<p>Top 5. I shouldn’t be so sexist.</p>
<p>“confused boy doesn’t know what he/she is saying. Harvard 5th? WUSTL up there? No JHU. ■■■■.”</p>
<p>I put Harvard 5th cos I went there for summer school and I wasn’t impressed at all. (At least that’s my opinion). I see that you’re from Baltimore,MD…okay, I get it. WUSTL is up there bec it is a good school. Comparing WUSTL to JHU is like comparing Harvard to Yale…there is no definite answer. So, stop complaining and don’t take it personally.</p>
<p>
Very few prospective students care much about academic program strength??!</p>
<p>Most posters on this board start a thread asking, “What are the best colleges for _______ (insert academic program)?”</p>
<p>I don’t see many posters asking, “Which student body has the highest average SAT scores?”
People only trot out those statistics when they want to get into arguments over which college is “better”. Also, I don’t know of many employers (outside of IB and management consulting) asking, or caring about, your SAT score…It happened 4 years ago…before you even went to college. Let’s talk about what you’ve actually accomplished while in college.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Bescraze: Aren’t the SAT is supposedly intended to measure how well a student will do in his FIRST year of college, freshman year only. </p>
<p>The relevance of the SAT fades rather rapidly once you pass intro chemistry 101 and move up into upper level electives major/concentration requirements. Harvard admits that it rejects plenty of well qualified applicants that can handle the tough Harvard course load…</p>
<p>Many prospective students care about the quality of education they are getting. Peer SAT scores and selectivity numbers are the probably the least of their worries when it comes to factors like location, social scene, accessibility of professors, costs of attendance, and those types of stuff.</p>
<p>I’m a little late, but I find theendusputrid’s post very strange and antagonistic, and feel like I should defend my beloved Tech. He clearly knows very little about what he’s writing about at any rate. I mean seriously, Caltech ONLY accepts top SAT and GPA students as part of an effort to trick people? Did he even read what he wrote to see if it sounded credible?? Maybe, just maybe, it could have something to do with providing an academic experience second to none in its rigor and difficulty. Affirmative action and sports recruiting would be interesting, but we don’t do it for an obvious reason; they would just fail out in droves. Because the students who already go here, students who dominated everything in math and science they ever touched in high school, are barely able to handle the difficulty sometimes. </p>
<p>Caltech is a niche school. It does very well in what it was designed to do; math, science, and engineering. Honestly, as I sit through classes with graduate students struggling to understand something me and my classmates already did as freshmen and first term sophomores, I have to wonder what other colleges are even teaching their students in undergrad. It’s great if your college or desired college believes in making ethnic diversity and intercollegiate sports priorities. They’re just not among ours.</p>
<p>When did being a meritocracy become such a bad thing in academia anyway? And no, we don’t actually just take the highest GPA and SAT scorers. Coincidentally, they happened to be among the brightest high schoolers in America, winning math and science competitions, taking years of college classes, doing lab research, and who knows what else. It just might seem like it’s by the numbers. Because at the risk of sounding incredibly snobby, if you can’t even get a 760 on the SAT II math, I don’t know how in the world you’re going to be able to hack through 5 terms of core math and physics. </p>
<p>Hey, I’m not making any argument as to how prestigious Caltech is, because frankly I couldn’t care what you think about that. However, anyone who thinks Caltech is designing its selectivity in an effort to raise it’s US News ranking is laughably ignorant. What’s important is that the people who chose to go here thought that it was right for them.</p>
<p>
