<p>Nonsense. Two of the best academic experiences in the country may be had at Deep Springs and Reed, which aren’t ranked all that highly.</p>
<p>Bottom line – the most important factor in the academic experience is you. If you don’t take an interest in the material and go out of your way to develop relationships with faculty, you won’t have much of an academic experience. Do you think some of the football players at Harvard or Yale are having much of an academic experience if they just want to party and play football? Of course not.</p>
<p>I have a bunch of friends at Cornell who went on for PhD study at the Harvards and Princetons and Stanfords of the worlds, and guess what? They didn’t find the academic experience all that different from the one at Cornell. Only at Harvard there was a much greater emphasis on teaching fellows, rather than professors, presenting the material. And at Princeton, my grad student friend thought the introductory biological science courses that he TAed were a joke and that the students didn’t really learn anything. And then there is the professor I had who recently graduated from Stanford with his PhD, and he found the academic experience at Cornell a breath of fresh air. At Cornell (gasp!) the students were actually interested in learning and doing work, whereas at Stanford he found that students were generally trying to compete as to who could slack off the most.</p>
<p>I think I already answered your questions pretty extensively over in the other thread, but I’ll expand a bit on the rankings inquiry. One of the reasons why Cornell was ranked so highly in 1998 was because that the class size factor included all students who were in honors and independent study tutorials, which are necessarily a 1 on 1 class. U.S. News since decided that these shouldn’t be considered classes (for whatever arbitrary reason) and Cornell’s strength in this category fell.</p>
<p>The worst way to make your college decision is to base it off the U.S. News rankings. Pick it based on the program you are interested in, how comfortable you feel on campus, and whether or not you feel like you can identify with the student body. And what’s sad, is that a lot of students just stick to the rankings. Since graduating, I’ve ran into a fair amount of people who picked Duke or UPenn just because the ranking was slightly higher than Notre Dame or Brown or Northwestern or Cornell, and I get the sense that they weren’t all that happy with their college experience. It’s particularly telling when they are around a bunch of happy and friendly Cornell alums.</p>