Overrated and Underrated Top Universities

College Search & Lists
281

<p>This is about L-school</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.utexas.edu/law/faculty/b...onal.html#_ftn1[/url]”>http://www.utexas.edu/law/faculty/b...onal.html#_ftn1&lt;/a&gt;
This study aims to assess which of the top schools have the most “national” placement, as measured by hiring by elite law firms around the country. This study proceeds on the assumption that “national” law schools (1) place large numbers of graduates at the best firms, and (2) place graduates at the best firms throughout the nation.</p>

<p>We studied the usual suspects for the top law schools—Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Chicago, Columbia, NYU, Michigan, Virginia, Texas, Penn, Cornell, Georgetown, Northwestern, Duke–plus two schools on the cusp of this elite group, Vanderbilt and UCLA. [1] As a check on the reliability of the results, we added five very reputable, but presumably less national schools: Emory University, Washington & Lee University, University of Notre Dame, University of Minnesota, and George Washington University.</p>

<p>To identify “elite” law firms, we used the Vault Guide to the Top 100 Law Firms, including the 23 “best of the rest” identified by Vault, top firms that didn’t make the top 100 (see <a href=“http://www.vault.com/nr/lawrankings...id=242&top100=1[/url]”>http://www.vault.com/nr/lawrankings...id=242&top100=1&lt;/a&gt;). In order to assess national placement power, we had to have a genuinely national sample. Therefore, we studied only the top 3 firms in each city/region-- where there were at least three on the Vault list. (The primary failing of the well-known American Lawyer study of hiring by the AMLAW 100 firms was that the sample was not national, with nearly one-third of the firms in New York City and more than two-thirds of the firms on the list in the Northeast corridor. AMLAW 100 is informative as to job placement in New York and the Northeast, but says nothing about national placement power.)</p>

<p>Rank Based on Per Capita Score for Elite Firm Placement</p>

<p>Rank School Per Capita Value
1
University of Chicago
2.28</p>

<p>2
Harvard University
2.11</p>

<p>3
Yale University
1.90</p>

<p>4
University of Virginia
1.50</p>

<p>5
Stanford University
1.41</p>

<p>6
University of Michigan
1.25</p>

<p>University of Pennsylvania
1.24</p>

<p>8
Columbia University
1.10</p>

<p>9
Duke University
1.02</p>

<p>10
University of Texas, Austin
0.92</p>

<p>11
Northwestern University
0.84</p>

<p>Univ. of California, Berkeley
0.85</p>

<p>13
Univ. of California, Los Angeles
0.78</p>

<p>14
Cornell University
0.73</p>

<p>New York University
0.73</p>

<p>Vanderbilt University
0.73</p>

282

<p>Well you really can’t take apart a ranking and expect to use the individual parts. All of the parts work congruently to formulate the final ranking, and you should use the final ranking for your basis of opinion (if you indeed do feel the need use a ranking). </p>

<p>Picking apart a ranking is similar to picking apart wins in a sport. Say the Chicago Bulls (a record of 13-18) beat the Phoenix Suns (29-4), does that mean that Chicago is better than the Suns? No. The season is not based on one game the same as a ranking is not based on one indicator.</p>

283

<p>overrated: UCLA
underrated:UCSD</p>

284

<p>Overrated=Oversized</p>

<p>Quantity begets Quantity, not quality.</p>

<p>“Supersize Me”</p>

<p>The overrated school is certainlY the one you or your kid is attending. The underrated school is the qualitatively opposite school.</p>

<p>Also,</p>

<p>it is bad form to claim that your favorite “top 25” school is underrated;</p>

<p>how much affirmation do you need to sustain your fragile achievements?</p>

<p>You’re in a good school, that’s it. You are not a better person then you were before you were accepted (THOUGH IT IS OBVIOUS MOST POSTERS WOULD LIKE TO THINK SO, “REVENGE OF THE NERDS” ETC.).</p>

285

<p>overrated-georgetown, upenn, cornell
underrated-most LACs, dartmouth, uchicago</p>

<p>my reasons:
i dont like upenn, cornell too much, and i dont like georgetown’s mascot/colours.
i like most LACs, dartmouth and uchicago.</p>

286

<p>One caveat I would add to the USNWR ranking is “Peer Assessment”</p>

<p>Could there be a more subjective rating?</p>

<p>Moreover,</p>

<p>Does anyone really think that these “undergrad rankings” are not biased by “Grad school” ratings?</p>

<p>Track the peer assessment score and you will see that they highly tilt toward schools with large and well known grad schools.</p>

<p>The peer assessment score is the grad school ranking hidden with in the undergrad ranking.</p>

<p>To add insult to injury, why do they represent 25% of the overall score? Why not 27% or 5%? </p>

<p>It’s arbitrary.</p>

287

<p>Woodwork’s point is a good one. The “peer” rating is a subjective aura. (I still believe it to be more valid than the rest of US News’ crock but that’s as far as I take it.) And even if you agreed upon which factors were valid in rating a school–and I think this would be a difficult exercise for any group of, say, 20 people to do–then decisions on how to weight the various factors would wind up producing wildly different lists.</p>

288

<p>West Ivies aka California Ivies + Reed</p>

<p>Research Universities:</p>

<p>UCLA
Cal Tech
UCSD
USC
Berkeley
UCSF
Stanfurd</p>

<p>LAC’s:</p>

<p>Claremont Mckenna
Harvey Mudd
Reed
Pomona</p>

<p>California Ivies + 4 is University of Michigan, MIT, University of Chicago, and our newest addition because of history of public hospitals Johns Hopkins University.</p>