Chicago is probably as good as Duke is but BERKELEY? Duke mops the floor with Berkeley in every area that matters like strength of the student body, diversity, research opportunities, undergraduate attention, civic engagement opportunities, alumni support, study abroad, quality of teaching, etc. Berkeley has more distinguished professors that bore their students to sleep because of their thick foreign accent and inability to relate to undergrads. Or better yet, an international TA teaches the class.</p>
<p>Duke is really underrated on this site. After HYPM and arguably Stanford, it’s the next best school alongside with Penn, Columbia and Dartmouth.</p>
<p>The PA of Duke is 4.4 at USNWR. That’s hardly mopping the floor of Berkeley who is at 4.7. In my opinion, PA is the most important factor in determining prestige. I am not saying that Duke shouldn’t be listed in the top 15, but it’s not in the same league as HYPSM. How you can say Duke is underrated on CC is beyond me. It seems like many Duke supporters here like to think they should be side by side with the very biggest names in academia of this country, while at the same time tearing down other prestigious universities. It’s a great school, but it’s lower PA scores make it not quite up there with the best of the best. And yes in my opinion, Duke is not as prestigious worldwide as Berkeley and Chicago.</p>
<p>You’re taking the least important statistic ever and using it against Duke. Do you know how subjective and flawed PA is? It’s an opinion poll for gods sake. You may have a point with international prestige, but I don’t see how that’s too relevant considering most graduates of the top schools stay in the US.</p>
<p>Bescraze, Berkeley grads are paid way more than Duke grads. If Duke is as prestigious or more prestigious than Berkeley, their grads would have been paid more by the employers. But we all know now that such is not the real case. Berkeley grads demands a higher pay and compensation packages than Duke grads do.</p>
<p>I, too, believe that Berkeley is more prestigious than Duke. When it comes to popularity, the lead of Berkeley over Duke on this area becomes even more evident.</p>
<p>Ring of Fire, the PA ranking shouldn’t be taken lightly. lease bear in mind that ALL respondents are people who have better knowledge and ideas than most of us here do.</p>
<p>Ring of Fire, </p>
<p>the PA ranking shouldn’t be taken lightly. Please bare in mind that ALL respondents of that survey are people who have better knowledge and ideas about the subject matter than most or all of us here do.</p>
<p>Least prestigious:</p>
<p>Vanderbilt</p>
<p>Most prestigious:
Princeton
Stanford
Oxford
Cambridge
Yale
Williams</p>
<p>CC threads like these are always immensely entertaining.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Getting in is the easy part. Getting the degree is where UChicago kills you…or at least kills fun as legend goes ;)</p>
<p>Rjko,
Sorry to disappoint you, but Duke is likely next in line after HYPSM when it comes to UNDERGRADUATE prestige. UC Berkeley is considered by most as a powerhouse for its graduate programs, but statistically they rarely match Duke (or many other privates) on various undergraduate metrics. </p>
<p>As for the Peer Assessment ratings and Duke, you frequently point out Duke’s “low” score. You know that many assign little to no value to the PA evaluations, yet despite their comparatively lower score, Duke has consistently ranked highly in the USWNR rankings. Going back to 1991, Duke ranks 7th even though, among the academic intelligentsia, its favorability rating has never been very high. Here are the historical ranking averages for the USNWR Top 30 for the 1991-2009 period:</p>
<p>Avg Rank 1991-2009 , Historical Average , College</p>
<p>1 , 1.42 , Harvard University
2 , 1.79 , Princeton University
3 , 2.42 , Yale University
4 , 4.47 , Stanford University
5 , 4.89 , Mass. Inst. of Technology
6 , 5.68 , Cal Inst. of Technology
7 , 6.26 , Duke University
8 , 8.32 , Univ. of Pennsylvania
9 , 8.74 , Dartmouth College
10 , 9.89 , Columbia University
11 , 11.16 , University of Chicago
12 , 12.21 , Cornell University
13 , 12.68 , Northwestern University
14 , 13.58 , Brown University
15 , 14.21 , Johns Hopkins University
16 , 15.32 , Rice University
17 , 15.53 , Washington University
18 , 18.00 , Emory University
19 , 18.94 , University of Notre Dame
20 , 19.83 , Vanderbilt University
21 , 20.53 , Univ. of California-Berk
22 , 21.26 , University of Virginia
23 , 22.00 , Georgetown University
24 , 22.84 , Carnegie Mellon Univ.
