the one with the top faculty in the fields that are her core interests, not the schools with the top median SAT scores. By that measure, Berkeley and Michigan beat Tufts, Brandeis, Rice, William & Mary, Georgetown, Wake Forest, WUSTL, Emory, Vandy, and Notre Dame hands down. Heck, Wisconsin-Madison beats almost all of these schools, and we can get in-state tuition there. Am I worried about her not being surrounded by other top students? No. If you do the math, there are actually more 1450+ SAT students at Berkeley than at any of these other schools, and more 1520+ SAT students at Michigan than at most of them; it's just that there are also more lower-SAT students in the much larger entering classes at Michigan and Berkeley than at the smaller private. Does that matter in a negative way? I doubt it. She'll find plenty of other smart kids to hang with, and especially if she pursues a major like classics or philosophy she'll quickly end up in small classes with some of the top faculty in the country in her department---just as I did as an undergrad philosophy major at Michigan.</p>
<p>To my mind, if school A is more selective than school B even though school B's faculty is stronger, it's school A that's overrated; it's being overvalued by applicants, allowing it to be highly selective, which pushes it up the USN rankings and draws an even larger applicant pool, in a self-reinforcing cycle. That's they very definition of "overrated" as far as I'm concerned.</p>
<p>Finally, there's someone without a naive HS mentality. I'm constantly amazed by some students on this forum. We might be born in the same year, but our views differ drastically.</p>
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To my mind, if school A is more selective than school B even though school B's faculty is stronger, it's school A that's overrated; it's being overvalued by applicants, allowing it to be highly selective, which pushes it up the USN rankings
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</p>
<p>just to clarify, selectivity only accounts for 15% of the ranking. Imo, most schools are ranked about right, except I think Georgetown, Berkeley, Michigan, and UVa are a bit underrated.</p>
<p>Patlees -- So if some schools are underrated, which are overrated?</p>