Not quite old

There's an irony to your comment. The reason that public schools don't suffer is because these rankings don't take student quality into account, which is a glaring omission. Except for the faculty student ratio, most of the measures favor schools with large numbers of high quality professors regardless of how good the undergrads are.

If Cal Berkeley were to admit an extra 5,000 international students with SAT scores 150-200 points below their current minimum with no other redeeming characteristics, while hiring an extra 100 professors, most of whom were bad teachers and published almost nothing while a few of whom were superstars, their ranking might actually improve even if the student experience were to worsen.

forgiven

university of california at san francisico?

i've never even heard of that...

CalX

UCSF is a global leader in biotech and top med school.

Columbia2007: as weird as it may sound to you, Yale or Stanford are not bigger names than Berkeley overseas.

danielvojtash

Bump to the people pointing out that this is not a research quality rank but a research quality + "global-ness" rank.

If the ranking were of Graduate quality, they would be patently ridiculous. Penn and Duke wouldn't belong close to the top 20. Nor would Imperial. Yale would be overranked as well, though it is actually top-20 and probably top-10.

GRAD quality rank would be more like (excluding foreign places, which I'm not too familiar with):

Stanford/Harvard
Berkeley
Princeton
MIT
Michigan/Caltech
Yale/Chicago
Columbia/UCSF
UCLA/Cornell
(lots of state schools)
Duke/Penn

In defense of my school:

"Uh.. Uchicago is #2 in econ, not #1. Also that shouldn't make it great. Stern is #2 in finance and Georgetown's #1 for IR."

In what source? It's #1 in USNews and NRC.

"Takes more than one thing to make a good college."

Look at some grad rankings. I've never gone over USNews, but Chicago has a better average rank than Yale and a way better average rank than Columbia in NRC (I know it's outdated until next December). It's also one of the handful of schools that's top ten in just about everything (including in the up-to-date USNews). Claiming that Chicago is a one-subject school is ridiculous.

pateta00

"Columbia2007: as weird as it may sound to you, Yale or Stanford are not bigger names than Berkeley overseas."You wrong..Stanford has much much more prstige abroad(south america , europe, asia) then berkeley, yale maybe no

UofCman

sternman87, of course one department doesn't make a school great. That's why Chicago keeps its physics, biology, sociology, law, business, political science and public policy departments around. Oh yeah, and then there's that whole humanities division. You know, the philosophy and languages departments. And there's that Chicago school of literary criticism that never seems to go away.

Compared to some of its other departments, Chicago's economics departments is downright mediocre....

danielvojtash

Actually, our highest concentration of non-top programs is in the humanities.

UofCman

^ (before edit) I would argue that the sciences are, but again the term "weakest area" doesn't mean too much in this context. Chicago is ranked #6 for its overall English program, just below Stanford and Princeton and tied with Cornell (which also has an amazing English department). Its ranked #4 in History with Harvard and Stanford. And then there's that whole Great Books thing. I don't have the numbers, but Chicago is also very strong in foreign languages and fairly strong in philosophy.

danielvojtash

We're 18 in philosophy, which is extremely weak in comparison to the majority of our program.

svalbardlutefisk

The rankings you provide, particularly your assessment of Yale are highly biased toward strength in the sciences. Yale is much stronger than you suggest when you consider graduate programs in the humanities and social sciences as well, where it is consistently one of the top schools in the country. Harvard and Stanford are still better overall with Berkeley and MIT (strong in areas like Econ as well as sciences) possibly better too, but to claim that Michigan or Caltech (only strong in a sciences, and not even all sciencs) is better or that there is any significant difference in quality between Princeton and Yale is not really accurate.

thethoughtprocess

I don't think undergraduate programs should be specifically ranked ever...I doubt a ranking for political science and english really matters when talking about a group of elite schools (ie saying Chicago undergrads are 6th in one field while Brown undergrads are just 10th in the field)...

I think the main thing that sets most undergraduate fields apart are how competetive the students are and what sort of grad schools and professional schools they go to. I know that there is no pre-med or pre-law major, but I'd think seeing how people get admitted to top med programs reflects the quality of their science program/students, as with law reflecting on polisci/history and business school reflecting on econ/business skills. Looking at success in sending kids to a topprofessional school is one of the better ways to say "Hey, if you are looking for a strong polisci program look at this school," especially compared to undergrad rankings which are basically based off of the schools graduate school.

