<p>What’s the better academic school? Tied in rankings but I feel Tulane has the better reputation. No scholarships or aid at either school.</p>
<p>Tulane definitely has a better reputation. It is going to be hard for Miami to shake the association they have with those football teams that won but had all sorts of problems and graduated almost nobody. To be fair, they are making a huge effort to remake the school, but that takes time. And as far as rankings go, you should really ignore those anyway. If you actually look at the USNWR article that talks about how they do it, some of it is arbitrary (why weight this factor 15% and another twice as much? Why not 25-20, or 35-10?), and others you can really argue about how much the measurement they are using reflects what they claim it reflects regarding the quality of the school. One thing for sure, once they put it out there and people started buying into it, it became somewhat self-fulfilling regardless of faculty or other improvements a school might make. Ok, off my soapbox now.</p>
<p>The bottom line is which school seems more suited for you, because at the undergrad level within certain tiers of quality, you really won’t see that much difference. The profs are mostly all competent or better, and the books are often the same. So besides atmosphere and feel of the place, the biggest difference are your fellow students. Which school has the higher quality student body overall? Are you looking to be really challenged, or would you rather be higher up on the food chain at a school? These are the kinds of factors that you should be focusing on, which goes to your question of which is better academic school. I am just saying that rankings wouldn’t tell you that anyway. Tulane, for example, is ranked below schools that have much lower average SAT/ACT scores for their students. While that certainly isn’t the be all and end all of academics, it is at least a measure that is the same across schools. Tulane is well ahead of Miami there overall, and the gap is likely to widen this year.</p>
<p>Miami:</p>
<p>Reading Middle 50%: 580 - 680
Math Middle 50%: 610 - 710
Writing Middle 50%: 580 - 670</p>
<p>Tulane:</p>
<p>Reading Middle 50%: 630 - 720
Math Middle 50%: 620 - 700
Writing Middle 50%: 640 - 720</p>
<p>But like I say, there is more to picking a school than this. Hopefully you got to visit both. If not, then you will have to decide on whatever factors you know are most important to you that you can research.</p>