<p>The toughest schools to get into (according to PR) in order are:</p>
<ol>
<li>MIT</li>
<li>Princeton</li>
<li>Cal Tech</li>
<li>Yale</li>
<li>Harvard</li>
</ol>
<ol>
<li>MIT </li>
</ol>
<p>College Suicidal Rankings</p>
<ol>
<li><p>MIT</p></li>
<li><p>UCSD </p></li>
<li><p>Princeton </p></li>
</ol>
<p>Overrated. Grade inflation & others. </p>
<p>LAC at most. I’m not saying that LAC is bad, but…</p>
<ol>
<li>Cal-tech<br></li>
</ol>
<p>Faculty-student relation problem. </p>
<ol>
<li><p>Yale </p>
<p>Overrated. Grade Inflation & others. </p></li>
<li><p>Harvard</p>
<p>Overrated Grade Inflation & others.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>I think that Duke is BY FAR the most overrated school ANYWHERE.</p>
<p>How exactly can schools like Harvard and Yale be overrated???</p>
<p>cavalier: if duke is so overrated, why are you applying there? </p>
<p>and it’s not overrated.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/srs/nsf04330/tables/tabb32.xls[/url]”>http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/srs/nsf04330/tables/tabb32.xls</a></p>
<p>Total R&D expenditures at universities and colleges,<br>
ranked by fiscal year 2002 total R&D expenditures<br>
[Dollars in thousands] </p>
<p>Institution and ranking 2001 2002 </p>
<p>2 U. CA Los Angeles 693,801 … 787,598
3 U. MIchigan 600,523 … 673,724
4 U. WI Madison 604,143 … 662,101
7 U. CA San Diego 556,533 … 585,008
8 Stanford U. 482,906 … 538,474
9 U. PA 469,852 … 522,269
10 Cornell U. 443,828 … 496,123
11 U. MN all campuses 462,011 … 494,265
13 U. CA Berkeley 2 446,273 … 474,746
14 U. CA Davis 432,396 … 456,653
15 MIT 435,495 … 455,491 </p>
<p>16 Duke U. 375,133 … 441,533 </p>
<p>19 UIUC 390,863 … 427,174
20 WUSL 406,642 … 416,960
22 Columbia 354,497 … 405,403 </p>
<p>23 Harvard U. 372,107 … 401,367 </p>
<p>28 USC 340,597 … 372,397
29 UNC 303,576 370,806 </p>
<p>30 Yale U. 321,514 … 354,243 </p>
<p>41 Northwestern 257,933 … 282,154
42 Emory U. 236,997 … 271,238
47 U. IL Chicago 233,098 … 259,852
53 U. Chicago 2 194,125 … 225,264
54 NY U. 190,722 … 222,978
55. Caltech 215,085 … 220,004
60 Vanderbilt U. 186,504 … 208,305
63 Boston U. 172,031 … 192,612
66 Carnegie-Mellon 144,882 … 188,191
69 U. VA 149,547 … 182,340 </p>
<p>79 Princeton U. 149,411 … 164,408 </p>
<p>94 Dartmouth C. 109,096 … 126,839
103 Brown U. 91,636 … 109,482
105 Tufts U. 105,806 … 109,291
109 Tulane U. 99,761 … 102,998
117 George Wington 73,805 … 86,288</p>
<p>ok, that last post doesn’t prove anything.</p>
<p>ucla is better than harvard b/c ucla spends more on R&D?</p>
<p>I apologize if my earlier posts in this thread seemed unfair or unclear. I have been following TheDads posts for a long time and have agreed with his views more often than not. I think his point about the importance of the right fit between student and school is particularly valuable.</p>
<p>It was also not my intention to bash LACs, the best of which are absolutely superb. I took issue with TheDads point about a report that some Ivy League faculty sent their kids to LACs because such anecdotal evidence reminds me of what my AP English teacher called the I had an uncle once fallacy. For example, the fact that TheDad knows someone who chose Smith over Yale doesnt confer any more absolute value on Smith than the fact that other people chose Yale over Smith proves that Yale is better. For the record, while I often disagree with the U.S. News rankings, I think theyre right to treat universities and LACs as apples and oranges. I also thinkas perhaps TheDad does toothat different schools are better and worse for different students.</p>
<p>last year, i use to go on these boards a lot when i was applying to USC. i am familiar with what the The Dad posted and what he posts now. yes, he did give great advise. but he seems a little rusty these days, saying things like: a school isnt good b/c someone in my homeowners association said so. come on, thats not really evidence, just hearsay. thats why hearsay isnt allowed in court of law as evidence, its unreliable and often skewed. what really really sucks is someone stupid highschool senior is going to come to this board for direction, and he might just make a seriously wrong choice b/c of the utter rubbish some people post. anyways, i think posters with credibilty should be careful of what they post. this site was a place to get reliable info., not anymore. now you have to sift through all kinds nonsense. this very discussion is a good example.</p>
<p>i do think one thing the dad has said makes more sense than anything ever posted on this site. college is all about fit, not about going to the best place you get in.</p>
<p>MrTrojanMan: I agree that this isn’t the most enlightening thread on CC–that title is kind of irresistible, though. </p>
<p>While I tend to break out in hives when people generalize too much from their own or their friends’ experience, I also think the vast majority of TheDad’s CC posts are far from rubbish–especially, as you point out, his wise counsel that individual fit matters more than outside rankings in choosing a college.</p>