Seeing and rating feeding into top professional schools is a real measure of undergrads thriving, whereas a ranking which looks and adds major weight to categories such as major grants and publishing doesn't show how useful the program is for undergrads, just the strength of the professors and grad students (and very rarely are undergrads involved in these).

With that, I think the best way to say UChicago as being singular in its strengths is to see if students from their only go onto to succeed in businesses and go on to top business schools (one of many measures, yes). Another would be how many firms hiring undergrads in financial fields, etc. compared to admissions to top med schools or law schools. I'm sure you'll find Chicago grads going onto all sorts of elite law schools and med schools (I'd assume its students often go onto its own top law and med programs). The students are among the nation's most competetive based on SATs and class strength. Thus, I'd say calling Chicago a school with only one major strength is ridiculous - simly be looking at the success of its undergrads and the strength of the undergrad class, I wouldn't hesitate to recomend Chicago as a strong choice in any field (at least based on professional school fields).

columbia2007

Yes, I still dispute this underrating of Yale. Berkeley certainly enjoys a great reputation in East Asia, though it would be surprising to me if it trumped Stanford there. In the rest of the world, Yale would almost certainly be more highly regarded. In Europe people seem very familiar with the Ivy League, with the possible exceptions of Penn (name confusion) and to a lesser extent Cornell.

danielvojtash

-Caltech is probably overranked, you're right.
-Michigan and Berkeley certainly have stronger grad schools than Yale. I can't see how one would begin to argue with this.
-MIT isn't as narrowly focused as Caltech. It's grad school is clearly better than Yale's. Not by a huge amount, but there's not really any uncertainty.
-Same goes for Princeton, actually.
-Chicago and Yale have grad programs of very nearly identical strength but different focuses

How is Yale underranked? It's very good in the humanities and good in some of the social sciences. The schools above it have a wider range of top programs. I don't see how I'm biased towards the sciences here.

Remember, i'm talking only about grad programs. Yale fully deserves its undergrad ranking. At the grad level, it's one of the top few schools, but it doesn't have the same power it does on the undergrad level. Any survey of grad programs will demonstrate this. Knocking down Caltech, Yale winds up co-ranking 7th in the country. The only other overall grad ranking I'm aware of puts Yale in 8th.

svalbardlutefisk

I'm not quite sure where you have determined that Michigan and Berkeley should be mentioned together when discussing graduate program quality: Berkeley is far better and recognized as such by almost all rankings. The most prominent rankings of universities by research quality (which is essentially the same as graduate program quality, since graduate school essentially consists of working with a professor in your field of interest) are the two cited by Newsweek in the article on which this thread is based. Both of them rate Michigan lower than Yale (Michigan is 21st in the Shanghai rating while Yale is 11th, while Michigan is 36th in the Times ranking and Yale is 7th). The Shanghai rating is based mostly on research and quality of faculty (80%) while the Times is based mostly on research (in the form of citations: 20%) and peer review (40%). With the Shanghai rating biased toward science (as it counts nobel prizes, most of which are in the sciences and articles in the journals Nature and Science as important components in its score) the fact that it rates Yale, a university stronger in the humanities than the sciences, higher than Michigan implies that Yale is probably better overall.
I will agree that I should have described MIT and Berkeley as "better" rather than "possibly" better since as you say (and as I pointed out myself) MIT is somewhat well-rounded and of course Berkeley is a top graduate school.
Finally, in regards to Princeton, the Shanghai rating puts it higher than Yale by 3 spots, but within US universities, it is only one spot higher. However, since that rating is biased towards the sciences, we should look at individual components that are equal across disciplines. I propose (from Shanghai's rating) the highly cited researcher "HiCi" category and the category that looks at articles across all disciplines "Sci." Princeton and Yale are about the same in "HiCi" (59.6 vs 59.1) while Yale is higher in "Sci" (63 vs 47.3). Then from the Times rankings, the peer review and citations/faculty scores seem appropriate as measures of overall quality. In citations/faculty, Yale is behind(19 points to 31), while in peer review the two universities are about the same (Yale is ahead 71 to 69). Thus, I would argue that overall, Yale and Princeton are roughly equivalent in graduate quality, as Yale leads significantly in one category, Princeton in another, with both tied in the final two.

futurenyustudent

WHAT?!?!?!?!