<p>Don’t be a jerk, infinite. Chicago doesn’t teach engineering. Yale and Harvard did, then they didn’t, then they did again, but Harvard spent more on it faster. Yes, the attitude at Chicago is that engineering is vocational (which it is), but more to the point there isn’t really room for an accredited engineering program AND a strong liberal arts core curriculum. So it doesn’t try. To my mind, at least, that doesn’t denigrate at all the quality of what Chicago does offer.</p>
<p>As for the professional schools, I agree with your statement, but so what? It just goes to show how silly your effort is. If you included that stuff, Chicago would pass MIT (which doesn’t compete in two of three categories), Princeton would sink towards the middle of the elite pack, Yale would rise a bit, Penn might show up, and Harvard and Stanford would (to no one’s surprise) be ##1 and 2. Then, if you included education, agriculture, theology, and social work, you would have another minor re-alignment. Meanwhile, Harvard Law School is both a great law school and a miserable place for students. It would be fundamentally rational for a student to choose Yale, Stanford, or Chicago (or one of several others) over Harvard; it would also be rational for a different student to choose Harvard over any of the others. No one would rank Chicago’s law school higher than fourth (or, really, lower than fifth). But Harvard’s “betterness” vs. Chicago or Yale’s “betterness” vs. Harvard doesn’t actually make much of a difference in anyone’s life.</p>
<p>I’m not certain what you are trying to prove. If it’s that Harvard, Yale, and Stanford are stronger institutions than the University of Chicago, well duh. If it’s that Chicago’s academic quality in the areas it covers and the universal respect people in academia give it are somehow illusory, you don’t know what you are talking about.</p>
<p>And what’s the problem with my analogy? Do you have a problem explaining what you mean? I have looked carefully at the data categories measured by the NSC; they really are tangential to anything resembling quality in any field. The whole project went off the rails and rendered itself useless.</p>