When people say all top50 schools are the same i get mad

College Search & Selection
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<p>Their argument is that top 50 schools represent the top 0.5% of colleges in the United State. This I will not argue. This, however, does not put Harvard at the level of Michigan or UNC. Even though they are both top 0.5% of colleges, there is a great difference among the top 50. Penn is greater than Michigan. The facts are simple. </p>

<p>Think of it as wealth. Yes, if you make over 200,000 you are in the top 1%. Yet if you make 2billion you are also in the top 1%. There is a difference between 200,000 and 2billion. Four zeroes. Just because some schools are top 50 does not make them PEERS, in fact there are many pedestrian schools listed as "top50." If you look at it, it isn't difficult to get into some top 50 schools.</p>

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<p>you are right, no colleges are the same, each has its own character, personality and style. It is up to the applicant to determine which type of college fits them the best.</p>

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<p>I agree with you, partially. There is a significant difference between say #1 USNWR school and #50. But the context in which that came up was there there isn’t much difference say #3 and #8. (Heck, I’d even say there’s not much difference between #1 and #15 or #20.) As I gather from reading that particular post, the expression got exaggerated and that’s why the whole top 50 thing came up.</p>

<p>And by your post, I presume you put Harvard way above Michigan and UNC. That, I cannot agree with. I most definitely do not agree that Penn is greater than Michigan. May be on the undergraduate level, but as a university, Michigan in no way is inferior to Penn. This argument has been made countless times, so I will not go on unless others wish to…</p>

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<p>You’re basically arguing against the law of diminishing return. What does getting into a college in the top half of the top one percent of colleges get over the bottom half of the top one percent? Are teachers rated in the top half of one percent going to give you a decidedly better education than the bottom half of the top one percent? It’s nonsense.</p>

<p>Spend all of your time doing well at what you’re doing rather than a moment about who your peers may or not be.</p>

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<p>Harvard>Penn=Michigan>UNC. :-)</p>

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<p>The top 50 (and others besides) are basically the same, as far as in terms of quality of education offered.</p>

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<p>I recently posted to say that the differences among among schools ranked in the top fifty are greatly exagerated. Get as angry as you wish, but that is my experience as someone who has attended a “HYPSM” school, a university ranked in the teens by US News, and one ranked in the twenties by US News.</p>

<p>If you wish to draw an analogy to wealth, remember that there are also studies show that after certain (relatively low) threshholds are attained, additional income doesn’t lead to greater happiness. The billionaire, alas, appears to be no happier than guy who makes $200K.</p>

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<p>MGMT, I think you misunderstood the concept that was made about the top 50 universities. It was not that #1 is equal and identical to #50, but rather, that the difference in overall quality (not environment, specific characteristics or campus culture) between universities ranked within reasonable proximity of each other is not that significant. In other words, top 5 universities like Princeton or Yale are obviously better than #50 Universities such as Florida, PSU or Yeshiva. However, top 5 universities like MIT or Stanford are not that much better better than #15-25 schools like Brown, Cal or UVa and those, in turn, are not much better than #35-#45 universities like Boston College, UIUC, UCSD or UT-Austin.</p>

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<p>I knew even before looking that you weren’t out of high school yet. I graduated from an elite top 10 private university; some of my best friends went to a top public. Our educations were much the same, and in some ways I very much envied their experience.</p>

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<p>Nothing is ever obvious. Harvard students ranked their own school 26th in academic quality and quality of life among the 31 COFHE schools (prestige privates, both universities and liberal arts). If the rest of the top 50 were included in the survey, I expect they’d finish up significantly lower than that. </p>

<p>What H (YP) have that the others don’t are average family incomes among students not receiving financial aid above half a million, and assets in the millions.</p>

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<p>mini, can you paste the link to that COFHE study?</p>

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<p>This thread should be retitled, “I go to UPenn and I have an inferiority complex.”</p>

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<p>^LOL don’t we all? that’s why people constantly rank/defend their schools on here…it’s sad.</p>

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<p>MGMT,
I’m very much inclined to agree with you. There ARE differences in the colleges and the student bodies that attend the USNWR Top 50 National Universities. </p>

