<p>Last time I checked BU was way bigger than BC and had a lot of more things going on. Not to mention that they have more Nobel Prize winners than BC (which has zero) and more famous faculty members.</p>
<p>So why does BC take the cake? Is it because the campus is nicer?</p>
<p>You need to do more homework before you ask these questions. First all rankings are subjective, meaning there is no flat answer to the question “Which one is better?”. This is akin to asking you who is better, you or your friend? Well your friend might be smarter, but you’re a better athlete or he might be more charismatic and you have incredible organizational skills. There is no global set of standards which people can universally use to say this school is better than the one next door. </p>
<p>These are some of the criteria. You’ll notice many of them are bogus and are fairly insignificant to us as students, while others use some sort of magical secret formula where factors like graduation rate and retention rate are given some arbitrary weight:</p>
<ol>
<li>High school counselor opinion</li>
<li>undergrad academic reputation - from surveys of presidents, provosts, and deans of admissions. </li>
<li>Grad/Freshman retention</li>
<li>Faculty resources - in respect to faculty salary, class size ratios, amount of time profs spent working</li>
<li>student selectivity - using mostly SAT/ACT and admission rates</li>
<li>financial resources - average amount of money spent (by college) on the student</li>
<li>alumni giving </li>
</ol>
<p>You are free to cook up any number of reasons why BC is better than BU now.</p>