<p>If you look at the pool of top 20 schools, there’s really little reason to pull out Northwestern to compare to U Chicago except for the fact that they are in the same city. If you were doing a perceptual map of the top 20 schools, you might stick Northwestern with Penn, Duke, Cornell and WashU, as those 5 schools are a lot more similar to one another and dissimilar from U of Chicago. (And people, I am talking about a perceptual map of differences, not ratings. These are all fine schools and I’m not interested in the kind of dorks who pretend that any differences at this level are meaningful.)</p>