<p>MTM is sensitive because I jeer at his notion of USC being among the nation’s elite universities. GMAFB. CC isn’t a court of law and the professor in my HOA is one of only dozens of sources over the years who say the academic climate for undergrad at USC is medicore, outside of a few majors like Film/TV and Music. This has already been hashed to death in another thread and needs no reprise here. But is fascinating that, unlike with so many other schools that <em>are</em> first rate, USC students virtually never mention academics as one of the good things about their college: they talk about the great social atmosphere, the so-called “Trojan Family” and networking connections, their fabulous football team, yada yada. </p>
<p>Snappy, you <em>still</em> don’t get it: I produced the ratings I did as an exercise to show that you can demonstrate just about anything with ratings. I had no idea where Smith or Yale would come out. And I did exactly two jiggers, which I noted: flipping Harvard to #1 (tongue in cheeck, because ratings will be presumed to be invalid) and dropping Washington & Lee’s raw score by 10 points just because I don’t like the excessive alcoholic atmosphere on the campus…which illustrates exactly another point: with some ratings you have no idea what effective biases are in them and why. With US News’ rankings, it’s pretty clear that you can scramble the list just by tampering with the weightings of every factor. The point of my rankings isn’t that they’re better rankings–though in their own peculiar way they do address some of the systemic underweighting of LAC’s–it’s to show that all rankings should be taken with a dumptruck load of salt rather than being revered as Holy Writ. Sheesh.</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>I guess MTM knows better than NSF.</p>
<p>just FYI</p>
<p>This is about NSF</p>
<p>NSF Fact Sheet</p>
<p>NSF-Funded Nobel Prize Winners in Science Through 2004
October 2004</p>
<p>The National Science Foundation (NSF) was established in 1950 “to promote the progress of science” and today funds more than 10,000 new awards each year in fulfilling that mission. NSF selects projects through a time-tested process of merit review, and the success of that process is reflected, in part, in the number of NSF-supported scientists recognized for their discoveries. In particular, NSF takes great pride in the remarkable achievements by U.S. and U.S.-based researchers that have received Nobel Prizes and the many who have been supported by NSF grants throughout their careers.</p>
<p>NSF’s contributions are significant considering the agency’s size and the foundation’s support for fundamental research in many disciplines relative to agencies focused on a specific mission such as health, defense or energy. NSF’s share of federal funding for basic academic research in physical sciences (including physics and chemistry) is 35 percent, non-health-related biology is 65 percent and non-health-related social sciences is 84 percent.</p>
<p>NSF-Funded Nobel Prize Winners
Physics 41
Chemistry 33
Medicine 23
Economics 28
Total 125</p>
<p>In most cases the university does not “spend” research money, it comptets with all other schools for the project funding. The projects are allocated based on the quality of the staff doing the research. It is very competitive. A high research ranking is an indicator of quality–one of several you could use…</p>
<p>To Dad–USC does have an outstanding engineering school–on par with Michigan and the like.</p>
<p>Sounds like we should start a thread of overrated and underrated posters on CC based on our perception of their credibility. I fully agree that it is getting harder to separate the wheat from the chaff in many of these threads, and while some of the side comments are humorous and entertaining, others are a waste of bandwith, and are better addressed in the CC Cafe. I am glad TheDad said what goes without say (IMO), that the best fit is, and should be, the best measure of a school for any one individual. But that is, in my view, a slightly different issue than the ratings/rankings game where we are talking about group data. When I visited my s. for parents weekend, I asked a lot of his friends how they started their college search. What criteria did they use? One of his friends said “word of mouth”. He started by looking at schools that his friends attended or were looking at, but ended up at one few were familiar with. You can’t possibly closely research hundreds of schools, so you need some criteria as a starting place. Hearsay IS appropriate, and is part of how a reputation is established. The very first, and most highly weighted rating column in the USNews ratings is “peer assessment”- the opinions of acedemicians about the other schools. Isn’t this rather subjective??? It may be reliable, but is it valid?(statistically speaking). Should we put so much stock in people’s opinions?? At least it is a starting point-- looking at the opinions of others. From there we should do our own research and formulate our own opinion. Seems to me that is why the opinions vary so much on this thread. I still feel, all things considered, that the advantages of hearing the opinions, experiences and personal biases of others has more advantages than disadvantages, and is what keeps me reading these posts.</p>
