Sorry about that Kr123, I look over so many things it is hard to keep everything straight .
What further need for discussion is there, you just said that Arizona is equal to Duke! I doubt you could find people on the Arizona board that would say that! I have to wonder, honestly, about any person or rankings which believe that. Nothing against AZ, but come on!
South Bend does have a high crime rate, I will not argue against this. However, Notre Dame is a VERY safe campus in my opinion. I have never felt threatened in any way walking acorss campus.
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The schools have virtually identical student populations.
Did you honestly research before posting this? Yale enrollment: 5,303...ND enrollment 8,346 (source Princeton Review). Notre Dame is almost 40% bigger! Don't try to mislead. Here is the link to the ND security information from NDSP themselves, the best source. http://www.nd.edu/%7Endspd/clery06.pdf. Judge for yourself but I think we have a pretty safe campus, especially given that South Bend isn't the safest city.
As for networks, I don't know if Yale alums give more, props to them if they do...but that doesn't affect you directly. ND has a larger alumni network and they have been known to bend over backwards to help out other ND alums. That is why our alumni network is so well-known. I will not use stats or anything like that on this one, I will let their actions speak for themselves. I would put our alumni up against ANY school in the world. I really would. LOVE THEE NOTRE DAME!
PosterX that ranking is a load of bullock. Quoted Hawkette:
According to Newsweek International, their List uses the following methodology in composing its ranking:
1. 50% of score divided equally among three measures
a. the number of highly cited researchers in various academic fields
b. the number of articles published in Nature and Science
c. the number of articles listed in ISI Social Sciences and Arts & Humanities indices
2. 40% of the score divided equally among four measures
a. the percentage of international faculty
b. the percentage of international students
c. the citations per faculty member (using ISI data)
d. the ratio of faculty to students
3. 10% of the score is decided by library holdings (number of volumes)
Just to put this in perspective, UC Berkeley is 5th, U Michigan is 11th and UCLA is 12th. By contrast, Princeton is 15th, Brown is 56th, U Virginia is 80th, Emory is 93rd, and Dartmouth, Rice, and Notre Dame (among other notables) are not ranked. Clearly, this ranking is using a methodology that is out of sync with how the vast majority of Americans would view these schools.
In the second List, the methodology is not disclosed, but seems to rely on a combination of factors involving Alumni, Awards, and some factors called HiCi, N&S (Nature & Science?), SCI, and Size. The results are again highly inconsistent with how most observers would see American educational institutions. For example, UCSD is ranked 13th and UCLA is 14th while Duke is 31st, Northwestern is 33rd, Brown is 85th and Emory, Dartmouth, Notre Dame and other top privates are not ranked in the top 100.
It appears that neither of these rankings give any weight to measurements of the quality of the student body nor to nearly all of the Graduation/Retention, Faculty Resources and Financial Resources measurements that are useful for evaluating the quality of an undergraduate experience.
As you can see, those rankings don't really make any real sense. The day you find someone who picks UCLA over Princton (no financial reasons), call me collect.
SweetLax, actually, UCLA is a world famous research university, and one of the best in the world, just like UCSD and UCSF/UC-Berkeley. Princeton has some good departments, but in terms of research, it isn't at the same level as a global university like, say, MIT, Yale or Harvard. See http://www.sciencewatch.com/sept-oct...2002_page1.htm
I'm sorry you don't agree with the rankings, but they are what they are. And, as world university rankings, they are remarkably consistent in showing schools like Harvard, Yale, MIT, Oxford and Cambridge at the top, while universities with smaller endowments, fewer resources, and far less groundbreaking research or academic activity like the University of East Anglia, Brown, ND, Tufts, Emory, University of Delaware are (in the case of ND) in the 200-300 ranking range and far below what some people think of as their peers.
Irish, the enrollment figures on the US Dept of Education website are virtually identical (both schools at 11,000) because of the graduate and professional student populations.
jags861 and posterx, Do ya'll just hate Irish Catholics or something? You keep attacking Notre Dame with rediculous rankings and misinformation that have no revelance at all. The World University ranking has to do with how much research is published on the Web by professors...I guess that is what makes a school academically competant.
I would hardly say that the Newsweek Global University Ranking has no relevance, given that tens of millions of people around the world have read it and it is considered to be one of the definitive rankings of global universities out there. Add it to the other rankings I've cited, which are also widely cited by thousands of other people, and you probably have hundreds of millions of people.
Yes, there are many measures of academic competence and I've always said that forget the rankings -- the best way to find out where you will do best is to visit for 3-4 days, talk to as many students and professors as possible, and find out where you will succeed academically. But when all the available rankings out there show an enormous gap (of hundreds of spots) between a couple of schools you're choosing from, you might want to do a bit of extra research and think carefully. That's all.
