I turned down Harvard, Princeton and Stanford for Berkeley's Physics programme

sakky
Sat, 24 Jun 2006 16:21:49 +0000

People, these arguments are ridiculous. It’s people like you that enable groups like US News to make so much money on something as silly as college rankings. Fact is, if you’re a good student, it doesn’t matter where you go. I know someone that attended Seattle University (ever heard of it?) for MSE. Oh no, he’ll never succeed in a non-prestigious university! Except that he got a 3.9 and is now attending Stanford for graduate school (and that’s BS that Stanford isn’t on par with Berkeley/MIT in engineering).



Uh, am I the only one who sees the paradox in this paragraph? You talk about how rankings are silly, but then you talk about a guy who went to a no-name school and then went to Stanford for graduate school. But who says that Stanford is a good graduate school in the first place? Answer - the rankings. So really, this paragraph, which purports to state that rankings are unimportant has, in reality, implicitly * confirmed * the importance of rankings.