289

<p>i think harvard and stanford are overrated for the quality/rigor of their undergrad program. you really don’t have to do much to get your degree due to ridiculous grade inflation.
harvey mudd is underrated. even in california. it is really awesome for science but most people don’t give it much credit.</p>

290

<p>I only made it to page 7 of this thread, so forgive me if I’m being redundant.</p>

<p>I’m definitely biased, but I think that the Claremont Colleges as a whole are vastly underrated, mainly because they’re so largely unknown. Almost nobody knows what I’m talking about when I say where I go to school, even though the consortium is highly respected within academia. I’ve talked to engineers who’ve never heard of Harvey Mudd, which is on tier with the top technical schools in the country. People think Scripps means that you’re a marine-bio major, and if they recognize “Claremont” at all, it’s usually only to say “Ohhh yeah, that politics school?” It’s vain, sure, because typically the people with whom recognition matters are familiar with the schools, but I definitely think that the 5Cs are underrated within the general pool of colleges and prospective students.</p>

<p>I also tend to feel that USC is overrated. Because I’m probably stepping on a lot of toes here, let me try to clarify what I mean. This is not at ALL to say that it’s not an excellent school with some AMAZING facilities and resources. It was one of my final 3 choices, it’s my sister’s dream school, and I have many, many friends who attend. Based on my own personal observations, USC tends to produce a higher-than-usual number of “I went (or am going, or am going to go) here, so I’m better than you” attitudes, and I don’t think that graduates of ANY school have a right to that.</p>

291

<p><a href=“http://daily.stanford.edu/tempo?page=content&id=11774&repository=0001_article[/url]”>http://daily.stanford.edu/tempo?page=content&id=11774&repository=0001_article&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>“You got Stanford kids comin’ to your program? Man, good luck with them — I heard they’re a bunch of whiners and moaners.”
Yes, my friends, such were the words spoken by some Harvard professor to one of our charismatic Australian professors a few weeks before we flew into Australia. No wonder our professor probably thought we were a big bunch of complaining babies.</p>

<p>Then came the straw that broke the kangaroo’s back: the grading system that would be used to evaluate our work. Apparently in Australia, they don’t believe in the wonderful, cushy system we have come to love at Stanford called grade inflation.</p>

<p>No, our professor told us, not everyone can get an “A.” In fact, if you complete an adequate job, you can hopefully get a “C,” and if you manage to get above average, you can cheerfully accept a “B.”</p>

<p>All hell broke loose. “What about my precious med school applications?” some of us screamed. “How am I going to get into law school with a bunch of ‘C’s on my transcript?” others cried out.</p>

<p>That night, the phone lines were busy as our perplexed Australian professors spoke to the folks back at Stanford. “Don’t worry,” they told us in the morning. “Your grades will be ‘adjusted’ to Stanford standards at the end of the course.” So we settled down, relaxed a bit and went back to being the mellow Stanford students we pretended to be in the first place. </p>

<p>.</p>

292

<p><a href=“http://daily.stanford.edu/tempo?page=content&id=13894&repository=0001_article[/url]”>http://daily.stanford.edu/tempo?page=content&id=13894&repository=0001_article&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>The joy of grade inflation</p>

<p>Who doesn’t like getting things easy? Higher education isn’t exempt from this phenomenon. Who wouldn’t rather loaf through a class and get an A- than bust their ass to earn a B? Maybe I’m just friends with a bunch of good-for-nothing layabouts, but I can’t imagine the latter offer is going to be overflowing with takers.</p>

<p>Always eager to please their “customers,” many universities have been happy to comply. A recent study at Princeton showed that nearly half of the grades handed out were in the A range, while As at Harvard have just reached an 18-year high. While I’d love to raise my nose at these east coast fops — especially since they both, in what must have been tremendous bureaucratic oversights, declined to spend four years with me —</p>

293

<p>We have had several recent Stanford grads as interns in this office. Not too impressive. I wonder why they seem so hardworking but lacking in judgment and creativity.</p>

294

<p>Wake Forest is WAY underrated. It’s unfortunate that it’s overshadowed by other schools in its area - UNC and Duke.</p>

295

<p>Duke at #5? (USNEWS): As my favorite professor said, "it is like the 13th chime of the crazy clock. Not only is it ridiculous in and of itself, it casts grave doubt on all that has gone before.</p>

296

<p>would someone rank the state schools? go psu!</p>

297

<p>I think USNW does that…</p>

298

<p>Overrated: Wustl, Duke, most of the Ivies.
Underrated: Rice, Caltech, U of Chicago.</p>

299

<p>It’s hard to overrate the Ivies and the near-Ivies. I feel they are all somewhat underrated on this board, and held in higher regard by the general public.</p>

<p>Thus, the following are underrated on this board…</p>

<h2> Ivies </h2>

<p>HYPCCDBP</p>

<h2> Near-Ivies</h2>

<p>MIT, Stanford, Duke, Caltech, Berkeley etc…</p>

<p>any more near-Ivies…maybe Northwestern?</p>

300

<p>The general public is filled with ignorance about the best colleges. That’s the only reason that everyone loves the “Ivy League” in this decade. The general public has heard of that. (But not any of the schools except HYP - the general public has never heard of U of Penn or Dartmouth or Brown.)</p>