<p>rankings are quirky things...especially US News rankings. Many of the schools ranked high by USN rank significantly lower in other systems. Its my opinion that a school that shows up at the top in NUMEROUS ranking systems is truly a good school.
Check these rankings out, and you'll see cornell is always around the top 10 or so. Keep in mind many of these rankings are international...and schools that appear at the top of them will be known internationally-not a bad thing. Also note (generally, when looking at rankings) that each system measures someting different in schools, and the methodology of rankings will vary with that system. YOu will also see in a few of these places that other ivies (brown and dartmouth most frequently) rank significantly lower than they do in USN. But remember, because rankings are the strange things they are, you can never use them to entirely rate the quality of a school.</p>
<p>Yeah, rankings are very odd. The job placement that you would get from Brown or Dartmouth would be better than a lot of the colleges ranked ahead of them.</p>
<p>its shocking people dont realize how great cornell is; the rigour, best engineering programs u can get, a liberal arts touch to the AS, i dont even want to talk about the ILR n Hotel Admin. Cornell students pass thru fire n have the social life as well. It's the best place u cud be, n honestly i think they shd be ranked 1st, n people shd stop saying Cornell is da back door to the ivy league, it ****es me off!</p>
<p>Rat:
revealed preference is the only study measuring prestige. it was done by academics (Harvard, BU, Wharton), not some USNews wanks. it's the best there is. why they did it is irrelevant. do they want to do it every year? of course not. the study applies only to 2004, as i explicity mentioned.</p>
<p>sillyrabbit:
for the university as a whole, Cornell <em>is</em> the easiest ivy to get into. the size is one of the reasons why. this is a fact. everyone knows this. it has the highest admission rate, so unless you believe the average applicant to Cornell is <em>much</em> stronger than the average applicant at the other ivies for some reason, you are simply in denial. </p>
<p>also Columbia has an entering class of about 2000 undergrads.<br>
Penn about 2400.<br>
Cornell had about 3200 undergrads enrolling last year. normally it's about 3100.</p>
<p>this is nowhere close to 3:1 as you suggest. you have no idea what you're talking about.</p>
<p>I am not sure where you got your "facts" from ihaveabunni. Your Columbia figure is significantly off. </p>
<p>According to the figures from the 2006 freshman class, Columbia had a freshman class of 1,400. I have no idea where you got the 2,000 figure from. But Columbia has fewer than 6,000 undergrads, so it is highly unlikely that they have more than 1,500 freshmen. Cornell had a freshman class of 3,100. So Cornell is definitely more than twice (2.2 times according to their official records) larger than Columbia.</p>
<p>And Revealed Preferences is a joke. It does not measure what professors at Harvard and PEnn think. All it measures what 16 and 17 year olds who are still poppings zits and think Applebees is the best restaurant in town think. The USNWR Peer Assessment score measures prestige. It is what highly educated leaders in the academic world( men and women with decades of experience at the highest levels of academe) think. And surprise, surprise, according to those very well informed people, H, P and Y are in a league of their own (4.9 PAs) and the remaining 5 Ivies all have PAs that range between 4.6 and 4.4. Also, the core campuses where top companies recruit talent is a measure of prestige. But revealed preference measures nothing of note.</p>
<p>you are wrong about USNWR. USNWR Peer Assessment score does not measure prestige. it attempts to measure quality of academic undergrad programs, and is probably not a bad measure of that. in fact, according to this study, what it ends up measuring is faculty scholarship and research: </p>
<p>i never claimed revealed preference measured any kind of quality. the point of revealed preference is to measure things <em>besides</em> quality. if you think prestige "is a joke," as you put it, that's fine. but the fact is: Cornell is the "least preferred" ivy league school to go to as an undergrad, but by no means the lowest quality one in terms of the scholarly activity of it's faculty and grad students.</p>
