Top 10 schools In U.S in your own opinion

UCBChemEGrad · January 12, 2009, 9:01pm

Dartmouth is a LAC with a business school.

pierre0913 · January 12, 2009, 9:01pm

if we go by Alumni giving rate, it’d go

<ol>
<li>Princeton</li>
<li>Dartmouth</li>
<li>Notre Dame</li>
<li>Yale</li>
<li>Harvard</li>
<li>Brown</li>
<li>Duke</li>
<li>USC</li>
</ol>

GiggitusMaximus · January 12, 2009, 9:08pm

Fitting the criteria of in a city

Seattle U baby
Fordham
NYU
Columbia
Loyola U Chicago
U of Chicago
Northwestern

gellino · January 12, 2009, 10:14pm

It also has a Med school, engineering school and many PhD programs. Not that it really is that relevant in evaluating the UG experience.

golacs · January 12, 2009, 10:27pm

If Dartmouth were not in the IVY league, Would It have still been respected such, such…? I really doubt.

It is an overrated school.

hmom5 · January 12, 2009, 10:56pm

Dartmouth really shouldn’t be judged in the same breath as most of the ivies, which are research institutions focused on research and graduate studies.

Dartmouth is in league with the top LACs, which is what it functions as for undergrads. In that league it is the most selective and probably offers the best undergrad education.

Overrated? Top students, top profs who teach, no TAs, best study abroad programs around, the D plan allowing more study abroad and internships, world class campus, highest salaries…IMO, greatly underrated for undergrad.

aabbcc1789 · January 12, 2009, 11:01pm

lol yea i really doubt that a lot of ppl would apply to dartmouth if it wasn’t an ivy haha…

hmom5 · January 12, 2009, 11:14pm

You’re probably right! The unfortunate fact is that kids line up to apply to Harvard and it has the highest yield of any school in the land. It also has the lowest student satisfaction rate among all ivies and top colleges. I went to Wharton, if I’d had a clue back then I could have gotten where I wanted to go in the much more enjoyable package that is Dartmouth, I could have had a lot more fun and a lot less stress. Enough said.

afitscher · January 12, 2009, 11:17pm

Emory anyone?

gellino · January 13, 2009, 9:38am

I was in the exact opposite camp, not having heard of Wharton until there were a bunch of grads in my IB analyst class from there. I guess ignorance was bliss for me in that regard. It’s one thing to go into corporate finance or consulting once senior year arrives and you need to get a job, but to me it’s another to desire to be a corporate drone at 17.

nyccard · January 13, 2009, 1:17pm

Alumni giving rate is a poor proxy for alumni satisfaction. It is a measure of how solicitous an alumni association is, more than anything else. The giving rate PER alumnus/a is a more accurate index, though still flawed.

nyccard · January 13, 2009, 1:55pm

The top LACs are fine schools and have their place in higher education, but they just don’t measure up to HYPS.

First, they lack the dynamic diversity you see at HYPS. They have very limited appeal outside the status quo. Most URMs and low income students haven’t heard of, let alone want to attend the LACs. Once these students find out about the LACs, they’re generally turned off by the homogeneity, which in turn further limits the appeal.

Second, they don’t offer the tremendous resources and facilities available at HYPS. This is especially problematic if you’re interested in the sciences and engineering. Some say that LAC professors are better teachers, I say that teaching and scholarship isn’t inversely related. Just because the HYPS professors are the best in their field doesn’t necessarily mean they cannot teach. In especially cutting-edge fields of study, research informs teaching.

