<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>
<p>Somebody can write an interesting psychology paper on people who spend inordinate amount of time vising CC forums for schools that they have nothing much to do with.</p>
<p>On school specific forums, the usual suspects are current students, alums, prospective students and the parents of any one of the these three groups. Anybody else who pops in and out of school specific forums mostly with negative and derisive comments tailor made to rile people up would make an interesting subject for a psych paper.</p>
<p>^ HYPSM + Berkeley + Michigan have stronger psychology departments than Chicago. I’d very much prefer that someone from one of those schools do the write-up on me, if that’s not too inconvenient.</p>
<p>I know I’m feeding a ■■■■■, but I just wanted to show an example of UChicago ranking higher than Harvard </p>
<p>Top Ranked U.S.
1 University of Chicago (Booth)
2 Harvard University
3 Northwestern University (Kellogg)
4 University of Pennsylvania (Wharton)
5 University of Michigan (Ross)
6 Stanford University
7 Columbia University
8 Duke University (Fuqua)
9 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan)
10 University of California - Berkeley (Haas)
11 Cornell University (Johnson)
12 Dartmouth College (Tuck)
13 New York University (Stern)
14 University of California - Los Angeles (Anderson)
15 Indiana University (Kelley)
16 University of Virginia (Darden)
17 University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill (Kenan-Flagler)
18 Southern Methodist University (Cox)
19 Carnegie Mellon University (Tepper)
20 University of Notre Dame (Mendoza)
21 University of Texas - Austin (McCombs)
22 Brigham Young University (Marriott)
23 Emory University (Goizueta)
24 Yale University</p>
<p>infinitetime - based on the rankings you’ve presented, again, would you make the same arguments if someone was comparing Yale and Stanford for grad as you do about comparing Yale and Chicago for grad level?</p>
<p>infinitetime is an anti-Chicago ■■■■■. Naturally, there must be as many anti-$institution ■■■■■■ as pro-$institution fanatics. Since there are so many of the latter around here, a few of the former have to show up as well.</p>
<p>Also, using the NRC rankings as support is at best questionable. There have been a ridiculous amount of problems associated with them. In the first place, they missed the deadline by literally 5 years, which is a testament to NRC’s incompetence. In the second place, they use a variety of questionable methods. For instance, while US News’ mathematics PA rankings gave Chicago 6th place (which was a huge step above the 7th place, given to Caltech), NRC apparently came up with a figure in the 50s. Despite the fact that Chicago has more Fields prize winners than any other institution, and has been traditionally regarded as top 6 (if not top 5, since Stanford isn’t usually considered top 5), and is the home of the only American Fields Prize winner in 2010… NRC’s methods are confused, at best.</p>
<p>Of course, we can all drum up data sets and say “this is the most valid in the world.” (This is BS, because the way in which you choose to analyze your objective data is inherently subjective, a point which everyone seems to forget.) But for every one that shows Chicago lagging behind its peers, there’s another one showing its peers lagging Chicago.</p>
<p>Also infinitetime, I noticed you made a comment about Chicago students rarely winning the Rhodes. Chicago is actually top 5 in producing Rhodes in the last 10 years. Chicago was also top 5 in producing Fulbright over the last 10 years, as it was this year, ahead of Harvard. So clearly those in the positions of power disagree with your harsh criticisms of Chicago.</p>