When (if ever) do you think Duke will catch up with HYP?

[Commodore15]

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Bephy,</p>

<p>The two C’s are gaining quickly on Stanford in terms of student body and faculty and given their locations in NYC and Chicago it would not be surprising if they equal and surpass Stanford in a few years. In light of the NYC project, Cornell will also gain quickly on Stanford in the hard sciences and Duke is already a Stanford peer in medicine, law, and banking. </p>

<p>Further, in the East, Stanford is not viewed as the end all and be all that it is in the west. As the New Yorker noted in a recent article, people are starting to question whether academics have been left behind in the “entrepreneurial culture” of Stanford where adjuncts (good at founding start ups but not so good at teaching anything) teach many classes.

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<p>The student bodies of Stanford, Columbia, and Chicago are already too similar for one to meaningfully differentiate between them. There are more than enough good students to go around at the top schools, and many slightly lesser schools are therefore able to fill their classes with top talent as well.
It would be very surprising if either Columbia or Chicago managed to catch Stanford any time soon. Columbia and Chicago have had their respective NY and Chicago locations since their founding…why would things change because of location now? Also, Stanford has arguably the more advantageous location; it is in the heart of Silicon Valley, and many of the industries which the region cultivates are those that are experiencing growth at the moment.
Cornell’s NYC campus will concentrate on engineering and technology. It isn’t an effort to directly improve Cornell’s hard science departments (with the possible exception of computer science).
Duke is a peer of Stanford in medicine (many in the medical profession would argue that Duke exceeds Stanford in this regard; medicine is what made Duke what it is today), but it is not a peer of Stanford in law…or “banking” (which isn’t a field and which is impossible to measure by any standard academic performance metric). Duke law is very good and Duke is very much a target for banks and consulting firms, but Stanford’s law is on par with Harvard’s and second to only Yale’s, and Stanford is recruited more heavily by top financial and managerial companies. </p>

<p>I do agree that the New Yorker article addresses what may be a rather serious problem at Stanford, but the issue in itself is more of a double-edged sword. These connections benefit Stanford quite a bit as an institution ($$$), despite potentially precluding some of the traditional intellectualism that may be found at a more cerebral institution such as Chicago. Many would actually argue that it’s better to be more like Stanford and less like Chicago; Stanford’s focus aligns with forward thinking, whereas Chicago’s is arguably outdated. The field of engineering, for example, is anticipated to be central to the advancement of technology, science, and civilization in innumerable ways throughout the future. Stanford has one of the top two engineering departments in the world, while Chicago lacks an engineering department altogether. Considering that Chicago has already been a “hidden gem” of sorts among top colleges, it’s unlikely that it has positioned itself for future acclaim as well as Stanford has.</p>