<p>Dang,</p>
<p>Take this utterly useless thread back to the undergrad side…
Really… overall grad school rankings are utterly, pathetically useless…
All that matters is the ranking of your specific discipline.</p>
<p>For example, in my field of astrophysics…
The top 5 are: Caltech, Harvard, Berkeley, Princeton, Chicago
The rest of the top 15 are (no particular order): Arizona, Colorado, Texas, Hawaii, Santa Cruz, MIT, Cornell, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Yale.
Do you see all those great public universities?
Stanford is not even in the top 20.
I loved Stanford and would have considered it… but it really, really sucks in my field.</p>
<p>And that’s the way it goes for grad school… it is incredibly specialized…
and believe that professors in a given field know EXACTLY which schools are highly ranked and which are not… I’ve known people who have turned down Stanford for a professorship at U Colorado, and turned down Yale to be a professor at UC Irvine…</p>