Saxonthebeach6

From a west coast kid's persepctive:

1-Harvard
2-Princeton
3-Stanford
4-Yale
5-MIT
6-Caltech
7-Dartmouth
8-Duke
9-Columbia
10-Berkeley
11-UChicago
12-UPenn
13-Cornell
14-Johns Hopkins
15-Michigan
16-UVa
17-UCLA
18-Brown
19-Rice
20-WUTSL
21-Northwestern
22-Notre Dame
23-Emory
24-UCSD
25-Georgetown

vc08

joker:
Depends on what major. Berkeley has the #3 undergrad engineering program in the country. Haas undergrad is EASILY more renowned that ND Mendoza. Same with Michigan Ross. In fact, 90% of Michigan's undergrad programs were ranked among the top-20 in the country.

Research is not "much more important for grad school" if you're a pre-med, engineering, chem, bio, biochem, or neuroscience major. Research is what gets you INTO grad school (at least the good ones).

Now, if you're an English major, that might be a different story. Then again, Berkeley also has one of the top-5 ranked undergrad English depts. in the country.

Same goes for ND vs UCLA. UCLA has BY FAR one of the best premed and psych programs in the country for undergrads.

I take it you don't have much experience with large schools; I applied to 11 universities including ND and BC, and I can tell you that I received a MUCH more personal experience with the Michigan and Wisconsin advisers, faculty and students than I did with ND or BC. Both of those schools had regional advisers regularly call me several times, inquiring about my senior year; at Michigan, I met with 2 advisers in one day, and met both a Stats and Geology professor in the same hour.

UCLA has fiat lux and cluster classes, which allow undergrads to get credits/units for small seminars ranging on things from '70s music culture to the Civil Rights Movement. With their honors program, you get special advisers and priority scheduling; same with the alumni scholars club.

As for why ND isn't ranked higher on people's list: perhaps their famously political approach to admissions made people question whether they were really attracting the best students possible; Maybe they simply felt the caliber of research/intellectual promise was higher at UCLA and other schools (eg Michigan) because of this. Or, perhaps the religious aspect has too much of a presence in some people's minds, eliminating potentially useful resources/research because of it (and I'm Catholic, so don't even start with the "it's not a bad thing" thing. For some people, it is). I'm sure many, many will disagree, and that's fine. ND is an amazing school. But it's not the only amazing school.

SO, in the future I suggest you don't make assumptions about specific universities unless you know them to be absolutely true.


Token: Berkeley OOS fees are virtually equal to many of the private universities you listed (many of which, from personal experience, don't give great financial aid). In fact, a majority of the schools you mentioned are MORE expensive than Berkeley OOS! A student paying 50k per year for Harvard could most certainly pay 44k per year to attend Berkeley, if they so choose (and, this is assuming they aren't under Harvard's tuition-cap plan). In fact, Georgetown is ~8-10k per year more than Berkeley OOS! But, you are entitled to your opinions, however...interesting they may be...and I will respect them!

Haha no kidding.

vc08

whoa, sorry for the long post, just needed to clear some things up!

thejoker0909

interesting post vc08. thanks for being respectful. I respect your opinions too. But when I visited umich, I was taken to a bunch of lecture halls. No one really cared about me visiting there, evident by the lack of help that I received and the lack of literature I received post-acceptance. Meanwhile, at ND, numerous advisors just walked up to me and began talking to me. numerous random students and teachers all did the same. I sat in on a class: 20 students w/ a professor actively questioning the students. I could not get enough literature about how much advising they do, career center, etc. Each week, something else came in the mail from ND be it a course guide or a hand-written christmas card. On another class that I sat in on, the prof was asking students about when they would like to eat dinner at her house. At umich, all that happened was one lofty prof kept lecturing while TA's walked around the room. Umich sent me no literature about what advising programs they have, if they have any.

Private schools provide a much more personal experience, and, at the top privates, one can do research comparable at the ug. level to what one would be able to do at a top public. The rankings of specific programs is not as important as a ug. b/c as a ug. one is taking lots of general classes, not really getting into the specificity that separates a good grad school from a bad one.

ilovebagels

1. Penn

2-25. some others...

RacinReaver

Man, the more technical oriented schools are getting beaten up in these rankings. I don't think I could have even listed off 25 schools I had been contemplating applying to way back when I was doing my undergrad apps.

Alexandre

I always thought that ranking is impossible. Instead, I like to group universities. Here's how I would group universities according to undergraduate education. I am only going to focus on tier I universities. I am not going to include LACs:

GROUP I:
Havard University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Princeton University
Stanford University
Yale University

GROUP II:
Brown University
California Institute of Technology
Columbia University
Cornell University
Dartmouth College
Duke University
Johns Hopkins University
Northwestern University
University of California-Berkeley
University of Chicago
University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
University of Pennsylvania

GROUP III:
Carnegie Mellon University
Emory University
Georgetown University
Rice University
University of California-Los Angeles
University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
University of Notre Dame
University of Texas-Austin
University of Virginia
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Vanderbilt University
Washington University-St Louis

GROUP IV:
Boston College
College of William & Mary
Georgia Institute of Technology
New York University
Tufts University
University of Califirnia-San Diego
University of Southern Califiornia
University of Washington
Wake Forest University

GROUP V:
Brandeis University
Case Western Reserve University
Indiana University-Bloomington
Lehigh University
Pennsylvania State University-University Park
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Syracuse University
Tulane University
University of California-Davis
University of California-Irvine
University of California-Santa Barbara
University of Florida
University of Maryland-College Park
University of Rochester

Please remember, those are ALL Tier I universities. As such, they are all excellent and very little separates one group from the group above it or below it.

