<p>Endicott, how is Duke any less “solid” than Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth or Penn? How are those four Ivies equal to MIT and Stanford? Duke is very much par with half of the Ivies.</p>
<p>Blatant Duke ■■■■■■■■.</p>
<p>Endicott stop ■■■■■■■■. Even as an applicant before I officially got into Duke, a lot of people, myself included, can see that Duke is on par with Columbia, Dartmouth, Brown, etc.</p>
<p>On my admit day and on the facebook group, I know a lot of people who have turned down these schools and Princeton and MIT to go to Duke. Why? Because not only is Duke very strong academic-wise, it also has a sense of community, social life, and sports.</p>
<p>Why is Bulter getting prestigious? Because it is the runner-up to Duke in the NCAA basketball championship.</p>
<p>John117, please feel secure about your school. It is a great school and you don’t need to compare with others.</p>
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<p>Your selective sample is obscuring the rarity of that.</p>
<p>john117, please don’t use Duke in the same sentence as the other two great institutions, thank you…</p>
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<p>obvious backdoor self-complement to say that duke is as good as stanford/mit</p>
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<p>What is UChicago missing that Stanford and MIT have, that raises the latter two in terms of prestige? Seeing as how the explanations given in this thread are (or at least were) common to Chicago as well.</p>
<p>Chicago IS on the level of Stanford and MIT in some graduate departments, most famously economics. Like Berkeley, it can’t compete with those two for undergrad prestige due to a lack of extreme selectivity.</p>
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<p>Isn’t Berkeley’s lack of relative selectivity due to its public nature, and legal mandate to serve CA residents? Or is there another underlying reason that’s common to both Berkeley and Chicago?</p>
<p>Rny2, in my books getting into Chicago is not associated with the same prestige because the other two are simply more selective. Schools are selective for a lot of reasons though, and academically, Chicago is easily on that level for fields like economics, and, may I add, mathematics :D.</p>
<p>And yes, Rny2, you’re right about Berkeley. Given its academic departments are consistently among the best of the best, in the top tier, if not public, it could ascend to maximal selectivity.</p>
<p>Stanford started out with generous funding which helped its rise (I believe students didn’t even pay tuition until the '30s). Stanford rose to prominence very quickly. In 1900, it was one of the founding members of the Association of American Universities, hardly 10 years after its founding. Jonathan Cole’s recent book, “The Great American University” provides additional details about Stanford’s rise. It really took off after Frederick Terman became provost in the mid-1950s. Terman had been a doctoral student of Vannevar Bush at MIT. Bush directed the federal Office of Scientific Research and Development during the war, which, among other things, was in charge of the Manhattan Project. Terman worked for Bush managing a large applied research lab for the war effort. After the war, Terman understood big science and the role that federal funding would play in it and this paid off at Stanford. Before the war and before he became Provost after the war, Terman was with the Engineering School at Stanford. Hewlett and Packard were among his students, and he was instrumental in starting the Stanford Research Park, the forerunner of Silicon Valley. Stanford also made wise choices of faculty in key departments. Finally, Stanford made a smart move when it relocated the medical science to the Palo Alto campus. As biomedical research funding grew, this had spillover effects on other science departments. There’s much more to the story, and you should check out Cole’s book for the rest of it. </p>
<p>Of course, there are other perceptions of Stanford:
In his book “100 Semesters”, William Chace (Emory President Emeritus) describes that he first saw Stanford in 1961 and said it was what his Berkeley professors said it was: “something of an undergraduate country club, populated largely by California students from wealthy families…”</p>
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<p>Rad Lab and Met Lab? Surely it’s just a coincidence…</p>
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<p>Well, I don’t understand what Duke’s missing that MIT Stanford and UChicago have…if you search for “Ivy League” in wikipedia, it clearly says Ivy includes MIT, Stanford and most of the time UChicago and Duke.</p>
<p>I don’t get why people here hate on Duke so much…I’m not speaking out of biasness because I haven’t even set foot on Duke yet. On another note, Duke is getting very selective nowadays. Its admit rate this year is 15%. Just three years ago, MIT’s admit rate was 14%. </p>
<p>I’m very disturbed by the hate Duke is receiving, especially from JohnAdam’s obnoxious posts. Please be civil.</p>
<p>[qutoe]Stanford started out with generous funding which helped its rise (I believe students didn’t even pay tuition until the '30s).
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<p>I suppose that depends on your definition of ‘generous’. The fact of the matter is that Stanford was wracked with financial difficulties for the first half of its existence, to the point of seriously contemplating bankruptcy several times. What Stanford was endowed with was a large plot of land (the Farm), yet the value of that was hardly obvious during the beginning of its life. The South Bay was largely backwater farmland before WW2. </p>
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<p>I think that’s an exaggeration. Stanford did not become a truly elite school until the 1950’s and later. That was when Silicon Valley began to blossom and that was when Stanford began to earn respect as a true scientific powerhouse, winning its first Nobels.</p>
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<p>NRC - Average of nonzero scores
- MIT
- Stanford
- Chicago
- Duke</p>
<p>There’s a perceptible gap in academic prestige. Whether that gap is significant is a completely separate flame war.</p>
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<p>I’m not going to search, but I can definitively say that if it says MIT, Stanford and the other two are in the Ivy league, it is wrong. 100% wrong.</p>
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<p>Nobody “hates on” Duke. They’re just saying that it’s not on the same level as the others. And of course you’re biased. You’re trying to justify your decision, and you don’t like the implication of inferiority. That’s natural … but it’s also pointless. Once you get to Duke it’ll be abundantly clear (and I think most people in this thread would agree) that whatever slight differences do exist just don’t matter.</p>
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<p>That’s putting the cart far before the house, for that begs the question of how Stanford and MIT obtained that money in the first place. Again, Stanford and MIT began life as schools wracked by financial difficulties to the point of nearly having to declare bankruptcy several times. Indeed, MIT’s financial problems almost culminated in a merger with Harvard several times. Early Stanford administrators trembled at having to compete against the (at the time) far more lavishly funded public university behemoth bestriding the East Bay. My have times changed</p>
<p>Money is therefore not so much a cause of the rise of the schools as it is a result. The more prominent the schools became, the larger their coffers. The question then is, how did they become so prominent in the first place?</p>
<p>Location. Before the age of easy and cheap transcontinental flights (America spans a continent, after all <3 ), location was an even bigger factor than it was today. California’s best and brightest would naturally gravitate towards the closer option. Same goes for UChicago. Once you get out of the northeast the competition for “bestest school” dropped precipitously.</p>
<p>"Well, I don’t understand what Duke’s missing that MIT Stanford and UChicago have… </p>
<p>NRC - Average of nonzero scores
- MIT
- Stanford
- Chicago
- Duke</p>
<p>There’s a perceptible gap in academic prestige…"</p>
<p>There is indeed. I don’t understand why Dukies here on CC cannot see it.</p>