Third, they enable students with excessive hand-holding. College is a time to develop independence and initiative. But why do it if the LACs take care of your every want? At HYPS, they ensure your well-being without micromanaging.

hmom5 · January 13, 2009, 1:57pm

I disagree nyccard. The same schools have had the highest rates for decades. Do you really think Harvard and Yale can’t muster an effort to compete with Princeton and Dartmouth?

nyccard · January 13, 2009, 2:02pm

Maybe Harvard and Yale care more about how much money they raise than how many alumni donated. In recent years, Harvard and Yale (and Stanford, for that matter) have consistently out-fundraised Princeton and the rest of the Ivy League. That’s the bottomline, no?

nyccard · January 13, 2009, 2:13pm

Add “and what percentage of” to “alumni…”

kwu · January 13, 2009, 2:34pm

Class of 2012, Ethnic Distribution

Amherst College
20 % Pell Grant Recipients
11 % African American
11 % Asian American
11 % Hispanic
6 % Multiracial
9% International

Princeton University
13.7 % Children of Princeton Alumni
7.6 % African American
16.7 % Asian American
7.6 % Hispanic
5.6 % Multiracial
11.3 % Ineternational

Endowments:
Amherst College: 1.66 billion
Princeton University: 15.8 billion

Very perceptive. Please remind me why anyone would enroll at a Liberal Arts College to studying engineering.

That’s your personal opinion. I would argue that the purpose of college is to help young men and women become open-minded critical thinkers in terms of how they express themselves: through writing, speaking, and artistic performance. I would imagine that someone needs to already have been an independent learner who takes initiative to have been admitted to any of the best colleges and universities. My condolences also go out to those students of HYPS who can’t even get a moment out of their professors to ask a question, and who are failing because of a negligent administration.

nyccard · January 13, 2009, 2:43pm

I was talking about top LACs in general not Amherst in particular. Is Amherst the only top LAC in the country? Students at 25-50 other LACs would disagree. Interestingly, Princeton is probably the least diverse of HYPS, but whatever.

IBclass06 · January 13, 2009, 3:06pm

In response to nyccard, sakky sums it up more eloquently than I could.

sakky:

Look, the truth is, all research univeristies, Harvard included, have some tenured profs who are just absolutely TERRIBLE teachers. They’re brilliant researchers, but they’re teaching skills are terrible. Either they’re completely incoherent in speaking, or they clearly hate teaching and are only doing it because they are obligated to, or they deliberately choose to spend no time in preparing lectures, etc.

Consider some of these quotes from Thomas Sowell, himself a graduate from Harvard (an extremely impressive feat as he is an African-American who got into Harvard in the days before affirmative action when the entire higher education system was still racist).

"For example, Time magazine summarized criticisms of top Harvard professors as “too engaged in their own research, too busy with outside consulting or just too lordly to bother with anything so trivial as an undergraduate.” …Much the same picture emerges repeatedly in the Confidential Guide published by Harvard students, where another professor of government was described as “completely disorganized” in his lectures and “inept at managing classroom discussions.” Words like “disorganized” and “rambling” appear again and again in descriptions of the lectures of particular Harvard professors in fields as disparate as music, anthropology, and women’s studies. In a course on genetics, both the professor and his teaching assistants are described as “often inadequately prepared” and in an introductory chemistry course, "lectures have bordered on the incomprehensible…“A research star who actually considers teaching worthwhile,” “one of the few professors who answers his own telephone,” “everything that Harvard is supposed to be, but usually isn’t.”

Important as lectures are, opportunities for interaction with professors outside the classroom-in their offices or at informal gatherings-can also be an important part of an educational experience. However, according to a distinguished accreditation panel visiting Harvard in 1987, “only the most aggressive and persistent undergraduate” is likely to have any “faculty-student interaction outside of the classroom” with senior Harvard professors. Harvard is by no means unique in this respect, nor are junior faculty members or even teaching assistants always accessible at research universities. The junior faculty and the graduate students who serve as teaching assistants at many universities have other distractions and pressures that keep them from investing great amounts of time in teaching. Their whole future and that of their families hang in the balance while they try to complete their research, so as to establish themselves in their professions. Many graduate students never get the Ph.D. degree for which they have sacrificed years of their lives. Most junior faculty members at leading research universities are let go after a few years, except for those rare individuals whose research output marks them as stars to be given tenure. In short, junior as well as senior faculty at many universities have strong incentives to give teaching a low priority. The very process by which a top university maintains its prestige and visibility in the world can undermine the education of undergraduates.

