Northwestern vs Georgetown vs JHU vs Tufts

prezbucky
Fri, 30 Apr 2021 05:53:37 +0000

Cornell is Ivy. My rankings take many things into account: a combination of undergrad and grad school academic quality (this helps the state schools, though I am taking undergrad more into account than grad – and I am taking breadth of quality programs into account), student happiness, outcomes (adjusted for regional differences in cost of living and majors sought), class sizes (this helps the LACs), US brand and career support (these help to get good jobs out the gate… all else equal…), general happiness/harmony on campus, etc.

Cornell is a great – great – university. Its genesis began with the command to let its students learn… everything: comprehensive breadth of education. While that isn’t possible, as all things are not, and never will be, known… it’s a glorious goal.

Cornell is both an awesome college and research university. Its global brand is big.

So ugh here are my tiers. Please note that at present state, I will probably forget a few schools. I don’t really have confidence in combining the LACs with the universities: the universities offer more breadth of study and generally more name brand, while the LACs offer smaller classes and more direct student/prof interaction. So i’ll keep them separate. I’d just say, I think the best undergrad education in terms of direct teaching is probably at Williams College. I don’t know of another college in the US that offers 2:1 S:F ratios in some courses. Anyway, let the idiotic paper-thin dichotomies ensue – we have a great many mighty schools – these are the tip of the iceberg.

Universities:

Tier 1: Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, Yale
Tier 2: Caltech, UChicago, Columbia, Penn (here due to Wharton)
Tier 3: Brown, Cal-Berkeley, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern
Tier 4: Carnegie Mellon, Emory, Georgetown, Michigan, Notre Dame, Rice, Vanderbilt, UVA, WUSTL
Tier 5: UCLA, Georgia Tech, (boy this is getting hard…) Illinois, NYU, North Carolina, Texas, Washington, Wisconsin
Tier 6: Boston College, Boston U, Brandeis, UCSD, USC, Tufts, Wake Forest

I quit. It’s hard mixing the state flags with the privates.

LACs:

Tier 1: Amherst, Pomona, Swat, Williams
Tier 2: Bowdoin, Carleton, CMC, Davidson, Hamilton, Harvey Mudd, Haverford, Reed, Vassar, W&L, Wellesley, Wesleyan…

ok, this is dumb. cripes.

Look at all the great colleges we have – it is an embarrassment of riches, and we are the envy of the world for higher ed. The Chinese had to create their own ranking just to get a few of their schools into the top 100. We dominate.