<p>This topic has already been done to death. Here’s 41 pages of it:</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=228121[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=228121</a></p>
<p>Then we should make 42 pages</p>
<p>Overrated:
Notre Dame–very selective college but not a truly great, comprehensive university. There’s a reason that their faculty voted overwhelmingly to join the Big Ten’s academic consortium.</p>
<p>Miami of Ohio–Undistinguished faculty, no graduate programs, less selective than Ohio State but still trying to milk that quarter century old “public ivy” book (of which they, along with Vermont, were only included as a controversy creating gimmick) for everything it’s worth</p>
<p>Underrated:
Ohio State–still burdened by lingering perceptions from the mid sixties and seventies when a hostile governor deliberately tried to dumb it down</p>
<p>Washington–like Ohio State, a great public flagship that doesn’t seem to get the attention it deserves, probably because of the focus on the nearby UC system.</p>
<p>Chicago–it may seem odd to say that U of C is underrated but because it doesn’t have the same social cachet as HYP (or Stanford/Duke) it’s often overlooked</p>
<p>Underrated: Bryn Mawr, Smith, Oberlin, Wesleyan, Macalester, Colorado College. Schools that soak up the gems that the ivies and other elites were too dumb to throw out. Most people consider them second-rate in comparison to elites, but I can’t tell you how many brilliant people I know who cared about more important things than their GPA and attend these schools.</p>
<p>Overrated: HYPSMC. Honestly, when will the acronym stop growing?</p>
<p>Inconsistently rated: Chicago, WashU, Michigan. Depending on whom you talk to, these schools are either pedestal-worthy or about as high-quality as the gum on the bottom of your shoe. Chicago gets flak for relatively low career placement rankings and having a high admissions rate, WashU for its waitlist, and Michigan for being a public school.</p>
<p>Billbank,</p>
<p>Let me count the ways why people think WASH U , not WUSTL is overated.</p>
<ol>
<li>It’s in the Midwest</li>
<li> It’s only 150 years old as opposed to 300 years old.</li>
<li> It doesn’t have legions of famous alums and very few children of famous people.</li>
<li> It’s not on a coast or near one.</li>
<li> I’m speculating on this one - the people who say it is overrated come from highly competitive schools and the kids from their schools that go to Wash U instead of HYP aren’t the same caliber of student as the ones that go to HYP. That’s not to say Wash U doesn’t have students that are just as intelligent as HYP admits, only that those posters that think Wash U is overrated are making that judgement based on the students from their schools. Anecdotal, in other words.</li>
<li>It has only one TIPPYTOP ranked graduate or professional school and that would be the medical school. Go figure!</li>
<li> And most important of all - it has outranked several Ivies - it has upset the status quo.The overrrated title was REALLY hot in 2003 when Wash U suddenly jumped from 12 to 9 and beat several Ivies. </li>
</ol>
<p>Other than that I don’t know how anyone could personally know what schools are overrated unless they had taught at, attended, or sent their money along with their kid to all the schools in question.</p>
<p>overrated: UC’s for people in west coast, northeast schools for people on east coast</p>
<p>This is tought, but I’d say:</p>
<p>Overrated: Stanford, George Washington, and University of Michigan.</p>
<p>Underrated: University of Chicago, Claremont Mckenna, and Yeshiva University (both Wake Forest and Brandeis were tempting).</p>
<p>lizschup -</p>
<p>I don’t have a dog in this fight – I personally think Wash U is an excellent school. But IMO the main reason why Wash U is often regarded as overrated is because it has a reputation for having boosted it’s USNWR and other rankings by gaming the system and by aggressively marketing itself to prospective students – leading the the suspicion, rightly or wrongly, that its rise of the last couple of decades is driven more by marketing puffery and rankings hype than by real increases in excellence.</p>
<p>Thanks for your input lizschup and coureur. Coureur, where do you think WashU should rank on USNWR?</p>
<p>“Theres two things they don’t teach you in Harvard Business School. One is to deal with defeat and two is how to use a shotgun. But I’m going to do BOTH right now to prove how amazing I am” - The Simpsons Movie</p>
<p>xD</p>
<p>Overrated: Stanford, UC Berkeley, Cornell
Underrated: Yeshiva University, CSUN, SFU</p>
<p>how is dartmouth overrated?</p>
<p>overrated: georgetown, ucb, harvard, notre dame</p>
<p>underrated: LACs in general, people are afraid of going to a school that not everyone hears about, emory</p>
<p>csun is underrated?</p>
<p>There’s a report I’ve seen mentioned on CC —don’t have the link — on American research universities. I think it’s out of ASU. Washu is in the top 10 of private American research univerisities and in the top 15 of research universities public and private. That is not a result of “market puffery.” That is a nonbiased measure of academic excellence using measurable data instead of what-I-think attitudes and opinions about marketing or admission policies. </p>
<p>Washu also shows up well in international rankings of global research universities, surveys where the ranking is mainly based on dollars available for research or for the work produced and cited by faculty. It’s too bad these ways of measuring the excellence of universities is so roundly ignored on CC. But it is, so you get opinions like those here stated that washu’s academic excellence can be sniffed at as the result of “puffery.”</p>
<p>^ See page 8:</p>
<p><a href=“http://mup.asu.edu/research2006.pdf[/url]”>http://mup.asu.edu/research2006.pdf</a></p>
<p>No, they much rather worry about 10 points on the SAT.</p>
<p>Thank you for the link, 45 percenter. I’m stuck on a dial-up (don’t ask!) and couldn’t bear to go looking for the info on google.</p>
<p>wow, 2861 views so far!!!</p>
<p>a lot of publics on this forum : Wisconsin especially, seem very underrated</p>