hawkette

It’s always fun to read how others rank colleges, but I am often left scratching my head at some of the choices and I wonder what the individual methodology was for some of these. For my own list, I’m likewise sure that there are a few rankings, up and down, that will startle (some were even surprises to me!).

I am most interested in which colleges provide the best undergraduate experience for their students, in and out of the classroom. For instance, I believe that, for undergraduate students, the classroom teaching experience is far more important than the research reputation of a school. I also think what happens outside of the classroom can be very important in measuring the full undergraduate experience.

I based my rankings on a combination of factors:

40% USNWR Ranking
30% USNWR Classroom Teaching Ranking
25% Social Life ranking drawn from input on previous CC threads
5% Athletic Life ranking as measured by 2007 Directors Cup standings

Here are the scores for each UNDERGRADUATE college and their ranks:

Rank, Score, College

1 , 3.7 , Stanford
2 , 6.85 , Duke
3 , 7.55 , Princeton
4 , 12.25 , Yale
5 , 12.65 , Dartmouth
6 , 12.65 , Notre Dame
7 , 12.95 , Brown
8 , 13.35 , Harvard
9 , 13.75 , Northwestern
10 , 14.1 , Rice
11 , 14.15 , U Penn
12 , 14.25 , Vanderbilt
13 , 14.4 , U Virginia
14 , 17.6 , UC Berkeley
15 , 17.7 , U Chicago
16 , 17.8 , Cornell
17 , 18.2 , Caltech
18 , 18.5 , Columbia
19 , 18.6 , U North Carolina
20 , 18.85 , UCLA
21 , 18.95 , U Michigan
22 , 19.8 , USC
23 , 20.4 , Wake Forest
24 , 20.65 , Wash U
25 , 20.7 , Emory
26 , 20.8 , MIT
27 , 22.95 , Georgetown
28 , 22.95 , Boston Coll
29 , 23.1 , Johns Hopkins
30 , 24.75 , U Wisconsin

evil_asian_dictator

Hey beefs,

Why isn't Duke on your top 20?

beefs

Oh my bad, seriously that wasn't supposed to happen.

1. Princeton
2. Harvard
3. Stanford
4. Chicago
5. Yale
6. MIT
7. Columbia
7. Duke
8. Caltech
9. Dartmouth
10. Cornell
11. Penn
12. Brown
13. Hopkins
14. Berkeley
15. Northwestern
16. Michigan
17. Georgetown
18. UVA
19. Rice
20.Vanderbilt

chicagoboy12

Chicago does not get a lot of love in this thread. Ive seen it ranked tops for undergrad experience. It was ranked #1 for best undergrad experience by Princeton Review, and has smaller class sizes than basically every undergrad college at a research university.

patlees88

For undergrad:

1 Harvard
2 Yale
3 Princeton
4 Stanford
5 MIT
6 CalTech
7 Columbia
8 Penn
9 Amherst
10 Cornell
11 Brown
12 UC Berkeley
13 Duke
14 Dartmouth
15 U of Chicago
16 Johns Hopkins
17 Northwestern
18 Georgetown
19 U of Michigan
20 U of Virginia
21 UCLA
22 Notre Dame
23 Rice
24 Emory
25 Vanderbilt

hawkette

I have received a pm request for the numbers behind the USNWR Classroom Teaching Survey and thought it might be best to share them with the full forum.

This survey was done in the mid-90s and it is possible that it may not be representative of what is actually taking place today. Still, I think that the results may speak to a campus's academic culture and the importance of teaching excellence. As a prospective student, I would consider these rankings in combination with the Faculty Resources rankings provided by USNWR as these will provide good clues about what type of classroom experience an undergraduate is likely to encounter.

USNWR did separate rankings for national universities and for LACs. Here are both:

NATIONAL UNIVERSITIES
1 Dartmouth
2 Brown
3 W&M
4 Rice
5 Princeton
6 Stanford
7 Duke
8 Miami U (OH)
9 Notre Dame
10 Yale
11 U Virginia
12 U Chicago
13 Emory
13 UC Santa Cruz
15 Vanderbilt
16 Boston College
17 Harvard
18 Northwestern
19 Caltech
20 Wake Forest
20 U North Carolina
22 BYU
22 Wash U
24 Georgetown
24 Tufts

For all of the colleges that did not make the list, I assigned a grade of 25, but it is quite possible that it could have been much worse.