<p>The good news is that there are a lot of good students at all of these schools and that should not be overlooked. It is a fact that each of these colleges attracts some pretty fine students who would be competitive at almost any of the Top 50 schools. </p>

<p>But the differentiating news is that, at some schools, the highest student quality extends very deeply into the full undergraduate population. And I think that is at least part of your point. Right?</p>

<p>One way that I have measured this is to compare the achievement levels of each school’s student body on the SAT and the ACT exams. I looked at absolute barriers (700 on the CR and Math SAT and 30 on the ACT) and asked what percentage of the student body achieved at these levels. As the data attests, the usual suspects top the list and IMO, the order is a reasonable listing of student body quality at these colleges. </p>

<p>Rank , Total Score , School , Critical Reading SAT (25% weight) , Math SAT (25% weight) , ACT (50% weight)</p>

<p>1 , 94.5% , Caltech , 80% , 100% , 99%
2 , 80.0% , MIT , 59% , 87% , 87%
3 , 77.0% , Yale , 77% , 77% , 77%
4 , 75.5% , Princeton , 73% , 75% , 77%
5 , 74.5% , Wash U , 64% , 74% , 80%
6 , 72.5% , Columbia , 65% , 67% , 79%
7 , 69.8% , Northwestern , 61% , 66% , 76%
8 , 68.0% , Duke , 60% , 68% , 72%
9 , 66.5% , Stanford , 61% , 67% , 69%
9 , 66.0% , Dartmouth , 65% , 65% , 67%
11 , 67.3% , Tufts , 60% , 57% , 76%
12 , 65.5% , U Penn , 55% , 67% , 70%
12 , 68.8% , Notre Dame , 51% , 58% , 83%
14 , 63.3% , Brown , 61% , 66% , 63%
15 , 64.8% , Rice , 53% , 64% , 71%
16 , 59.8% , U Chicago , 64% , 59% , 58%
17 , 61.0% , Emory , 48% , 56% , 70%
18 , 60.0% , Vanderbilt , 46% , 54% , 70%
19 , 57.8% , Johns Hopkins , 42% , 59% , 65%
20 , 56.0% , Carnegie Mellon , 33% , 67% , 62%
21 , 53.5% , Georgetown , 57% , 50% , 54%
22 , 54.3% , Cornell , 42% , 59% , 58%
23 , 52.5% , Brandeis , 42% , 46% , 61%
24 , 48.8% , USC , 35% , 46% , 57%
25 , 42.3% , W&M , 45% , 32% , 46%
26 , 39.0% , UC Berkeley , 32% , 46% , 39%
27 , 39.3% , NYU , 32% , 35% , 45%
28 , 39.0% , U Michigan , 23% , 43% , 45%
29 , 38.8% , Case Western , 25% , 38% , 46%
30 , 36.0% , Boston Coll , 31% , 41% , 36%
31 , 35.0% , Georgia Tech , 21% , 45% , 37%
32 , 36.3% , U Rochester , 25% , 34% , 43%
33 , 33.8% , UCLA , 22% , 43% , 35%
34 , 32.5% , U Virginia , 29% , 36% , 33%
34 , 33.5% , U Illinois , 16% , 46% , 36%
36 , 31.5% , U North Carolina , 27% , 29% , 35%
37 , 26.3% , Rensselaer , 24% , 47% , 17%
38 , 29.0% , Wake Forest , 26% , 32% , 29%
38 , 31.3% , Tulane , 33% , 16% , 38%
40 , 28.3% , U Wisconsin , 17% , 32% , 32%
41 , 26.0% , Lehigh , 18% , 34% , 26%
42 , 22.5% , UCSD , 14% , 30% , 23%
42 , 23.0% , U Texas , 17% , 25% , 25%
44 , 20.8% , U Florida , 16% , 21% , 23%
44 , 21.8% , Yeshiva , 17% , 16% , 27%
46 , 17.5% , U Washington , 12% , 16% , 21%
47 , 15.0% , UC Santa Barbara , 11% , 13% , 18%
48 , 12.5% , UC Irvine , 8% , 17% , 13%
49 , 10.5% , Penn State , 7% , 14% , 11%
50 , 10.0% , UC Davis , 7% , 13% , 10%</p>

<p>na , na , Harvard , na , na , na</p>

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<p>They are all the same. The differences are essentially negligible. You should be able to succeed the same regardless.</p>