If you want to move away from research or how many students go to the top graduate schools (both of which measures ND lags far behind), look at a few other factors, like how many students receive Fulbright, Gates, Rhodes or Marshall Scholars.
Here is a list of institutions producing Fulbright Scholars this year, from Chronicle of higher education. Note that the number of applicants is fairly consistent from each school (although large schools like UC Berkeley have a few more than smaller ones), but the number who win from each school is very different:
1 Yale U. 31
2 Harvard U. 25
3 Brown U. 24
4 Columbia U. 21
4 U . of California at Berkeley 21
4 U. of Michigan at Ann Arbor 21
7 U. of Chicago 18
7 U. of Pennsylvania 18
9 Cornell U. 15
10 Duke U. 14
10 Johns Hopkins U. 14
10 Northwestern U. 14
10 U. of Wisconsin at Madison 14
14 Boston College 13
14 Ohio U. main campus 13
14 Pennsylvania State U. at University Park 13
14 Princeton U. 13
14 U. of California at Los Angeles 13
14 U. of Texas at Austin 13
20 New York U. 12
21 Arizona State U. at Tempe 11
21 George Washington U. 11
23 College of William and Mary 10
23 Stanford U. 10
23 U. of Arizona 10
23 U. of Pittsburgh 10
Notre Dame: Fewer than 10 (did not register)
And now Rhodes Scholarships:
- Since the scholarship was created in 1902, Notre Dame has had 14 Rhodes Scholarship winners, almost all of them prior to 2000.
- Since just 2002, Yale has had more than 15 Rhodes Scholarship winners; since 1902, it has had nearly 200.
[Even though Yale is one of the smallest universities in the country by undergraduate enrollment and much smaller than ND, it has produced more Rhodes Scholars than any other university except Harvard by a huge margin.]
PosterX, no one said ND was a great grad school or research school. Most of us don't want to do research, we want a great education, and in my case, family of alums. Of course its not going to be on the best international school research list...its not a research school. I still stand by what I say, no one picks UCLA over Princeton.
Fulbright Scholarships should not be used as an indicator.....My son who is a Junior was asked by his school to complete the application and he decided a Fulbright does not match his career goals..perhaps other schools have students simliar to my son, do not have the time and energy to fill out another application....I noticed his school is not on the Fullbright list but has been ranked in the top 5 of USNEWS for several years...
posterX is a troll. search for his last five most recent entries. he scours this website for opportunities to boost yale at the expense of every other university
Looking at Rhodes and Fulbright scholarships kind of downplay our excellent business school, don't they? That doesn't seem like a great ranking methodology to me at least. Also, there are a lot of factors about ND which can't be ranked, such as how happy the students are and how successful they are after ND.
As for your rankings, it sounds like you are looking at rankings that are including graduate programs which makes no sense because we are talking about UNDERGRADUATE. When I decided to come to ND I didn't care how strong the grad programs are...and I still don't. Again, having strong grad programs can actually HURT undergrad education because professors focus more on the grad students than undergrads and there are fewer research opportunities for grad students. Here, many professors will tell you that they prefer working with undergraduates, and that is part of the reason that undergraduates have so many research options. I myself was awarded a grant to do research here...there are a lot of graduate students who can't say that!
This discussion is about undergraduate education, and hence I personally am going to ignore (other than pointing it out) anything that is based on anything but undergraduate, because it is simply superfluous. I put these world rankings in that category because it has, according to you, Yale and ND with approximately equal enrollments which tells me they are looking at graduate schools as well and that is beyond our scope.
Also, I am going to stress this one more time, at Yale the graduate students probably will get most of your professors' attention as well as most of the research opportunities. You probably won't be able to run your senior thesis in a lab for a semester like I did here. If you are looking at doing any kind of research, you should look into what undergrads are able to do and what the opportunities are. Yale may have great opportunities for grad students (and they do, it is an amazing school) but I would worry about undergrad playing second fiddle.
I wouldn't worry about that, irish, considering that Yale alumni get into the top graduate Ph.D. and other programs at a rate higher than that of any other university in America, in every field --- and at much higher rates than those of Notre Dame. Perhaps the most prestigious sign of getting into any grad program you want, the Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford, is just one example of that, and Yale's placement of several of its undergraduates each year as Rhodes Scholars, when there are only 32 awarded each year across the entire country, is the envy of the nation. Notre Dame has one scholar every five years if it is very lucky. Also, I would consider things such as the fact that Yale has the smallest undergraduate class sizes of any university in America, and, particularly in the most popular majors, by far the lowest student to faculty ratios of anywhere except Caltech. In the Princeton Review rankings, Yale was recently ranked the #1 "Best Overall Undergraduate Academic Experience" in the country, above many tiny liberal arts colleges like Swarthmore; while world-famous newspaper columnist David Brooks, a UChicago alumnus, has recently written an article in the Washington Monthly explaining why Yale "provides the best undergraduate experience in America."
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