The teaching role of graduate students at universities is far larger than many people-especially parents and high school students-realize. Harvard has about 400 people teaching who are not faculty members but teaching assistants, teaching fellows, and the like-usually graduate students, understandably preoccupied with completing their own education. Even when called “teaching assistants,” they do much more than simply assist professors with grading exams or preparing science labs. Most of the classes in introductory calculus at Harvard are taught by teaching assistants. Many teaching assistants are foreign, and a recurring complaint in the Harvard students’ Confidential Guide is that their English is often hard to understand. As for the advisory role of these non-faculty teachers, according to the Harvard Salient (a student newspaper), “academic advising can be a sad joke, often consisting of nothing more than a harried tutor’s cursory glance at the study card. Many of us qualify as ‘phantom students’ who go through Harvard without ever meeting a full professor.”

Those professors who enjoy teaching more than research are likely to seek out the small liberal arts college-or have to go there after being forced out of research universities for not publishing enough. Winning the “teacher of the year” award at a research university will carry very little weight when time comes to have one’s contract renewed or to be voted on for tenure. In 1987, a Harvard professor whose credentials included such an award was notified that his contract would not be renewed. I personally know three other professors at three different institutions who were notified that their contracts would not be renewed after they had won “teacher of the year” awards. One referred to the award as “travel money.” The issue of teaching versus research has been debated innumerable times and is unlikely to be settled any time soon. What is important to someone seeking good teaching is to find out where it is most likely to be found. At a top research university, where the professor knows that “publish or perish” are his career choices, it is unrealistic to expect that most will make teaching their top priority. To some, teaching is purely incidental."

Nor is this criticism specific to Harvard. Sowell also talks about UCBerkeley:

“The great state universities have similar problems, often to an even greater extent than Harvard and other large private universities. The University of California at Berkeley is unsurpassed as a research institution, its faculty have received many Nobel Prizes, its graduate programs rank above those of Harvard in several fields, and Berkeley is often rated number one among the nation’s universities. However, none of this translates into an outstanding undergraduate education. At Berkeley, there are estimated to be more than twice as many graduate students teaching as at Harvard. In addition, Berkeley has large numbers of part-time junior faculty, who support themselves by having other jobs-and therefore other demands on their time besides teaching. Finally, the huge size of the university-more than 30,000 students-ensures that undergraduate education is impersonal, bureaucratic, and sometimes chaotic.”

[Sowell:</a> Choosing a College Chapter 2](<a href=“Sowell: Choosing a College Chapter 2”>Sowell: Choosing a College Chapter 2)

The point is that many research universities, Harvard included, have uneven teaching quality in that the profs are not particularly interested in research. That’s not to say that everything is perfect at the LAC’s. But I think in general, the profs at the LAC’s tend to care more about teaching than the profs at the research universities.

Heck I myself was just talking to Rakesh Khurana, professor at Harvard Business School, and he himself stated that doesn’t think the teaching of Harvard undergrads is very good and that the teaching is better at the LAC’s.

sakky:

I mean that the educational environment is different. Now, obviously there are certain schools that are classified as research universities that are very LAC-ish, like Dartmouth and Brown, and to some extent Princeton. Hence, it’s a difference of degree (no pun intended). But what it basically boils down to is that the LAC’s strongly emphasize teaching and personal attention. Class sizes are small and are often times seminar-based. Professors are selected for their teaching ability, not their research. And the whole environment is built to foster undergraduate teaching and learning. As an undergrad, you don’t feel like you’re a second-class citizen to the graduate students.

