UChicago remains an outlier

NiceUnparticularMan
Fri, 04 Aug 2023 14:04:04 +0000

marlowe1:

Ah, but the difference between Rice and NU is that Rice doesn’t have a UChicago down the street from it.

Neither do Vanderbilt, Georgetown, WUSTL, Notre Dame, or Emory (I’m not including USC or NYU, in case UCLA or Columbia might count as a “Chicago down the street”).

I am not trying to be nitpicky, but I actually think this is a real puzzle! If you had asked me before looking at this chart, I would have thought Rice would be more similar to those other schools. Indeed, if you had asked me whether Rice would be more similar to, say, Emory or Chicago, I would have thought the answer was extremely obvious . . . and not Chicago.

Of course I am open to learning differently, I am just not sure we have reached a compelling answer yet as to what put just Rice, and not Emory and such, into the same group with Chicago.

And MIT, CMU, and CalTech for that matter. I kinda get why Chicago would be in a group with those three. But Rice? Seems like an obvious answer to the “one of these is not like the others” game . . . .