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<p>They are not all the same.</p>

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<p>MGMT made a great analogy in his earlier statement. “Think of it as wealth. Yes, if you make over 200,000 you are in the top 1%. Yet if you make 2billion you are also in the top 1%. There is a difference between 200,000 and 2billion.” </p>

<p>There is definitely a difference between the two. If you made, for example, $2 million, your lifestyle compared to someone who made $200 million would not be that different though. There simply isn’t that much stuff to buy. (Granted this argument looses water depending on where you live.) </p>

<p>The farther up the ladder you look the more it’s apparent though. If I went from making $20,000 a year to making $200,000 a year my life would be much more drastically changed than had I gone from making $20 million a year to $200 million a year. </p>

<p>MGMT is using a great analogy, I just think it’s disputes his point. </p>

<p>Harvard is clearly a better school than Tulane (my Ala Mater). You just won’t find the difference between the two that there is between Tulane and The University of New Orleans. Professors at TU and HU can teach at/around the same ‘clip’ without having to slow down for students to “catch up.” </p>

<p>Both schools will also have 99% of their professors in possession of their terminal degrees for their respective disciplines. Those professors went to the same schools too. Most Top LAC’s and Top 50 schools have the same percentage of their professors from the Ivy league and the UChicago’s of the world. </p>

<p>So while there are differences between Harvard and all the rest, there are too many variables that go into the college selection process to ever try to discern valuable insight from where someone went to school. As a quick for instance, I hate cold weather. I would have never attended Notre Dame, any Ivy, UChicago, or Wash U. At the time I was looking at colleges I prefered UVA, Tulane, Emory, UT Austin, Stanford, and Ga Tech for their weather alone. If I loved equestrian sports, that would have ruled out almost all of these. I chose TU for a few reasons including the full ride I received and the girl I was dating. Foolish to consider the girl perhaps, but not that rare. :slight_smile:
These were the days before Harvard and the like gave out money simply because your family made below a certain threshold. Luckily, even with this economy, there are far more scholarships and need based considerations on the part of universities.</p>

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<p>

[Student</a> life at Harvard lags peer schools, poll finds](<a href=“http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2005/03/29/student_life_at_harvard_lags_peer_schools_poll_finds?pg=full]Student”>http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2005/03/29/student_life_at_harvard_lags_peer_schools_poll_finds?pg=full)</p>

<p>It should be noted that however much one may criticize Harvard for its performance in the study, at least it made the results public. Virtually all of the other colleges keep the results tight to their chests (as a Johns Hopkins admissions officer on here admitted).</p>

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<p>@Hawkette…</p>

<p>You must be joking. A single standard like the SAT scores or ACT scores cannot be used to determine the quality of student body at any given school.</p>

<p>1) SAT scores do not (necessarily) reflect on the test-taker’s intelligence. There are too many kids “preparing” for the tests so that you cannot argue that these scores reflect on their natural intelligence. (And if anything, SAT scores are known to be most related with wealth.) SAT tutors can improve your score by hundreds of points. In addition, it does not take into account the very extremes like a kid who is brilliant at math but doesn’t read well. I know a friend from a foreign country who has won Olympiads who did horribly on the reading section of the SAT.</p>

<p>2) There are so much more to people than just their test-taking abilities. What about their friendliness? Intellectual curiosity? Interest in different culture? Sociability? Test scores do not show these. So stop saying that one school has “better” student body because they have higher mean SAT scores.</p>

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<p>the SATs are one of the most ridiculous and insufficient ways to regard and rank schools.
The academics at all 50 of the top schools will be relatively similar. OF COURSE, there will be better and worse, but in the grand scheme of things, they will teach just about EXACTLY THE SAME STUFF.</p>

<p>the ONLY differences come in :</p>

<p>prestige
student body
environment
specific strengths
opportunities
and campus/other shallow stuff.</p>

<p>I think this is how students like YOU are confused. It’s not like we are comparing high schools where inner city schools fail in comparison to rich suburban schools. In the top 50 schools, all of them are relatively wealthy and more than wealthy enough to provide good education to all of their students. The academics will be just about the same at all of them.</p>

<p>The difference is in what I listed above.</p>