<p>
I like this for the most part, although it’s dripping with Berkeley bias</p>
<p>UCB I believe, bases his list off the PA scores at USNWR. In all fairness to him, Berkeley is that famous worldwide. In my opinion, it’s only on CC based on USNWR rankings that it isn’t rated as high at it really should be.</p>
<p>Yep, my list is USNWR’s 2009 Peer Assessment score. Berkeley stands alone. :-)</p>
<p>
If that were entirely true, do you think I would put 'furd at No. 1?</p>
<p>Remember, academic and lay prestige can differ widely (and lay prestige can be further divided into general society and a more educated/informed sub-group).</p>
<p>^ Yeah, yeah, yeah…my list is obviously more academic prestige than “street” prestige.</p>
<p>Berkeley is like a mega academic powerhouse… My Harvard friends spoke very highly of UC Berkeley… </p>
<p>"1. Harvard, Stanford, MIT
4. Yale, Princeton
6. Berkeley
7. Caltech, Chicago
9. Columbia, Penn, Johns Hopkins, Cornell
13. Duke, Michigan
15. Dartmouth, Brown, Northwestern, Virginia "</p>
<p>I like this list a lot. Academic wise, I think Michigan and Virginia are top notch schools with many different departments ranked among the top ten. It’s good to see three of the top public schools among the top 15 for academic peer assessment. I feel US News is kinda bias towards private schools with rich endowments lol… 
</p>
<p>IMHO, Georgetown is a really prestigious school as well… I wonder why CCers do not consider it among the top 15 for prestige…</p>
<p>^ Georgetown has significantly more lay prestige than it does w/in the academic community.</p>
<p>Here again where are we talking about lay street prestige? Does anyone here on CC honestly believe that certain schools rated in the top 15 in USNWR not listed above, really have as much lay street prestige in Europe and Asia where the vast majority of people in this world reside?</p>
<p>In Europe, Oxford and Cambridge are highly rated.</p>
<p>you guys should check this out:</p>
<p>[Comments</a> on “Think we’ve got it bad? U. Chicago has it worse” - The Daily Princetonian](<a href=“http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2000/03/07/399/comments/]Comments”>http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2000/03/07/399/comments/)</p>
<p>Even Princeton recognizes Uchicago as rigorous and prestigious…</p>
<p>I asked my family (who live in the caribbean) what schools in the US they’ve heard of and they were only able to name four: harvard, princeton, yale, columbia. None of them even knew what Stanford and Oxford were.</p>
<p>so there’s international recognition/prestige for you.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Oh dude… At Hopkins, we have a better meme than “Where fun goes to die…”</p>
<p>“Getting into JHU is like unprotected sex; happy that you got in, sad that you came…■■■”</p>
<p>That article is also dated March 7th, 2000. 
I’m pretty sure life has changed for the better over the past 9 years at UChicago</p>
<p>
:rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes:</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-chicago/666260-daily-princetonian-meets-u-chicago.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-chicago/666260-daily-princetonian-meets-u-chicago.html</a></p>
<p>
Recognition and prestige are not the same thing. NYU is very, very well-known abroad, but that doesn’t mean it’s more prestigious than, say, Cornell.</p>
<p>We can measure a university’s ability to attract brains and money, using the following 4 steps to calculate a composite ranking:</p>
<ol>
<li>rank the schools by the average SAT scores of its students
(source: [College</a> Rankings - Home](<a href=“http://www.ordoludus.com/]College”>http://www.ordoludus.com/))</li>
<li>rank the schools by the average endowment per student
(source: [List</a> of colleges and universities in the United States by endowment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._colleges_and_universities_by_endowment]List”>List of colleges and universities in the United States by endowment - Wikipedia))</li>
<li>rank the schools by the number of Nobel Prizes and other major awards won by the faculty
(source: [ARWU2008](<a href=“http://www.arwu.org/rank2008/ARWU2008_TopAmer(EN).htm]ARWU2008[/url]”>http://www.arwu.org/rank2008/ARWU2008_TopAmer(EN).htm)</a>)</li>
<li>average the 4 ranks together, and sort the resulting list</li>
</ol>
<p>The ranking that results is not necessarily a good ranking for educational quality, because it fails to account for all sorts of factors such as student-faculty ratio. But it seems to be a fairly decent objective measure for features that have a strong impact on perceived prestige. Here is the list, with component ranks (for SAT,EPS,and faculty awards) in parentheses:</p>
<p>1 Harvard University (2,4,1)
2 Princeton University (3,1,7)
2 Stanford University (5,5,2)
2 California Institute of Technology (1,7,5)