<p>I realize you are probably too young to remember, but the Peer Assessment score was once called "Academic Reputaton" by the USNWR. As far as I am concerned, reputation and prestige are interchangeable, especially when the evaluator in question is refined and knowledgeable. Among the ignorant and uneducated masses, the delta between prestige and actual academic quality is quite large. However, the more refined and educated the judge, the smaller the delta between quality and pretige becomes. The Peer Assessment score measures prestige in the purest sense of the word. Not as it is seen through the eyes of 16 year old kids (mean SAT scores and acceptance rates), but through the eyes of the men and women who earned PhDs at the top programs on Earth. Another measure of prestige can be derived from corporate recruitment activity on campus. Revealed preferences is a joke. The RP is merely a popularity contest and has little if anything to do with reality or prestige. Sorry, I guess I just don't think 16-17 year old high school students know enough about universities to pass judgement on such issues. </p>
<p>As for Columbia, I am pretty sure that the Schools of General Studies, Nursing aren't considered in the overall figures of the university. If they were, Columbia's acceptance rate would be 18%, not 13% as the USNWR and most other publications seem to indicate. For statistical purposes, Columbia only includes the numbers from the college and from the school of E&AS. Those two colleges enroll roughly 1,400 freshmen each year.</p>
<p>i do remember the old term, actually. "Academic Reputation" as you put it, seems to measure how smart professors and administrators think another school's professors are:
<a href="http://www.emory.edu/ACAD_EXCHANGE/2...nov/hicks.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.emory.edu/ACAD_EXCHANGE/2...nov/hicks.html</a>
not how how much employers are impressed when they look at your resume. not how much med school admissions boards are impressed by your bachelor's degree. and not how badly freshman want to go there. that last one is what revealed pref measures. to the best of my knowledge, the other ones have not been measured scientifically yet. revealed pref is all there is, so far.</p>
<p>one could roughly reproduce the USNWR peer ranking in an objective manner by tallying the number of peer-reviewed publications, nobel prizes, members of the national academy of sciences members, pulitzer prizes, research funding, etc. the times of London and chinese rankings are based almost entirely on this stuff. they roughly give the same results as the USNWR peer ranking. USNews is either just too lazy to do the research directly themselves, or they thought they were measuring something else -- probably the quality of the undergrad experience academically. USNews did not ask how prestigious schools were. they could have. in fact i think they should have, and then made the academic quality ranking by doing the research directly themselves like the chinese ranking. USNews asked for an objective rank of the undergrad programs. the prestige is in your eyes, because you are impressed by smart professors, or by the people USNews sent the survey to. would it be better for an applicant to listen to you instead of the revealed pref study? i think so. but this does not change the fact that the study measures preference independent of actual facts about the schools. or that applicant preference is what determines the size of the applicant pool, and ultimately the quality of the students who end up going there, the income of the school's alumni, etc. </p>
<p>nothing I said about Columbia is wrong. if you have a problem with the numbers, take it up with the Columbia webadmin. i will repeat my original contentions:</p>
<ol>
<li> sillyrabbit's number is about 4/3. not >3, as he claims.</li>
<li> Cornell is the easiest ivy to get into.</li>
<li> the ivy with the lowest prestige as measured by applicant preference is Cornell.</li>
<li> the quality of scholarship and research by Cornell's faculty and grad students is very high.</li>
</ol>
<p>bunni just give it up. even if some of what you r saying r facts, ur trying to prove it to people who go to Cornell...which to tell u the truth is actually pretty mean spirited. That's like going up to a little kid and telling them they aren't special and won't ever be a unique snowflake. Just understand that people like to think they are special (which everyone at Cornell definitely is) and trying to convince them they aren't is just...being a jerk...</p>
<p>Well I mean it's true. Everyone at Cornell is obviously amazing and by taking the time to prove through some random statements that Cornell students are a millimeter less amazing in kilometers of amazingness (lol) is just...oy...</p>
<p>I AM a unique snowflake no matter what you say bunni!!! :'(</p>