Did any of you chose Stanford over Harvard this year?

[SDTB]

<p>I believe Stanford is an interesting case. It’s a relatively new school, and it should be judged that way. The fact that its undergraduate reputation is being included with other private institutions that have a “100 year advantage” on it is nothing short of amazing. With that said, it is more important to consider future growth. Stanford has a few unmatchable qualities that make it unique and give it a distinct advantage (and disadvantage!) over other schools. I would argue that it is one of those institutions that have a tremendous upside to it.</p>

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@datalook

I would argue that the membership in US national academies (NAS, NAE, IOM) is a better metric for faculty quality, because about half of the academy members are still active. In that regard, Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and Berkeley are the 4 giants in USA. Each of them has more than 200 academy members, well ahead the other universities. That is why they have the best graduate schools.

I agree that it’s a better metric than simply counting Nobel Prizes. However, any science academic would argue that any metric that leaves out Caltech should be immediately discredited. The truth is that Caltech’s density of high quality faculty is nearly unmatched by any other school. Now, is density the best way to measure overall science quality? I would argue no. It’s inherently easier to run a small school than it is to run a big school. In this regard, there are so many factors to consider (philosophy, size, money, rankings, future prospects, etc.) that it’s silly to rank the schools. People can’t just put arbitrary weights on each factor and sum them up like it’s some simple algebra equation.</p>

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@Baelor

It’s quite simple. Selectivity means nothing if the student bodies and faculty are of equal caliber. Yield similarly means nothing.

I see a lot of number crunching to develop a metric to decide “which undergraduate is better!” and then extend this metric to the school as a whole – which includes graduate school. How does this make any logical sense?</p>

<p>Elite graduate departments generally do not publish admission statistics for a reason – they are cumbersome and they don’t tell anything meaningful. If one particular department houses 200 academic giants in a field, it would be easy to see that that department would be willing to admit more students than another department that only has 1 giant and 10 total faculty members. For example, Yale’s “selling point” in its PhD admissions was that it only accepted ~5% of its applicants this year. The truth is that number isn’t a reflection of the quality of Yale’s PhD programs as they generally lag behind other institutions with higher admittance rates.</p>