<p>Drew University in New Jersey is a highly underated school in my opinion. The campus and facilities are beautiful and the location is prime real-estate (30 mins outside of New York). The theater department at Drew is tops amongst LACs and hosts the new Jersey Shakespeare festival each summer. Drew also has strong academics (not as strong as Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore) and a small, but strong medical program. However, the most redeeming factor at the school is the relationship amongst the students and faculty, especially with Dean Thomas Kane (worked on 9/11 comission, fmr gov of New Jersey). Kane’s political ties enable the school to get some of the best speaker’s in the nation. Unfortunately, Drew’s endowment hinders it from reaching the level of the top LACs because Drew offers very poor financial aid and loses many students for this reason. But I definately fell in love with it when i visited.</p>
<p>I was just kidding about duke…I just said that to tick my friend off (he got in ED)…lol. BTW, if any Duke adcoms are reading this site, I didn’t mean that! I would honestly consider myself lucky to get into Duke. It’s a great school.</p>
<p>Much of what we see in Rankings is making personal preference based upon the personal preference of other people who are high school seniors: “I want to go to college X because more people who were my age last year chose it over every other college.” Other rankings are based again on the raw materials of the college such as endowment. Page Smith an American historian and an official at UCSC wrote a book, Killing the Spirit, which details from a historical perspective why he thinks denominational schools and Women’s colleges were doing a better job of educating their students. This was particularly interesting coming from an educator who was not a professed christian or a teacher at a Women’s college. This opinion was largely based on his own experience at Harvard and elsewhere that the name schools recruited many bright undergraduate students but upstairs at the same “name” school the best graduate students seem to come from Women’s colleges and denominational schools.
I agree with TheDad that one’s own college ranking is the one that matters. This ranking will be based partly on objective data such as the SATs of the other students, partly on semiobjective data such as apparent student participation in class, but mostly on subjective data and ones self knowledge: Do I like this area of the country? Did the students seem like my type? What was the feel as well as the fit? I’ve had friends whose child picked a college based upon being on the campus 10 minutes. “What do you mean you want to go to college here? I feel like I just got out of the car.” “Well Dad, I’ve made up my mind. I want to spend the next four years of my life here.” And the funny thing is those kids enjoyed all four years and never complained. May all of our children be so fortunate.</p>
<p>ok, what i mean by hearsay is when somebody says they know somebody who said something and then presents that something as evidence to you. something more reliable than hearsay would be when YOU know somebody who said something, and that somebody said that something right in front of you. </p>
<p>here is an example: if you talked to USC student and he said academics at USC were good, that wouldnt be herasay. if you talked to the dad and he said academics at USC were not good b/c somebody else said so, thats hearsay. aslo, the USC student has more credibility b/c he goes to USC. and thats just an example, im not trying to say anything more.</p>
<p>jschwent: Rice is underrated (if any school ranked in the top 20 can be considered underrated) because it is not well known outside of Texas, NASA, and a few of the top medical and graduate schools. Looking strictly at the quality and opportunities of its undergraduate programs, Rice does not take a back seat to anyone. It also has the fourth largest endowment per student among all universities, second to Princeton among universities that do not support medical and law schools; and it uses endowment income to lower tuition for all students. The lack of notoriety might be due partly to the fact that PR does not seem to be a priority and partly to the fact that it is significantly smaller than its Ivy peers. </p>
<p>Rating top colleges is like arguing who makes the best ice cream. Depends on what flavor you like best.</p>