Dartmouth vs UC Berkeley

system
Wed, 13 Jun 2007 09:17:10 +0000

I think those criteria are actually very good, and probably some of the best criteria for a rising high school senior to look at - unless you’d rather have high school students base their college judgements on people’s random opinions.

These aren’t entirely objective, but you can attempt to objectify atleast 1) and 4).

For 1) Quality of Students - SATs, National Merit Scholars, Other types of scholars, class rank - stronger students = smarter peers. Sorry, but I’m assuming people who perform better academically are smarter, and feel thats a somewhat decent assumption to make.

2) Class Size - though I don’t agree smaller is always better, still I feel like it is generally a good rule. How many seminars, how much close contact with a big shot professor. How many undergraduate research opportunities. This is all measurable.

3) This is totally subjective. However, assuming good teaching leads to strong students, maybe how many students end up going to top law/med/biz schools (since there is a ranking for that) or go onto win prestigious scholarships. This is a rough correlation though.

4) Institutional resources - somewhat measurable by these rankings, and also by figures such as endowment per capita etc. (though I believe there is an increasing returns to scale)