<p>It’s actually not a stretch at all if you look at the quality and quantity of faculty research, graduate student placement (both incoming and outgoing), undergraduate student placement at graduate programs, graduate student yield, federal and non-federal funding sources, strength of new faculty appointments, faculty awards (both for senior and junior faculty), facilities, breadth of research fields ranked among the top 10 by COHE, departmental publication citation indexes, etc., especially relative to the number of undergraduate majors in the sciences. </p>
<p>I have done all of that.</p>
<p>Of course, there are a couple other possible competitors for the #1 spot - namely Harvard, Caltech and Stanford, so it depends on how you interpret all of the different variables.</p>