<p>“Stanford is better than Columbia in every field of study and I mean every single one. There is no comparison to be made here. Chicago and Columbia alums need to realize that their peer schools are Cornell, Penn, Duke, and Northwestern. S&M are on another level.”</p>
<p>@GB: I haven’t read all the comments in this (I believe) nearly pointless thread, but the dismissiveness is coming from you as well (if not particularly, as seen on the first page). I think it’s quite a stretch to say Northwestern and Duke (And company) aren’t peer institutions of Chicago. They are peers. But so are Harvard and Stanford, etc. As for your physics peers at Duke, I am suggesting as a math/physics person at the UofC, that you should go ahead and ask them what institutions they applied to and considered the “elite crapshoot” schools: anyone who is going through or has gone through the graduate school process in mathematics, physics and most certainly economics would declare UofC,Harvard,Stanford,Cal,Princeton in the top grouping—these schools are insanely difficult to get into at the graduate level.</p>
<p>And at the undergraduate level … I don’t understand what is wrong with every “other Chicago student/alum brags about how intellectual the school is and how much more pre-professional the rest of its peer schools are.” I mean for god sakes, Stanford alums brag about entrepreneurs changing the world all the time and for all I know that is true. Brown alums brag all the time about the creativity that their lack of a set curriculum creates. Harvard alums brag about their network. There are entrepreneurs at the UofC. There is a lot of creativity and course freedom at the UofC. There is a professional network at the UofC. But we think it’s the quirkiness and the intellectualism that distinguishes us. You haven’t been at the UofC. We have. We’ve read Foucault in Harper and discussed Nietzsche at 4 in the morning in Snitchcock and wrote proofs at 6 in the morning in the Reg, while discussing urban Chicago education and Boyer’s mustache and grabbing $1 milkshakes in -5 degree February weather. Maybe you’re right—all other schools produce great graduate numbers too. But is it worth going on the UofC thread and openly dismissing UofC as having “no comparison” to Stanford and MIT? You don’t need whatever rankings, whatever numbers, whatever publications to simply go around and ask us current UofCers or the current professors or the alums. Or the alums, professors and students at Stanford or MIT or Duke or Northwestern. Congratulate Boyer for doing things like raising the alum giving rate and branding our school by sending out t-shirts. This is what Harvard has been doing for years. I’m proud we joined the party. We don’t need to accuse one another of lying and making claims that “there is no comparison.”</p>