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<p>Sorry, Alexandre, with the same token, is there any factor that would place Caltech outside of the HYPSM? The fact that some people think outright that Dart beat Cornell shares some commonality.</p>
<p>Ivy_grad, I am not trying to alter opinions…I am only asking that we do not present our opinions as fact. I am sure we all make the mistake from time to time, myself included. But it is important to recognize that our opinions are just that…opinions. </p>
<p>Rtkysg, the only reason I do not place Caltech with the “Big 5” is because Caltech is limited in scope. Outside of the Sciences/Engineering, Caltech offers very little. At least MIT has a top ranked Econ department, respected Linguistics, Philosophy, Political Science and Psychology departments and a very strong Business school. Caltech has none of the above. </p>
<p>In terms of strength of faculty, quality of student body, reputation in the eyes of the intellectual and industrial elites and resources, Caltech is hard to beat.</p>
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<p>Precisely, Alexandre, people rank schools based on what they think is primordial to college ranking. Some people don’t place Cornell in the top ten because it lacks selectivity and the huge number of its students. In terms of international recognition and grad school admission, Cornell is hard to beat too. :)</p>
<p>Rtkysg, if we were ranking universities according to selectivity, I would not object. But we are rating universities in their totality. I am pretty certain that the 10-15 universities following the top 5 are pretty even overall and it is not possible to prove that one is better than another. What can be done, and what this forum should be about, is help students find the best fit for them…based on their individual needs and preferences. But claiming that Duke is better than Chicago or that Dartmouth is better than Cal or that Brown is better than Cornell is nonsensical. It simply cannot be done.</p>
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<p>This is where actually the problem arises. Totality is absolutely subjective from one person to another. How you measure totality can be very different from the others. Some people equate totality to employability after graduation, some people equate totality to education environment and so on. With this respect, it might be sensible to say Brown or Cornell is better than Cal. Some people can also claim that if you said that you rank the schools based on their reputation only, they would not argue either.</p>
<p>By totality, I mean EVERYTHING. That includes quality of faculty, quality of academics, breadth and depth of curriculae, on-campus recruitment, alumni network influence/power (how successful and widespread is the network), school spirit (based on alumni loyalty and pride in their ACADEMIC institution, not sports), quality of life on and off campus, overall endowment, endowment/student (factoring in economics of scale), quality of students, academic reputation in academic circles (peer assessment score), reputation in the corporate world (do the exclusive firms actively recruit on campus), research spending/turnout, research opportunities, placement potential. I say “placement potential” rather than placement rates because one must keep in mind that different universities will have different placement rates based on the interests and inclination of their students, not based on the quality of their students or of the institutions in question. </p>
<p>When I say totality, I mean the entire university. When somebody makes a blanket statement that university X is better than university Y, it is a foregone conclusion that we are talking in absolutes…and that automatically implies that we are looking at the institutions as a whole. We aren’t saying university X is better at placing students into graduate school than university Y. Or that university X is more selective than university Y. We are simply comparing two universities in their totality. </p>
<p>If we want to look at one or two factors independently, we should be saying university X is better than university Y in such and such a way. Not simply say that university X is better than university Y.</p>
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<p>I never claimed that my rankings were “fact”. I never claimed that my rankings were anything but my opinions. My opinions are based on what I have observed in academic, professional and personal environments (both here and abroad).</p>
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<p>Herein lies a fundamental problem.</p>
<p>This is a website / forum largely dedicated to undergraduate education.</p>
<p>THAT should be the basis by which a university should be judged (and where discussions should begin and end).</p>
<p>Take, for instance, Princeton, Dartmouth, Brown. None of those schools have the “big three” major grad schools programs (i.e. Law, Business, Medicine) - Princeton has none of the three, Brown only has medicine and Dartmouth lacks a law school. So, in practice, they are really “colleges” in the classic sense vs. “universities” … (in fact, Dartmouth is officially Dartmouth “College” rather than Dartmouth “University”).</p>
<p>But would anyone argue that their lack of grad schools hurts their ability to provide a world class undergraduate education? In fact, I would argue the exact opposite. The fact that graduate schools (grad students) are virtually “second class” compared to the undergrads at these schools, I would argue that it’s hard to beat these schools in terms of undergraduate focus, attention, resources, faculty availability, etc.</p>
<p>And what of graduate school placement?</p>
<p>All three of those schools place very highly (within the Top 15) of WSJ top feeder to elite grad schools ranking.</p>
<p>So, in the end, I’d argue that you need to take a look the undergraduate program at any given institution rather than the university “in totality”. And in that “calculus” one can certainly argue that X is better than Y.</p>
<p>For example, as a potential undergraduate student, what do you care if the university has tens of thousands of grad students in numerous grad programs at any given university? How does that benefit you other than adding to the competition for resources, attention from faculty, administration focus, etc.? It doesn’t.</p>
