duke vs. dartmouth

warblersrule
Wed, 24 Apr 2019 18:11:18 +0000

theloniusmonk:

Being from a similar place to OP (NJ, upstate NY), Dartmouth was in my day considered far more prestigious than Duke. It was a safety school for kids to applying to Harvard, Yale, may be even Dartmouth.

One has to go back at least 40 years to find a meaningful difference in academics and selectivity, I suspect. Duke has been a top 10 school in the USNWR rankings every year since 1985 with only one exception (#12 in 1989).

Duke was not as much of an academic powerhouse in the 1960s, though it was already pretty strong. In the 1964 Cartter Report, Duke ranked #20 for departmental strength, coming in 11th among private universities (behind Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, JHU, Penn, and Northwestern, in that order).