Anybody’s who been to a research university knows the feeling of getting a prof who’s a brilliant researcher but who either can’t teach well, or doesn’t WANT to teach well (because he feels that it’s not important and he’d rather get back to his research). Anybody remember the movie “A Beautiful Mind” where Russell Crowe taught at MIT and was just being a complete jerk to his students? He didn’t care about teaching the class, he didn’t want to be there, and he saw that task as not only useless, but downright annoying. The sad thing is that it’s not just people like John Nash who behave that way. That’s the sort of attitude you will sometimes get from faculty members at research universities - that they’re not really interested in teaching. I won’t say that bad teaching never happens at a LAC, but I will submit that it happens far less often. The fact is, LAC faculty members are not hired for their research prowess, but rather for their teaching skill. Hence, great research can’t make up for poor teaching.

Hence, LAC’s feature small, intimate classes, faculty members who are selected for their teaching skill, extremely strong culture and community bonding (because of the small student body), highly personalized attention. On the other hand, it is true that LAC’s don’t offer the vast array of resources that the bigname research universities offer. Yet I think the biggest issue is that the LAC’s just don’t have the big prestigious name brand. MIT is famous. Harvey Mudd and Cooper Union are not. And I understand that for some people, name-brand and pop-culture prestige is important.

The point is, when I say that they cater to different people, what I mean is what are you going to school for? If you are going to school for the brand-name, or you want to go somewhere that has lots and lots of students and lots of resources (but not necessarily lots of resources per capita), and you don’t really care about teaching quality or interpersonal attention, then you should go to a research university. However, if you can forgo the brand name, and you want a highly intimate educational environment with small class sizes and strong teaching, then you should look for a LAC.

sakky:

Well, there are significant downsides to being at many large research universities too. Let’s take Berkeley as an example. You say that LAC’s offer limited courses. Well, at Berkeley, many students cannot get into the courses that they want. Who cares if your school has lots of courses if you can’t actually get into the ones you want? Your school then becomes, in effect, a school of limited courses. Same is true of profs. There are profs at Berkeley who haven’t taught an undergrad course in years, sometimes decades. To give you an example, take Yuan Lee, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry in 1986. He is emeritus now, but back when he was still a full prof, he stopped teaching undergrads basically ever since he won the Nobel. Berkeley let him get away with it. Plenty of other Berkeley profs have not taught undergrad courses in years. Nor do I mean to single Berkeley out. Many other large public universities exhibit the same problems.

Nor do I see a small peer group as necessarily being a bad thing. I think this depends on the person. Caltech, for example, has extremely small peer groups - as Caltech has fewer undergrads than even most LAC’s do. But that doesn’t seem to hurt the school spirit of Caltech. Most Caltech grads seem to appreciate the experience. The same could be said for a place like Princeton, which is also not a particularly large school in terms of the number of students. Some people strongly prefer a small environment. I think it’s for the same reasons that some people like living in small towns as opposed to big cities.

About the research thing, I wonder how much it matters. After all, plenty of students, even math/science students, have no intention of becoming researchers anyway. For example, I know people who just wanted to study math/science so that they could teach it in high school. You don’t need to do cutting edge research to be a high school teacher. Plenty of other people just want to pursue it as an intellectual interest before heading off to, say, law or medical school, or going off to investment banking or consulting jobs. If you don’t actually intend to pursue math/science as a living, then who cares how much cutting-edge research you are exposed to?

And then there is the high success rate of LAC’s in getting students into the top PhD programs of math/science, measured as a percentage of grads getting into such programs. I think that demonstrates emphatically that whatever the LAC’s may be lacking in cutting-edge research evidently doesn’t hurt the students in terms of getting into top doctoral programs. For example, Caltech publishes its PhD commencement data, showing where its new PhD students got their undergrad degrees. In many years, the combination of Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, and Wellesley have more alumni getting PhD’s at Caltech than UCLA has, despite the fact that UCLA clearly has many times undergrads than the combination of those 4 LAC’s, and despite the fact that UCLA is local to Caltech and thus would be expected to send plenty of their undergrads to Caltech. I am sure that there are plenty of UCLA grads who wanted to go to Caltech to get their PhD, but were not admitted because Caltech decided to admit somebody from a LAC instead.

sakky:

My argument to what you say is simple. If what the LAC do is so great why have they not risen in the eyes of industry? Why is it year after year the top engineers come from the top research institutes, not the top LAC. the statistics can be seen on by US News. industry (who hires on engineering ability) prefers the top research universities over the LACs

Oh really? Is that a fact? Are you really sure that industry prefers those who are coming out of the top research universities?