LACs
1 Carleton
2 Swarthmore
3 Williams
4 Grinnell
5 Amherst
6 Earlham
7 Haverford
8 St. John's
9 Colorado College
10 Davidson
11 Oberlin
12 Pomona
12 Wellesley
14 Bowdoin
15 St. Olaf
16 Bryn Mawr
16 Macalester
18 Bates
18 Middlebury
18 Reed
21 Kenyon
21 Spelman
23 Smith
24 Sewanee
25 Centre

tokenadult

A much more subjective list, attributable to, um, a friend:

Harvard
MIT
Princeton
Stanford
Chicago
Berkeley
Caltech
Columbia
Harvey Mudd
Michigan
UCLA
Minnesota

This is BIG-TIME debatable, and I'm not going to take it to 25 entries.

vc08

token: WOW, I'm shocked that Berkeley isn't in there (in your original post, that is....if the latest one is edited, disregard this Q). Any reasoning behind that? I realize it's grad schools are very prestigious, but seriously, I know of many, many people who've turned down Stanford/CalTech/MIT undergrad to go there. Doesn't really make sense.

thejoker:
Says who? Other than your ambitious little self? ^_^ Many ranking systems list Berkeley as one of the top-10 institutions in the WORLD. Wisconsin is tied with Harvard for producing the most CEOs of Fortune-500 companies (and for half the cost of tuition, too). Private doesn't necessarily mean better. It can, and it can't.

xiggi

Hawkette, I am afraid that looking at a list that places Duke ahead of Princeton or Harvard, and Notre Dame or ... Berkeley ahead of Columbia makes me long for the much maligned peer assessment.

If this list is an answer to a question, it must one hell of a screwy question. Just to make sure, we are talking about quality of education at the undergraduate level, aren't we?

thejoker0909

vc. with regards to ug education, private does not always mean better, but in the case of ND vs. UCLA or ND vs. Wisc, it certainly does. those two schools pride themselves on research, which is more important for grad school. Meanwhile for ug, those two publics have massive class sizes, lots of TA's, teachers focused more on research, lack of small, seminar classes, lack of personal avising and attention, which is so critical at the ug level.

The use of the # of Ceo's coming from a school is a null-set argument. Just because a student from a school became a Ceo does not mean it was b/c of that school. The list you are referring to is with numbers of 4, 5, or 6 ceo's: i.e., its not very accurate and very subject to chance.

holmespoint

Interesting that Harvey Mudd doesn't appear on anyones list? Reasons?

smartalic34

is wesleyan in the unfortunate position of being "between" LACs and Nat'l Unis?

jazzymom

Hawkette: I get your list, though I honestly don't see a 5-percent weight given to the quality of athletic hoopla (my term). But so be it. It's as good a list as any of the other totally subjective and personally biased lists posted.

Correction. It's better than, not as good as, the oddly skewed revealed preference survey list. (The survey must have included quite a few girls' prep schools to put Wellesley at #11). BYU is in the "top 25" but not Chicago? As someone else once said about the bias inherent in that survey: GIGO.

Is this exercise about the quality of UG education? Nah. It's one more version of the design-your-own ranking as has been done a zillion times before on CC. One person's impressions and opinions are as good as anyone else's.

Mondo

After this, I have to continue studying for my math final.

Here's how I would rank them, in terms of quality of undergraduate education/selectivity/student body quality.

National Universities
1-Harvard
2-Princeton
3-Yale
4-Caltech
5-MIT
6-Dartmouth
7-Duke
8-Stanford
9-Columbia
9-Rice
11-WashU
12-Brown
13-UPenn
14-UChicago
15-Northwestern
16-Notre Dame
17-Georgetown
17-Carnegie Mellon
19-Johns Hopkins
20-Cornell
21-Tufts
22-Emory
23-Vanderbilt

Dartmouth & Duke, I think, have slightly stronger undergrad programs than Stanford or Columbia. Rice is underrated and easily beats many of the Ivies- I think it is Top Ten material.

I realize that my list doesn't have any of the top publics but I think in terms of undergrad education alone, privates have an advantage over publics. For similar reasons, this is why Cornell is fairly low on my list- strong graduate programs, not as strong undergraduate programs.

I, for one, would be thrilled to go to Berkeley, UVA, or Michigan for law school.

tokenadult

Referring to the revealed preferences rankings top 25, it was written:

I see your profile says "Location: SoCal," which makes clear that a lot of people you know get in-state tuition rates at Berkeley. You can see in a post above that I have friends who have advised me that Berkeley is a great place for undergraduate study of certain subjects, but as an out-of-stater I can think of a LOT of colleges that would be sufficiently less expensive than Berkeley's usual price for out-of-state students that students admitted to other highly desired colleges might prefer them to Berkeley. The California view of the world is not the only view out there, and the revealed preferences working paper makes clear that there are regional differences in which colleges are preferred to which other colleges, which in some cases appear to be related to issues of price.