25 , 23.89 , University of Michigan
26 , 25.00 , Univ. of California-LA
27 , 26.63 , U. of N. Carolina-CH
28 , 26.71 , Tufts University
29 , 27.45 , Wake Forest University </p>
<p>VandySAE,
I like your thought in #1430. Keep all of the prestige-seekers away from Nashville! </p>
<p>Unfortunately, I think you’re fighting a losing battle as the secret is out on a pretty unique and balanced place that hopefully can retain its flavor in the years to come.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Really? Duke next in line for undergraduate prestige over:</p>
<ul>
<li>Caltech</li>
<li>Columbia</li>
<li>Dartmouth</li>
<li>UPenn</li>
<li>Brown</li>
</ul>
<p>There is a strong argument to be made for any or all of those schools to be next in line after HYPSM in discussing “undergraduate prestige”. Now granted Duke can certainly make a strong case to be one of those schools but it certainly is not a shoo-in by any means, and IMO prolly belongs somewhere at the tail-end of the list above.</p>
<p>“Undergraduate prestige”? High scoring SATers are a dime a dozen across the US.
How does this translate to prestige?</p>
<p>
Berkeley is also a powerhouse for its undergraduate programs, Hawkette.</p>
<h1>2 in undergraduate engineering programs and #3 in undergraduate business programs.</h1>
<p>Don’t waste your time on hawkette UCB. She doesn’t take into account PA scores of USNWR only the antiquated teachers excellence survey that was done by the same source over ten years ago. Duke’s PA isn’t low, it’s the same as the University of Michigan. It’s just not the same as HYPSM and Berkeley. I agree that Duke belongs in the “next line” of prestigious universities, along with about 15 other schools. I’m not disappointed at all hawkette. Duke is a great school. Unfortunately many of its supporters on CC like to overplay its importance as compared to its actual peer institutions. They have a tendancy to downplay other comparable schools, in an attempt to make their school look better. That i find objectionable. Not for myself, but to the young impressionable adults on CC who might actually believe some of the rubbish they are being told.</p>
<p>UCB. Berkeley is a powerhouse in so many disciplines at the undergraduate level that it would take me at least 15 minutes just to type them up. That’s what I find it so amusing about all of the critics who like to show statistics of endowments, faculty/student ratio, and the like and skip over the quality ratings of the actual departments at the top schools. You wont find Duke, or many other schools for that matter, rated over UCB in a lot of those rankings.</p>
<p>As for the Peer Assessment ratings and Duke, you frequently point out Duke’s “low” score. You know that many assign little to no value to the PA evaluations, yet despite their comparatively lower score, Duke has consistently ranked highly in the USWNR rankings. Going back to 1991, Duke ranks 7th even though, among the academic intelligentsia, its favorability rating has never been very high.</p>
<p>You sort of make my point with that statement hawkette. You discount the PA rankings because “academic intelligensia” doesn’t really know very much about the true ranking of a school. I have news for you, they could care less that USNWR rates Duke so highly. If it really mattered to them, their PA scores would be higher.</p>
<p>This is a pointless thread. There are many types of “prestige”.</p>
<p>1) Academic prestige. The PA score is a pretty accurate reflection of academic prestige. For undergrads aiming for graduate school, the PA is a pretty good indicator of how well regarded their undergraduate degrees will be by graduate school admissions committees. </p>
<p>2) Name recognition among the masses: Wit the exception of a handful of schools, like Harvard, MIT, Yale and maybe Princeton and Stanford, prestige among the masses is very regional. Few universities beyond a 500 mile radius or outside of one’s sports conference area will have real appeal among the masses.</p>
<p>3) Name recognition among the educated elites: Although regional biases still exist, more than 3-5 schools will be recognized by the majority of this group and the radius of recognition will spread beong 500 miles and sports conferences. </p>
<p>4) Corporate reputation: This is industry and location specific. Most large universities with strong Business and Engineering programs will attract major companies from all industries and all corners of the nation/world.</p>
<p>In short, “prestige” means different things to different people. Post #352 in the thread (written by yours truly no less) provides several different points of views.</p>