I’ll put it to you this way. The average salary of all graduates (of all fields - engineering, science, math, etc.) of Harvey Mudd in 2003 was $53,900.

[HMC</a> Highlights](<a href=“http://www.hmc.edu/highlights/]HMC”>http://www.hmc.edu/highlights/)

Let’s compare that to an elite engineering research university - oh, I don’t know, Berkeley. Forget about all the humanities and social science majors, and let’s just look at the starting salaries earned by just the engineering students at Berkeley in 2003.

EECS - $55923
Mechanical Engineering - $50447
Chemical Engineering - $50517
Civil Engineering - $48312
BioEngineering - $41571
Materials Science - $41337

[Career</a> Destination Survey Reports 2003](<a href=“http://career.berkeley.edu/CarDest/2003Majors.stm]Career”>http://career.berkeley.edu/CarDest/2003Majors.stm)

So look at what we’re talking about here. The data indicates that the average Mudd grad actually got HIGHER salaries than the average engineering discipline at Berkeley except for EECS, and, like I said, that Mudd data includes some people who majored in the natural sciences, who tend to earn less than do engineers. Let’s also keep in mind that Northern California tends to be a more expensive place to live (and hence offers higher salaries) than does SoCal.

Now you might be thinking, well maybe there’s just something strange going on with Berkeley. Ok fine, then let’s take a look at the Gold Standard of engineering research universities, MIT. What kinds of salaries did bachelor’s degree recipients in engineering from MIT receive in 2003?

course 1 (Civil Engineering - no information available
course 2 (Mechanical Engineering) - $48353
course 3 (Materials Science) - $51000
course 6 ( EECS) - $59703
course 10 (Chemical Engineering) - $46500
course 13 (Ocean Engineering) - $51000
course 16 (Aero/Astronautical Engineering) - $48477
course 22 (Nuclear Engineering) - $37000

<a href=“http://web.mit.edu/career/www/infostats/graduation03.pdf[/url]”>http://web.mit.edu/career/www/infostats/graduation03.pdf</a>

The Harvey Mudd salary data and the MIT engineering salary data look pretty darn comparable to me.

So, spe07, you tell me what’s going on. Here are these employers paying Mudd grads comparable salaries to, and in many cases, HIGHER salaries than, engineering grads from the elite research universities. What’s going on? Why is that? I thought you said that the industry prefers the top research universities over the top LAC’s. So then why were companies paying such high salaries to the Mudders? Are those companies just being stupid in throwing their money away?

Now, look. I’m not saying this stuff just because I’m a Mudd fanatic. I’ve never been to Mudd, I have no affiliation with Mudd. In fact, my affiliation is far more aligned with the big research universities. I’m not saying that everybody should go to a LAC or that LAC’s are perfect.

However, what I am saying is that we ought to have more respect for the elite LAC’s. The elite LAC’s do a pretty darn good job at teaching and preparing their students for jobs or for academia. Obviously when you’re talking about elite engineering, you can’t talk about LAC’s like Williams or Amherst, because they don’t even offer engineering. But you can and should talk about LAC’s that do offer strong engineering like Mudd does.