<p>I think Ivy grad and I have seen a different part of our education stand out for us, and we emphatically believe in those intangibles that community and reputation among the people that matter creates. I have never doubted that for people entering very specific careers Michigan or Cal is a better choice than a lower Ivy (Engineering, Nursing), but on the other hand for a person going into the top two business career paths or into professional and/ or grad school the lower ivies, particularly the more selective undergraduate focused ones, tend to do much better.</p>
<p>Alexandre you can argue Michigan’s prowess all day long, but when you start saying “150,000 per student is essentially the same as 200,000 per student” or that Michigan MBA and law are top 5 schools I start to see holes in your arguments. The fact of the matter is that in every undergraduate related metric Dartmouth beats Cornell and Michigan handily, and on the intangibles I assure you it does as well. The only metric I can point in that regard is alumni giving, but trust me that when you jump to get the alumni magazine every month so you can read about your friends in the “class notes” section, its much different than a school where you only know .0001 percent of the population. When that school is one of the best in the world, it makes that network even stronger.</p>
<p>Ivy<em>Grad, if you look closely at the 15 or so criteria I said made up “totality”, you will see that they are all relevant to undergraduate education. Did I even mention medical, law or any other type of graduate school? I do not recall doing so (even though the presence of most graduate programs generally enhances the options availlable to undergrads). I rarely lose sight of the ball Ivy</em>grad. When I discuss universities on this forum, I generally only discuss undergraduate education. </p>
<p>In all ways that matter, after the universally acknowledged “Big 5”, there are roughly 12 or 13 universities that are pretty much equal overall. It is futile to try and rank them. </p>
<p>And by the way, my opinions are also partially impacted by what I have observed in the highest of academic, professional and personal cirles both in the US and abroad.</p>
<p>It’s ironic that the Presidents of the two colleges Slipper attended went to Wisconsin and Oregon. Surprising they ever got anywhere without those important “connections”.</p>
<p>Ranking schools according to selectivity is a methodology that focuses on the quality of input. Considering that in many cases, bad input = bad output, it’s a fairly good measure for ranking schools.</p>
<p>The opposite philosophy is equally legitimate. That is, ranking colleges based on their output. However, it’s difficult to have objective measures of how “good” a college’s output (of graduating seniors) is. If we look at only what % get jobs after school, community colleges and technical training schools would rank highly. If we only look at the % of students going on the graduate schools, that would also skew the perspective (probably towards smaller LACs like Reed College). Looking at raw numbers would skew rankings in favor of larger schools (like Berkeley).</p>
<p>The method USNews uses is a combination of the two, but I’d say the measures it uses to gauge output are weaker than its measures used to gauge selectivity (input).</p>
<p>Hence, although totally far from perfect, I would tend to agree with Ivy_Grad’s rankings based on selectivity, at least for undergraduate rankings.</p>
<p>you guys are a literal riot. I just love reading the witty repartee. But, for even more fun, suggest a new thread on the statistical value of the off-quoted WSJ ‘feeder’ story. Are they any beginnning AP Stats students who want to take a crack at it?</p>
<p>People need to stop quoting the WSJ report. It is such a bad ranking that it doesn’t make sense at all. Not all people go to college to get into a professional school.</p>
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<p>The parameters that you mentioned naturally become the basis on which other people perceive the ranking, the difference is that they give each parameter with a weight that is subjective from one person to another. If I am to take only a certain angle or perspective based on the totality that you mentioned, I can as well say that Stanford ‘should’ be ranked higher than Yale or Princeton. Why? Because Yale lacks science/engineering prowess while Princeton doesn’t have heavy graduate programs. While this (Stanford > Yale) is obviously not true, it reflects the distribution of weights for each parameter constituting the totality you mentioned.</p>
<p>Implicitly, I would argue that you put more weights on one parameter than the other. As matter of fact, you tend to rank colleges solely based on peer assessment score provided by USNEWS that you ‘think’ is the most objective, although obviously it’s not necessarily true. When you say totality, people can say that USNEWS measures this totality, and hence putting Cal and Michigan in the top 20’s when measured as a whole.</p>
<p>in the WSJ feeder list, none of cornell’s grad programs were even used, which means that it didn’t hvae the highest proportion of students in any single grad program used</p>
<p>while dartmouth, a small school had its own business school used, gee, what can that do</p>
<p>columbia, had 2 of its own grad programs used</p>
<p>michigan which cracked 30, had 2 or 3, take those 2 or 3 away, and see what happens</p>
<p>chicago had 2 of its own used, as well, take them away, see what happens</p>
<p>and, don’t forget WSJ ignored Stanford’s B-school…hmmmm</p>
<p>That was extremely weird, especially since Stanford’s GSB is the hardest to get into. If they wanted to measure a school’s success in getting graduates into top professional schools, you’d think it’d be a no-brainer to include it.</p>
<p>Actually BBall, Michigan had just one (Law School).</p>
<p>And they didn’t include Penn’s Med school (oldest in the Nation and stilled ranked 4th), nor WashU’s, but included Yale and Columbia’s. lol doesn’t make sense. I bet they surveyed Yale’s med school just to keep it ranked high.</p>
<ol>
<li>Harvard</li>
<li>Princeton</li>
<li>Yale</li>
<li>Stanford</li>
<li>Penn</li>
<li>MIT</li>
<li>Duke</li>
<li>CalTech</li>
<li>Dartmouth</li>
<li>Columbia</li>
<li>WUSTL </li>
<li>Brown</li>
<li>Northwestern</li>
<li>Cornell</li>
<li>JHU</li>
<li>Chicago</li>
<li>Rice</li>
<li>Berkeley</li>
<li>Vanderbilt</li>
<li>Notre Dame</li>
<li>Carnegie Mellon</li>
<li>Georgetown</li>
<li>Emory</li>
<li>UCLA</li>
<li>UVA</li>
<li>Tufts</li>
</ol>