I have my doctorate in Neuroscience and have been a student, postdoc, and faculty at schools around the country. Pitt is one of the very best for undergrad neuroscience. It isn’t really even close. Pitt is a lot closer to Penn than Temple is to Pitt. In fact, I’ve taught at Penn and did research there and I’d recommend Pitt for undergrad neuroscience over Penn. Probably not for grad, but I have no problem saying the undergrad program at Pitt was superior to Penn’s in my observations and experience. Temple isn’t in the same neighborhood.
I’ll give you the latest NIH research funding numbers available, and keep in mind NIH funding is the absolute gold standard in the bio/health science fields because all of that money is a result of it having been successfully awarded after going through the most rigorously peer reviewed and highly competitive process out there. It is the research funding mechanisms that scientific careers are based on.
NIH funding for FY2015
UPenn: $458.0 million
Pitt: $436.1 million
Temple: $64.3 million
Those numbers speak for themselves about what is going on at the different schools, but that is well over a 6-fold difference in the level and volume of high caliber research being conducted in the bio and health sciences. And that is also why just saying “Carnegie level” whatever is absolutely meaningless. There are 100+ schools categorized in the highest research level in the Carnegie classification …it is classification not a ranking…and the disparity between any two of those schools can be even greater than 6-fold. If a school is bragging on their Carnegie classification, that typically means they’re not one of the higher profile research centers.
And yes, research isn’t unimportant for undergrads in majors like neuroscience because the field is a research discipline. If a student wants to do neuro or biology as a career, i.e. become a scientist, then they should get into a lab as an undergrad as soon as possible and do some publishable or presentable work. Not that opportunities don’t exist at Temple for that, there are just a lot more of them at Pitt.