<p>Just curious as to your thoughts on the matter.</p>
<p>I’d say five or so years, when the overall acceptance rate becomes <10%, since I think selectivity matters in reputation, but that’s not the whole story obviously. But, honestly, I don’t think it needs to. With its peer schools as UPenn, Columbia, Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, and Stanford, I feel Duke’s reputed enough for a graduate to land an awesome job. I feel the difference is negligible.</p>
<p>When ALL the top schools become lottery schools… 15 years, at the latest.</p>
<p>^I always complain to myself that admissions were so much easier the years before I applied. I can’t even imagine how screwed up it’s going to be in 15 years haha.</p>
<p>I think down the road 15-20 years the top colleges are all going to have really small acceptance rates. H has a worldwide reputation, will Duke get that in our lifetime? I don’t know, but considering that the school isn’t even a hundred years old, it’s impressive</p>
<p>Agreed SeniorOhBoy… People I know who’ve went to selective schools (and nonselective schools too) pity the poor students trying to get into their alma maters… It’s ironic that the alumni don’t think the ridiculously competitive admissions crap is worth the rankings.</p>
<p>The education that one receives at Duke is certainly already equivalent to what one would receive at HYP.</p>
<p>However, in terms of reputation, I doubt that Duke will ever catch HYP(S). HYP have 350+ years of rich tradition behind them, and Stanford was a unique case in which its synergistic relationship with Silicon Valley propelled it to its current stature (it was also founded as a very wealthy school). The reality is that HYPS have distanced themselves from every other university in the country.
Going to Duke (or any of its peers, such as Columbia, Penn, Dartmouth, NU, etc) probably grants an individual [nearly] every opportunity that they would have available to them at HYPS; the difference between HYPS and the rest lies in overall institutional fame and caliber.</p>
<p>Yeah prestige wise, Duke will never catch up to HYP. Academic-wise though, they are already extremely similar.</p>
<p>As fast as Duke is statistically catching up to HYP, other colleges like Vandy are catching up to Duke. Someday, a thread on CC will be titled “When (if ever) do you think Emory will catch up with HYPSMBDCCCCDPVWN?”</p>
<p>Well, I personally believe if we can continue to focus on research and ramp up our efforts to attract awesome faculty we should eventually get there. It is imperative that we have the money to do these things however; and obtaining that money is going to be no mean feet. Also, college rankings etc will always go through cycles and trends. Take this very moment for instance, dear old yale’s star doesn’t seem to be shining too brightly (lower yields etc) while schools like Penn, Duke and Chicago are going great guns.</p>
<p>You are correct that money is one key difference that separates HYPS from the rest. However, this is also what makes Duke’s catching up to this group of schools so unlikely. Universities allocate their endowments to long-term investments in order to achieve slow, but consistent growth. In order for Duke to match the endowments of top schools, it would need to cash in on some very high-return (and high risk) investments which it will never allocate a significant portion of its endowment to and/or reach an enormous level of alumni giving. Consider that top schools will be investing in the same markets with the same (or very similar) strategies as Duke, and that they also benefit from either better alumni giving (Princeton leads the country as a % of alumni who donate) or better fundraising (Stanford leads the country), and the situation becomes entirely unfeasible. </p>
<p>And yes, you are also correct that Duke would need more money to attract the nobel laureates, NAS members, and the like which it seeks. It’s not that Duke can’t afford the salaries that these academics require, it’s that it could never afford to match the higher salaries that the richer schools offer them. Nobel laureates are incredibly hard to obtain at a university because they’re rare and every school wants them, including HYPS. A richer school will naturally be able to pay more for a nobel laureate, so if Duke does acquire such faculty it will not be without paying beyond what it is willing. One must also consider that most of these academic superstars are already at – and in most cases, with tenure, colleagues, established lifestyles, and sometimes families – the schools that Duke seeks to catch. Duke would likely have to go so far above and beyond what it can on any sort of consistent basis for it to ever recruit a meaningful amount of these faculty members.</p>
<p>@LmaoZedong - I laughed at the acronym. </p>
<p>I agree that a lot of these schools are much closer together than people think. The difference between Emory and Duke (even though this was the point of comparison) is much smaller than the difference between Duke and Stanford. The real drop in quality happens after HYPS, at which point MIT stands alone (although it is probably closer to HYPS than to the schools below it), and is then followed by maybe 10 or 15 schools, all of which are of similar caliber.</p>
<p>HYPS is one league, and the rest of top 25 belong to another. This will not change for the next one hundred years.</p>
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Individuals such as yourself who attend top 30 schools outside of the Ivies, Stanford, MIT, Duke, and Chicago can keep convincing yourself that you’re on par by thinking that but no one believes its true and the facts don’t bear themselves out that way. Duke is #5 after HYPS in sending grads to the most elite professional programs.</p>
<p>Calling Duke and Wake peer schools seems like a bit of a stretch. I’d say that the next 10 or so following HYPSM are all more or less peer schools, but not the next 15-20.</p>
<p>Yeah, at the undergraduate level…</p>
<p>Tier 1: HYPSMC
Tier 2: the other 5 Ivies, Chicago, Duke, NU, and Hopkins
Tier 3: the remaining top 30 schools (with a cutoff at UNC-Chapel Hill)</p>
<p>These debates are silly. Even at the undergrad level, the quality of undergraduate programs vary widely. For example, Cornell (purportedly third tier on this board) has a better engineering school by miles than either Brown or Yale; G’town’s SFS program rivals Princeton’s; for pre-med or bio it is hard to beat Harvard, Duke or Penn; in English literature Yale rules while in creative writing Emory is tremendous; for education go to Vanderbilt; economics try Harvard or Chicago; general liberal arts try Brown, Columbia or Chicago; the hard sciences Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Cornell, and Cal Tech. Etc, etc, etc</p>
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<p>No one believes that what I’m saying is correct? </p>
<p>I’ve got news for you, bud: most people aren’t prestige-obsessed snobs who decide between two comparable schools based on minutia such as better graduate school placement. Most people deciding between schools like these don’t even look up grad school placement statistics; they visit the schools and decide which to attend based on which they believe will provide them with the better undergraduate experience. </p>
<p>Get real, and understand that you’re not better than other people simply because you attended Duke.</p>
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<p>I agree that Duke and Wake are not peer schools, as there is actually a significant difference between the two. But Duke and Rice/Vanderbilt/WashU/Georgetown/etc? The difference is much too small to make a decision between Duke and any of these based on reputation.</p>
<p>I agree with you when you say that a particular school doesn’t make you successful. However, saying there is no difference between vandy, rice etc and Duke is tantamount to saying that there is no difference between Duke and Stanford.</p>
<p>First, I should clarify that I’m not saying that there isn’t a difference between Duke and Vanderbilt/Rice/Georgetown etc; I’m just saying that the difference between Duke and these schools is very small.</p>
<p>Second, I sincerely doubt that many would share your view. “Stanford” is a true household name. The whole idea behind the HYPS acronym is that these four schools are in a league of their own. The difference between HYPS and the rest (excluding MIT and Cal Tech) is huge with regard to prestige and global acclamation. </p>
<p>On the other hand, the only person whom I’ve seen promoting the notion of a definitive top 15 schools is goldenboy8784.</p>