UCBChemEGrad

Ha, that wouldn't help move Columbia above Berkeley in Hawkette's rating...Berkeley has a higher PA score than Columbia...

hawkette

xiggi,
Re your question about my ranking that

"places Duke ahead of Princeton or Harvard, and Notre Dame or ... Berkeley ahead of Columbia"

all fair observations as it relates to prestige in the academic and perhaps parts of the business world for these colleges.

Please understand that I may come at this college ranking from a less traditional standpoint as I think that students should be FAR LESS concerned with a college's ranking among academics and FAR MORE interested in the quality and nature of the undergraduate experience that they will actually enjoy once they get on campus. I believe that the academic differences among these institutions are generally much less than the non-academic differences and can be very important in the college search process as a student looks for the right fit.

As I noted earlier, I would weight my ranking factors as follows:

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

Others might choose different weights or other factors, but I think any ranking that any of us post should have some quantifiable elements rather just a straight name recognition or prestige listing. I think that looking at the full UNDERGRADUATE experience is a better way for the student.

jazzymom,
I hope that you would agree that a 5% weight is not that consequential to this ranking and I don't think it moves the needle for many (if any) of these colleges.

I don't think that a college's athletic programs relate to the academic quality of a college, but I do think that there can be a relationship between a school's athletic teams and the impact on the campus's social life. Good teams can breed greater campus excitement and most students will benefit from this. That is partly the reason for the 25% weighting to social life.

doctorb

Tufts, Wake Forest, W&M, Rice, Georgetown get no respect on this forum. I would place them head and shoulders beyond the State U research schools listed consistently ahead of them. I know this is unpopular but I just have a deep bias that smaller is better. Those schools are too big for LAC but are so different from many of the larger, research focused schools. I believe to the advantage of the individual student.

There should be a separate category for these 'tween schools so they get their proper respect. Oh well, tilting at windmills again.

gellino

I don't think many unbiased people would agree that UMichigan is on a par with any of those other schools in Alexandre's Group 2; certainly not from a student selectivity perspective. I get the impression from people I've talked to is that UMichigan OOS attendees are those that get rejected at all those other Group 2 schools. M+V SAT of Rice and WUSTL in his Group 3 are 100+ points higher than UMichigan and think Tufts would be a fair amount more highly regarded than any of those other schools in Group 4. Brandeis, RPI, Lehigh are certainly stronger than all the other schools in the Group 5.

I don't know much about the relative placement of public schools except that Cal/Berkeley, UVA, UMichigan are probably considered the best three and would put them in Group 3. I'm curious how you have any context to differentiate UIllinois, UWashington, UMaryland into groups 3,4,5 when they don't seem materially different from each other to me aside from your pro Big 10, anti east coast bias.

Alexandre

"I don't think many unbiased people would agree that UMichigan is on a par with any of those other schools in Alexandre's Group 2."

Really? So in your estimation, a significant portion of the academic world (over 50%) is biased in favor of Michigan? How do you explain Michigan's peer assessment score of 4.5/5.0 (tied with Penn at #12 in the nation). And is Gerhard Casper also "biased" toward Michigan? I fail to see the connection. He never studied or taught in Ann Arbor and yet, he had this to say about the University:

"I am extremely skeptical that the quality of a university - any more than the quality of a magazine - can be measured statistically. However, even if it can, the producers of the U.S. News rankings remain far from discovering the method. Let me offer as prima facie evidence two great public universities: the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and the University of California-Berkeley. These clearly are among the very best universities in America - one could make a strong argument for either in the top half-dozen. Yet, in the last three years, the U.S. News formula has assigned them ranks that lead many readers to infer that they are second rate: Michigan 21-24-24, and Berkeley 23-26-27."

Criticism of College Rankings - September 23, 1996

Can you name me 15 universities that place more students into top graduate programs or companies?

Gellino, I am not biased. Most of the academic and professional world agrees with my point of view.

Pizzagirl

DoctorB, as a fan of W&M and Georgetown in particular, I COMPLETELY agree with you that they get little respect in the forum and I'd place them ahead of the State U research schools listed consistently ahead of them (while by no means degrading those schools).

As for Tokenadult's point about Berkeley: I also completely agree that part of Berkeley's appeal in the West Coast is indeed the fact that it is (comparatively) low-priced for what you get, which raises its profile there (again, not taking away from Berkeley's general excellence at all - but it does seem as though Californians don't always understand that their view of the landscape is not universally shared across the country).

I also believe that the pricing system creates a different impression elsewhere ... even though (say) Stanford for anyone is more expensive than Berkeley OOS, knowing that some people are paying in-state prices for Berkeley has an impact on what I think I'd be willing to pay for it, when I have my own state school. That comparison doesn't come into play if I were just looking at Stanford - I wouldn't implicitly compare its price to my own state school. I think for those of us in states with good state schools to begin with, it takes a lot to consider paying OOS for someone else's state school. As an IL resident, I probably would still pay OOS for UCLA or Berkeley (but likely not the other CA schools), Michigan, Virginia, NC and possibly Wisconsin or Washington ... but I compare the price/value of Berkeley to that of my own state school in a way I wouldn't for a California private school.

UCBChemEGrad

Let's look at tuition/fees for W&M, Georgetown and Berkeley:

W&M: $26,775 (OOS) + $7,385 (Room/board) = $34,160
Georgetown: $36,140 + $11,478 = $47,618
Berkeley: $28,003 + $13,848 = $41,851

If a student was paying full sticker price and wanted to major in sciences, engineering, or business, Berkeley would be the clear choice. More top programs at Berkeley translates to higher ranking, IMO.

beefs

Alexandre, those look much more like traditional prestige rankings that anything else =\.

Caltech, Dartmouth, and UChicago are second to none and on par with your "group 1" in terms of undergrad education.