New President Announced

grreat
Sun, 07 Mar 2021 23:37:36 +0000

Here are UChicago’s current rankings for graduate and professional schools (per US News):

Booth (Business): 3
Law School: 4
Pritzker (Medicine): 17
Biological Sciences: 13
Chemistry: 14
Computer Science: 30
Earth Science: 19
Economics: 7
English: 1
Fine Arts: 42
History: 6
Mathematics: 6
Physics: 7
Political Science: 12
Psychology: 17
Public Affairs: 13
Social Work: 3
Sociology: 8
Statistics: 6

What these suggest is that while there are some clear standout areas, on the whole there is a lot of room for improvement. UChicago is a solid top-20 in most fields, but it doesn’t clearly come across as the top intellectual destination in the world. It doesn’t have many top-3 programs.

Now if we look at Berkeley’s rankings:

Haas (business): 7
Education: 20
Engineering: 3
Law School: 9
Biological Sciences: 1
Chemistry: 2
Clinical Psychology: 3
Computer Science: 1
Earth Science: 2
Economics: 1
English: 1
Fine Arts: 15
History: 4
Mathematics: 2
Physics: 3
Political Science: 4
Psychology: 1
Public Affairs: 3
Public Health: 9
Social Work: 3
Sociology: 1
Statistics: 2

What the rankings here suggest is that even though for two of the professional schools Berkeley ranks a bit lower than Chicago (3 vs 7 for business, 4 vs 9 for law), on the whole Berkeley performs A LOT better. I’m not sure how Berkeley does it but they’re near the top for almost everything – plus they have fields and rankings that Chicago doesn’t even have (education, engineering, clinical psychology, public health). In other words, you don’t have to think twice about going to Berkeley if you have a graduate school offer from there. Nearly all of its programs are top-3. If someone is there at the grad level, you know they’re at one of the very top programs there can be. And I agree with JBStillFlying that if Chicago is able to do that for its departments, across the board, that will be the best investment for the professional schools as well because on the whole Chicago’s image will improve. Right now it’s a more confusing image of very strong professional programs with top-20ish grad programs.

So I think if Alivisatos is able to bring some of that Berkeley magic, establish top-notch research even with a limited budget and one much smaller than HYP, then that will truly be a step forward for Chicago,