Please move on or take it to PM.
I teach at a current T100 school (above T60 for major). I have barely had any raises at all in 8 years.
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I think colleges are better grouped as a bell curve vs being segmented into equal quintiles. There are the limited colleges to the right which have a combination of physical and economic resources (per student), quality of faculty and overall strength in academic ability of their students that set them far apart from others. There are a whole bunch of excellent colleges in the middle and then the remaining group, which often are in financially precarious positions. This is not to say that the schools to the right are better for your student or that they guarantee better outcomes. I do they think they generally provide broader and more opportunities that don’t require as much effort as schools to their left.
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So just as a technical matter, quintiles can be applied to bell curves, and in fact quintiles versus, say, quartiles, kinda come out of the bell curve world because at least some people intuitively think that best tracks the left tail, left of center, center, right of center, right tail structure that many people associate with bell curves.
However, what I take you to be suggesting is something like that this bell curve has long tails, or at least on the right side, such that you really need more than quintiles to identify institutions way out on the right side tail.
Personally, I think there are studies which suggest in various ways that for most students, those tails are not nearly as long as some people have been assuming. But it may depend on what you are talking about, and it definitely seems to vary for different types of students.
In any event, I would suggest trying to describe that sort of observation with the word “excellent” is fraught with the possibility of miscommunication (and of course you didn’t do that). Like, maybe you could use “far-right-tail”, which to at least some people would fairly clearly communicate what I take you to be suggesting. So, “X is a far-right-tail college, Y is still excellent but not a far-right-tail college,” seems to track how you want to speak.
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Allow me to clarify. These institutions are indistinguishable from other Tier 2 large publics. Tier 1 (mich, unc, uva, ucla, uf, etc.) sure. Tier 2? No. Tennessee and South Carolina for example are not magically better than LSU for example.
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Duke is now ranked higher than 5 Ivy League schools (Columbia, Penn, Cornell, Brown, Dartmouth).
How did Duke accomplish this impressive rise to the top?
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This article has an interesting graphic of past rankings in US News:
In 1988, Duke was 7. It was 5 in 90, 6 in 95, 4 in 2003, 8 in 2016 and 7 last year.
Duke really didn’t rise. In the last 4 decades, it seems to have hovered around this level.
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I agree.
Really impressed with the upward movement of UT Austin. For example their Chemical Engineering undergrad program went from #9 to #5! That is a surprising jump to me as a chemical engineer.
Yeah, back when I was applying to colleges, Duke was definitely considered in whatever you would call the group after HYP (which at the time was not HYPSM yet).
I think the basic story of that was Duke was the main “HYP-Plus” (not really a term I recall being used much at the time, but the gist of it) of the South. Like, you had HYP, then Stanford in the West, Chicago in the Midwest, and Duke in the South. Pretty straightforward branding in that sense.
Then at some later point, when I was not really paying attention, apparently the concept of HYPSM emerged, at which point there was a T5 versus T10 framework. But to my knowledge, Duke was almost always T10. And to me, being in a four-way tie for #6, which is really a tie for #6-#9, is not a notably different result.
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One of the single metrics that is most correlated to USNWR ranking is endowment per student, as the higher weighted components of USNWR formula are all well correlated with endowment. Among “national” colleges, the highest endowment per student colleges are below. Duke is top 10, and not far after HYPSM. Duke also has a higher endowment per student than Chicago, Columbia, Penn, Brown, Cornell, …
1 . Princeton
2. Yale
3. Stanford
4. MIT
5. Harvard
6. Caltech
…
9. Duke
Duke also excels in most other key metrics, tying for 3rd highest graduation rate in most recent IPEDS, again higher than Chicago, Columbia, Penn, Brown, Cornell… As one would expect with such stats, Duke has historically done well in USNWR, and usually been among top 10, above many Ivies. Duke didn’t rise the top. Instead it’s been there all along. In the first USNWR in 1983, Duke was ranked #6. In the first scientific looking formula USNWR ranking from 1989, Duke was ranked #5 (after HYP, Stanford’s popular co-terminal masters program pulls slows average graduation time).
Why do you expect Duke to be ranked lower than all Ivies?
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This extends back into my era, the '80’s. HYP was the pinnacle. Duke was for the high achieving kids who wanted to go to school in the South, Stanford or Berkeley in the West and Michigan in the Midwest. At least in my high school, U. Chicago was not on the radar screen. The other Ivies were fallbacks for kids who did not get into HYP.
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And Vanderbilt was a good school, but nowhere near as crazy low acceptance rate as they have now. They did a tremendous marketing job.
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Exactly. The only guarantee in the rankings is that the methodologies will be “improved” to ensure movement, without chaos.
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Yep! When I applied to colleges in the mid 90s, Vanderbilt had a mid 60% acceptance rate.
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Vanderbilt has definitely changed a lot! I went to Duke and Vanderbilt wasn’t even on my radar. Meanwhile, D24 had Vanderbilt at the top of her list very early on and never wavered on making it her ED choice despite getting a hard sell on Duke from me 
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Not heard of Vanderbilt in the 80s. But now, it’s at the top.
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Vanderbilt first made the USNWR rankings in 1990 at #24. It fell off in 1991, but it has been on the list from 1992-2025, ranked between 13 and 25 (mostly < 20). Is it on top because the list brainwashed people into thinking that Vanderbilt is good, or did the list find a great school that no one had heard was good? Maybe, it’s both?
This is not a number with much meaning since any top 9% (statewide or local eligible) instate UC applicant will automatically be admitted to Merced if they don’t get in anywhere else. So a significant fraction of admits didn’t even apply to Merced, and unsurprisingly very few of those people accept their offers. To the best of my knowledge no other university on this list admits students who didn’t apply.
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Indeed, the U.S. News Rankings draw maximum attention from the prospective students and their families. Since the year 1999, I have had the opportunity to visit and interact with the students of quite a few universities appearing among the so-called T20. I found the students in each of these universities intelligent and smart, with potential to do well in their post-college career path.
Objectively speaking, the ranking does not reflect the relative quality of education in these universities. It is the prestige factor that dominates the application process. In my opinion, this ranking reflects the general perception about the relative standing of the universities.
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