5 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (4,6,4)
6 Yale University (6,2,9)
7 University of Chicago (12,10,8)
8 Columbia University (11,22,6)
9 Duke University (10,14,25)
9 Northwestern University (15,11,23)
11 Cornell University (20,20,10)
11 Washington University in St. Louis (14,15,22)
13 University of Pennsylvania (9,32,13)
14 UC Berkely (22,32,3)
15 Johns Hopkins University (16,32,17)</p>
<p>Note that 3 of these schools (Cornell, Berkeley, Hopkins) have more than 1 component score that would have knocked them off the top 15. 5 also-rans have at least 1 component score that would have placed them on the list: </p>
<h1>16 Rice (8,3,58) ,</h1>
<h1>17 Dartmouth (7,8,59),</h1>
<h1>18 Brown (13,19,46),</h1>
<h1>20 Emory (17,13,59),</h1>
<h1>24 Notre Dame (21,9,100).</h1>
<p>7 of the 15 would make the list by any of the 3 component measures, and all have a composite score in the top 10:</p>
<p>1 Harvard University (2,4,1)
2 Princeton University (3,1,7)
2 Stanford University (5,5,2)
2 California Institute of Technology (1,7,5)
5 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (4,6,4)
6 Yale University (6,2,9)
7 University of Chicago (12,10,8)</p>
<h1>19 Vanderbilt (29,21,34) and the University of Chicago are not even close by these measures. Chicago is #1 in the USA, and #2 in the world, according to perhaps the most prestigious element of the “awards” metric: the number of Nobel Prize winners affiliated with the faculty, staff, and alumni.</h1>
<p>tk, I am not sure I agree with your criteria, and the SAT link you provide is either outof date or innacurate.</p>
<p>haha, this thread is a drug for prestige whores :]</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>Yes, the ordoludus.com table I used appears to be 2006 data, so it is a little out of date. I used it because I wanted to be able to site my source with a single link, and it was the most convenient site I could find for that. </p>
<p>The significant thing is not the precise scores, but the relative rankings. If you look up and plug in more up-to-date SAT numbers, I think you will wind up with the same (or nearly the same) set of 15 schools in my composite ranking, even though individual schools will move up or down a little in the SAT-only rankings.</p>
<p>As for the criteria, what’s not to like? What set of measurable criteria would be better?</p>
<p>I started out by asking, What are the essential features of a university? My answer: Students, Teachers, Facilities. Then I ask, What are the qualities of these features that should command respect? My answer: intelligence of the students, distinction of the faculty, and … I’m not sure exactly what about the facilities, but they should be well built, well maintained, and well run. That takes money. </p>
<p>Then I look for simple, easily-documented metrics for those 3 features.</p>
<p>Of course, prestige is a subjective thing, and is affected by public awareness. The most exclusive school in the country may well be Deep Springs College. How many people even have heard of it, or Olin?</p>
<p>Now, when it came to my own child, who is a well-qualified senior in high school, I did not strongly recommend any of the schools on this “top 15” list. He applied to 6 small, selective LACs, none of which is exactly a household name (not among the general public anyway). And we completely skipped over many of the most “prestigious” ones.</p>
<p>^^
I like your criteria. I mean, there will never be a set hard fast rule for criteria, but I hope we can at the very least agree which criteria are bad. I’d say yours are pretty sound.</p>
<p>Also, all the data may be slightly outdated, average SAT scores do not change much each year-especially relatively, and the way tk calculates rank, the difference would be negligible if any. Which is another reason why I like the rank, it won’t fluctuate much because colleges can’t really change their quality quickly.</p>
<p>Alexandre-I looked at the data, I think they made a typo with Stanford-1247, I think they meant 1447. The rest seems pretty cogent.</p>
<p>
Your use of Nobel prize “data” is an obvious weakness, one that caused me to dismiss your ranking out of hand. Certain schools (Chicago, I’m looking at you) have a rather shameless habit of claiming Nobel laureates even if those scholars have only the most tenuous ties to the university (for example, researching there for a year or two after earning the prize). Others have a stricter policy of only counting Nobel laureates who were on faculty when they won the prize. Furthermore, the AWRU Nobel data only includes laureates in physics, chemistry, medicine and economics – literature and peace are not represented. Only 12 Americans have ever won the Fields, so it’s not a large enough pool from which to draw conclusions.</p>
<p>
Berkeley’s got 3 of those. I think Princeton has more.</p>