<p>Maybe it’s because I’m from a school in the 40s, but it’s so funny to see all the people argue about schools in the top 20 and which ones are a spot too high 
Sometimes it’s scary when you think about the fact that there are real people behind these usernames.</p>
<p>USC > Michigan makes perfect sense. If you look at the objective factors (SAT, Student/Faculty Ration, Endowment etc) USC is easily in the top 20. What continuously hurts USC is peer reputation score and the east coast bias. If it had a 4.2 or 4.3, instead of a 3.9, it would immediately leap frog into the top 20. Other schools like Berkeley have much lower quality students/resources but are buoyed by very high peer reputation scores (4.9 in the case of Berkeley). </p>
<p>Peer reputation should be 10%, not 25% as most college deans have no idea about the improvements or declines of other universities and the incentive is to grade down competitors.</p>
<p>
Its relatively weak programs are what continuously hurt USC. Don’t shoot the messengers for giving USC the PA score it deserves.</p>
<p>lol @ Penn-haters…MIT and Caltech are pretty much specialty schools with relatively weak humanities components, so I don’t see how they would qualify as “well-rounded”. Yes, Stanford is better than Penn by far (I would personally put it above Harvard in the rankings b/c of its engineering, but that would be blasphemy right?). Overall, I think Penn should be tied with Columbia and Duke, but all these universities are so close together that trying to differentiate between them (except in the cases of specialties such as Wharton at Penn and engineering at MIT, etc) is an exercise in pointlessness. </p>
<p>PS: Cornell and Brown people need to chill the **** out. You’re the worst Ivies…get over it.</p>
<p>Hi MOW,</p>
<p>Now I feel better. I was called a Dookie soccer mommy… ;)</p>
<p>…Probably been called a lot worse! :)</p>
<p>Seems like this may be accurate, I’am really shock by University of Illinios- Urbana Champaign ( just went by the school yesterday), I wonder how the hundred schools look. Will certainly visit USNEWS when rankings are release.</p>
<p>I just saw the ranking at a bookstore and here’s what I found: 99% of its enrolled freshmen graduated in the top 10 percent of their high school classes. That’s higher than UC Berkeley (98%) and UCLA (97%), the California flapships that are known to value class rank/GPA the most. The percentage for Harvard/Yale/Princeton is ~95%. Even though Penn’s SAT range isn’t really all that high among the peers, the end result is US News says Penn is “more selective” than Stanford.</p>
<p>The impact from a high “top-10%” seems significant. It’s apparently the main reason why UC Irvine is solidly in the top-50.</p>
<p>The methodology is gonna pressure more schools to use top-10% as the cutoff criteria.</p>
<p>Regarding MIT being a “specialty school”…MIT has evolved into much more than a specialty school. Top economics program, rapidly emerging business school, excellent linguistics, all on top of the renowned engineering and maths/sciences. Sure, I probably wouldn’t major in literature at MIT, but there are a lot of options available. MIT has really made the effort to diversify itself over the last few decades and I think it has caught up with the best of the best universities in America.</p>
<p>
“much lower quality students/resources”?! LOL! OK, maybe in your view an SAT average of 10-20 points lower is “much lower”, but let’s have U$C add 7,000 more undergrads and see if it’s able to maintain that insignificant SAT edge.</p>
<p>Obviously, academics completing the USNews survey don’t see USC and Berkeley as peers.</p>
<p>Good to see Florida tied with Texas, but both schools are still underranked by ~10-15 places.</p>
<p>I think the top 10% thing is an extreme detriment to the rankings. It is not a reasonable measure of selectivity IMO.</p>
<p>Where’s Hamilton in top 20 LAC?</p>
<p>monstor344,</p>
<p>It means you are better off not to go to uber-competitive HS unless you are so good that you can be among the top-10% even within a competitive class.</p>
<p>
USC has higher endowment ($3.589B)?</p>
<p>Amherst is at #2. If the folks at Ephblog are correct, it will go down to #10 next year, next to Haverford. =(.
What I don’t understand is Pomona at #6 when it should be at #1 or #2.
Pomona > AWS in all things quantifiable.
endowment/student, SAT, GPA, etc… except PA.
It’s below Middlebury? Seriously? Middlebury? Middlebury in Vermont?</p>
<p>I’m not surprise University of Pennslyvania is ranked number 4, great school.</p>
<p>monstor, yes the top 10 category is a farce, especially in the way it unfairly benefits the UC schools, most notably UC Irvine, Davis, and Santa Barbara. These schools “estimate” their top 10 figures while drawing from a lower academic pool of California high school students with commensurate lower SAT/ACT scores. Hence, in an unintended twist re. USNWR, these students are at the top of their class — by California standards.</p>
<p>it is almost the exact thing as last years, no need for everyone to get all excited haha… oh well…</p>
<p>I think they were more in line with my personal opinions last year. UPenn seems too high on the list.</p>
<p>Stanford = Number 1 school
Give me a reason that it shoud not be</p>