UW Madison horribly underrated

[Anonymous]

Why is this posted in General Parenting and not Colleges & Universities?

As an aside, my kids aren't going to school in Wisconsin, no matter how good the school is.

[Anonymous]

Sure if you want your kids hanging with racists

Jobs from
From WI

lol waste of oos monies

[Anonymous]

I mostly read only good things here but this board attracts a lot of prestige- seekers.

[Anonymous]

Mid level kids, very white.
It is a fine school to go to when you don’t have better options

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I've noticed UW Madison gets massive underrated by people on this sub, which I think is a real shame/mystery. Lots of people call it "a mid tier public university" putting in behind Michigan or UNC. This concept is completely false for several reasons. First of all to those who think UNC is a better school, why does UW Madison have a peer reputation score of 4.2/5, better than UNC/Texas/GT/Georgetown/Notre Dame/Vanderbilt? Why do academics administrators think so highly of UW, putting it as the 5th best public university in America, if it's such "a mid tier public university." This is just the tip of the iceberg. UW is the "mid tier public university" with 26 Nobels laureates (most in the big 10), graduated more Fortune 500 ceos in the nation, graduated John Bardeen (won the Nobel in physics twice), J.H. Van Vleck (won Nobel for magnetism), Frederick Jackson Turner ("manifest destiny" historian), and John Searle (coined "philosophy of mind").

Oh I did I mention that UW faculty wrote the social security bill for FDR (John R Commons and Ed Witte), while also having an average department ranking of 10.4/154 making it one of the 5 public universities in the nation with all academic departments ranked 30th or better. They also have the 3rd most National Academy of Arts and Sciences members of any public, standing at a whopping 183 members. Oh I forgot to mention UW was an AAU founding member with Michigan and Berkley. What has UNC or UVA or Umich been doing to compete with these statistics? Well, almost nothing other than hyper focusing on their business schools. In short, UW is absolutely a top public school. It's laughable that people consider UNC or Texas to be a better school and I really want to know why so many parents and students make such a fallacy.

Americans don’t particularly care about international rankings and I’m not sure why they should

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It’s an excellent school with passionate alumni but it’s not very diverse, there is little to do in Madison but party, the weather is lousy and unless you are really into Big 10 sports you’re out of luck. Its football crowds are known for being rowdy, drunk whose cheers are often vulgar and they are proud of it. But, it is an excellent school.

Little to do except party?? So false. And weather overall is great…wonderful summers, beautiful fall, winters cold enough to actually enjoy outdoor cold weather activities, nice springs.

[Anonymous]

It's not horribly underrated, it's simply not all that interesting. The same holds true for UT Austin, UIUC, University of Florida, etc.

Why pay OOS for a large, albeit well-respected, state school?

Michigan is the 2nd/3rd best school in the country and is world renowned across all subjects. UNC is perennially in the top 5 state schools, is about the size of UVA and in a bordering state/only one state over. UC Berkeley is the best school in the world for CS, etc. UMD is in a bordering state.

That's why those schools are popular on this board.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’ve seen only good things about UW on DCUM.

same

Another “same”.

[Anonymous]

No one is trying to go to Wisconsin bro.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We visited because DC was interested. It's also very white, which was a turnoff for our DCC, who went to a diverse HS. They ended up in Boston, at a school that has significantly less white

We were really struck by that too and our DD didn’t apply. I think she also didn’t like the cold though she did apply to Michigan. (This year so I don’t know where she is going to end up).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:No one is trying to go to Wisconsin bro.

Tell that to the 50,000 OOS applications they get every year.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Sure if you want your kids hanging with racists

Jobs from
From WI

lol waste of oos monies

Attaboy.

[Anonymous]

Pass

[Anonymous]

[Anonymous]

Back in the day, Wisconsin was always regarded as one of the better publics. It was known as a very good all-around school in a cool little city.

But if you recall, for a decade or so, the Republican governor at the time - Scott Walker - made a big deal of attacking the University of Wisconsin. He made being anti-education his political issue, and so he slashed budgets, got rid of a lot of tenure positions, took away a lot of autonomy, and generally made the University of Wisconsin a very undesirable place, both for academics and OOS students. It's taken U Wisconsin some years to come back from that and the impression that Republicans were going to send the school into terminal decline.