I also boost the LAC’s because I detect a very strong whiff of compromise inherent in this conversation. What I mean is that many research universities compromise some teaching acumen for research fecundity, and they’ve gotten their undergraduate students to accept this compromise as somehow “justified”. Basically, what I see time and time again is that whenever the shortcomings of the teaching ability of a particular research university are pointed out, the university administrators will inevitably pull out the old refrain that that’s the price you pay to be around research greatness. The unwritten Faustian bargain is that the undergrads have to (sometimes) put up with shoddy teaching in order to enhance their opportunities to be around top researchers and large research projects, and supposedly this proximity to research will enhance their potential to enter academic graduate programs. The implication is that if you don’t go to a research university, you won’t have an opportunity to participate in research yourself, and so you wont’ be competitive for a PhD program. Tell that to the Harvey Mudd alumni, which have the the highest rate of doctoral completion of any undergraduate program in the country.

“According to data from the National Research Council and the U.S. Department of Education, Harvey Mudd College has the highest percentage of graduates who go on to earn doctoral degrees in science and technology.”

[Harvey</a> Mudd College](<a href=“http://www.mentornet.net/Partners/Campuses/CampusInfo.aspx?CampusCode=HMCXX]Harvey”>http://www.mentornet.net/Partners/Campuses/CampusInfo.aspx?CampusCode=HMCXX)

“Everyone has heard of M.I.T. and Cal Tech, but most laymen would be surprised to learn that Harvey Mudd College has a higher percentage of its graduates go on to receive doctorates than either of these renowned institutions.”

[Sowell:</a> Choosing a College Chapter 4](<a href=“http://www.leaderu.com/alumni/sowell-choosing/chpter04.html]Sowell:”>Sowell: Choosing a College Chapter 4)

"An even better comparison would be among all colleges and universities, using percentages of students continuing on to the Ph.D., to allow for differences in their respective sizes. On this basis, the liberal arts colleges outdo the universities decisively when it comes to the proportion of their graduates who go on to complete the doctorate. For a 30-year period, the following institutions had more than one-eighth of their graduates go on to receive the Ph.D.:

<ol>
<li>Harvey Mudd College</li>
<li>California Institute of Technology</li>
<li>Reed College</li>
<li>University of Chicago</li>
<li>Massachusetts Institute of Technology</li>
<li>Swarthmore College</li>
<li>Haverford College</li>
<li>Oberlin College</li>
<li>Harvard University</li>
<li>New College of Florida</li>
<li>University of California at San Diego</li>
<li>* Amherst College</li>
<li>* Carleton College</li>
<li>* Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art</li>
<li>* Pomona College</li>
<li>Rice University</li>
<li>Brandeis University</li>
<li>Eckerd College</li>
<li>Wabash College</li>
<li>Bryn Mawr College
*Tied in ranking.
Source: Change magazine</li>
</ol>

Liberal arts colleges outnumber universities 10 to 6 among these 20 institutions, with the other 4 being engineering schools (Harvey Mudd, Cal Tech, M.I.T., Cooper Union). Such renowned universities as Yale, Stanford, and Princeton do not have as high a proportion of their alumni go on to receive Ph.D.'s as any of the colleges on this list."

[Choosing</a> a College - Chapter 3](<a href=“http://www.amatecon.com/etext/cac/cac-ch03.html]Choosing”>Choosing a College - Chapter 3)

So then that simply begs the question - why are all these doctoral programs admitting such a high percentage of graduates from the LAC’s, if the LAC’s are no good? Are the doctoral programs being stupid? I’m sure there are MIT students who really wanted to go to a particular doctoral program but got turned down in favor of a Mudder. Was the program being stupid in doing that?

Luckie_Starchild · January 13, 2009, 3:08pm

As institutions, LACs have more “student run” aspects and are less bureaucratic IMO. I don’t they are more micromanaged than universities; in fact, there may be more leadership opportunities for students.

kdm88 · January 14, 2009, 3:17pm

Sort of in order…

Amherst
Stanford
Swarthmore
Princeton
Yale
Williams
MIT
Harvard
Cal Tech
Pomona

Top 10 schools In U.S in your own opinion

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