Duke 2014 Hopeful

slik_nik
Fri, 12 Jun 2009 17:41:28 +0000

@frenchhorngirl: I know I stated that I would stop arguing with your statements, but some of your statements are fallacious, so I have to argue them.

You say that Duke is a Tier 2 school (“in the context of the top 50 universities, HYPSM is tier 1 and Duke is tier 2”), but you haven’t provided any evidence to back that up. You provide yield statistics, but just because Duke has a lower yield than Stanford does not mean it is Tier 2. Based on the information on the NYT article you cited, you gave statistics that 94 percent of “admitees” choose Stanford over Duke. How does that mean it is tier 2? 65 percent of the “admitees” choose Harvard over Yale, a clear majority; does that mean Yale is Tier 2? No.

Regarding the U.S. News and World Report rankings, Stanford is ranked #4, whereas Duke is ranked #8. Again, this does not mean that Stanford is better than Duke because the difference is negligible (Stanford had a score of 94, whereas Duke had a score of 90, 4 out of 100 point difference is negligible; if this was a report card grade, they would both count as a 4.0 GPA)… you cannot say one is better than the other because there are just too many similarities. Anyway, how does a difference of 4 spots make one school Tier 1 and another school Tier 2, especially if they are both in the top 10 list of more than 2474 colleges/universities in America (based on data from Infoplease: [Number of U.S. Colleges and Universities and Degrees Awarded, 2005 — Infoplease.com](Number of U.S. Colleges and Universities and Degrees Awarded, 2005)?) If you want to rely on US News rankings, Duke is in the 99.67 percentile of all 4-year universities in the United States; how is that not Tier 1?

Maybe to you Duke is Tier 2, but the general public will consider otherwise. I strongly believe that Duke is in the same league as Stanford. As I stated earlier, Stanford has a slightly better reputation and prestige (in other words, name recognition), but greater recognition and prestige does not equal better. The academic quality/rigor, quality of teaching, and the quality of life (although the weather will be better at Stanford, I’ll give you that) are basically the same at both universities. So you cannot argue that Stanford is better than Duke; they are just way too similar in all the qualities that make up a great university.

For your information, Tier 2 schools are those schools that do not make the top 50 on U.S. News and World Report. See this link: [College Search: Second Tier. Colleges](http://www.collegeconfidential.com/college_search/second_tier.htm) . It seems that you have already acknowledged this by making a reference to the top 50 national universities though.