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I truly believe being stagnant in the rankings is due to the poor graduate school. The rankings are created by those in academics, and we judge a school by their alumni. Even though I am a proud alum, few people will know (or care) where I went to undergrad, what is important is where I got my doctorate. Academics are seeing scholars coming out of Duke's grad schools, so they have a high impression of Duke. However, they aren't seeing anyone coming out of ND's. Therefore, how are they going to compare the two?
That being said, the Princeton Review rankings are undergraduate rankings. I believe the peer assessment score is highly flawed for the reason I just outlined, it is judged by people who know more about graduate rankings than undergrad. I honestly would put ND's undergraduate education against any school in the nation, seriously, anyone. The reason why (and so few people understand this unless they have been outside of ND) is that at other schools the emphasis is on the graduate schools. Undergraduates are people you have to deal with, they don't get the attention and they surely don't get the opportunities they have at Notre Dame.
I had weekly meetings with a faculty advisor and published as an undergraduate at Notre Dame. Those things are very hard to do elsewhere. Heck, there are faculty members I know who don't meet with their grad students, let alone their undergrads. This isn't factored into the rankings, but I think it should be. You can go to Harvard, Yale, Duke, Stanford, anywhere with a grad school, you will always be second to the grad students. ND is one of the few places that that isn't the case (and, ironically, I think it is because the graduate programs aren't stellar). I heard my ND advisor say several times that she preferred to work with her undergrads because they were more serious students than her grad students. It isn't like that at other places.
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