USNWR Top 10 Leaked

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Harvard and Stanford are 1 and 1a. MIT is great too but is still the other school in Cambridge. They don't have nearly the resources either. With real estate estimates, Stanford has the most $$ and in terms of pure endowment, Harvard has the most $$ of any school. Should we be shocked they are both great in pretty much every area.

Are you 90 years old? Harvard is now the other school in Cambridge.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Yes, all of Duke’s departments are backwaters compared to the rest of the top schools. In particular, the law schools at Princeton, Johns Hopkins, MIT, and Cal Tech, all are leagues ahead of Duke’s, as well as the medical schools at Princeton, MIT, and Cal Tech. And same for the business schools at Johns Hopkins, Princeton, and Cal Tech relative to Duke. It’s almost like these universities have different institutional priorities across different programs.

All of the departments you mentioned are, of course, graduate programs. There are schools not ranked in the top ten who also are very strong in those three areas as well as many others areas where Duke is not. Your point isn’t pertinent here anyway because this is a discussion about the top 10 UNDERGRADUTE schools from USNWR. Nice try though. By the way, JHU does have a graduate business school.

The comment was more about the fallacies of making an apples to oranges comparison across institutions based on the strengths of their individual departments, when in many instances many top universities are lacking specific programs due to institutional priorities in allocating resources. MIT and Princeton may decide to build a law program, but that would come at the expense of other programs that they already excel in or are trying to build. Johns Hopkins recently decided to build a business school, but it remains unranked despite Johns Hopkins having a $10 billion endowment, which shows the limits in building an academic program when the historical investment is not there. I don’t have access to the undergraduate specialty rankings, since they don’t seem to be readily available, so can’t comment on that.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Yes, all of Duke’s departments are backwaters compared to the rest of the top schools. In particular, the law schools at Princeton, Johns Hopkins, MIT, and Cal Tech, all are leagues ahead of Duke’s, as well as the medical schools at Princeton, MIT, and Cal Tech. And same for the business schools at Johns Hopkins, Princeton, and Cal Tech relative to Duke. It’s almost like these universities have different institutional priorities across different programs.

All of the departments you mentioned are, of course, graduate programs. There are schools not ranked in the top ten who also are very strong in those three areas as well as many others areas where Duke is not. Your point isn’t pertinent here anyway because this is a discussion about the top 10 UNDERGRADUTE schools from USNWR. Nice try though. By the way, JHU does have a graduate business school.

The comment was more about the fallacies of making an apples to oranges comparison across institutions based on the strengths of their individual departments, when in many instances many top universities are lacking specific programs due to institutional priorities in allocating resources. MIT and Princeton may decide to build a law program, but that would come at the expense of other programs that they already excel in or are trying to build. Johns Hopkins recently decided to build a business school, but it remains unranked despite Johns Hopkins having a $10 billion endowment, which shows the limits in building an academic program when the historical investment is not there. I don’t have access to the undergraduate specialty rankings, since they don’t seem to be readily available, so can’t comment on that.

you cant all of a sudden have top a notch program despite large endowments. see duke engineering.

duke also has had 2 nobel prize winners in the last 25 years.

[Anonymous]

same goes for yale and brown engineering.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:same goes for yale and brown engineering.

It's interesting how a school can't just buy a good engineering program. Harvard, Yale, Brown, Chicago, and Duke all have enormous resources. You'd think it would simply be a matter of will. Build the facilities. Use their prestige and money to hire the best faculty. And the good students will come.

But nope. There are still tons of public schools that are better than Brown or Yale and so on at engineering. And often computer science too.

Whereas I'm pretty sure you can "buy" a top 10 humanities program if you really wanted one.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Yes, all of Duke’s departments are backwaters compared to the rest of the top schools. In particular, the law schools at Princeton, Johns Hopkins, MIT, and Cal Tech, all are leagues ahead of Duke’s, as well as the medical schools at Princeton, MIT, and Cal Tech. And same for the business schools at Johns Hopkins, Princeton, and Cal Tech relative to Duke. It’s almost like these universities have different institutional priorities across different programs.

All of the departments you mentioned are, of course, graduate programs. There are schools not ranked in the top ten who also are very strong in those three areas as well as many others areas where Duke is not. Your point isn’t pertinent here anyway because this is a discussion about the top 10 UNDERGRADUTE schools from USNWR. Nice try though. By the way, JHU does have a graduate business school.

None of these schools have the graduate programs mentioned. Duke does.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Harvard and Stanford are 1 and 1a. MIT is great too but is still the other school in Cambridge. They don't have nearly the resources either. With real estate estimates, Stanford has the most $$ and in terms of pure endowment, Harvard has the most $$ of any school. Should we be shocked they are both great in pretty much every area.

Berkeley is great in pretty much every area of academia that it offers. Harvard is not great in Engineering.

It's faltering. The whole UC system is faltering.

Medical school at UCLA having problems.

Engineering may be the only place where UCB is still pretty strong but since it went test blind the students are bailing out of engineering and into easier majors at a record pace.

It is really hard to pick engineers just by looking at transcripts.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Yes, all of Duke’s departments are backwaters compared to the rest of the top schools. In particular, the law schools at Princeton, Johns Hopkins, MIT, and Cal Tech, all are leagues ahead of Duke’s, as well as the medical schools at Princeton, MIT, and Cal Tech. And same for the business schools at Johns Hopkins, Princeton, and Cal Tech relative to Duke. It’s almost like these universities have different institutional priorities across different programs.

All of the departments you mentioned are, of course, graduate programs. There are schools not ranked in the top ten who also are very strong in those three areas as well as many others areas where Duke is not. Your point isn’t pertinent here anyway because this is a discussion about the top 10 UNDERGRADUTE schools from USNWR. Nice try though. By the way, JHU does have a graduate business school.

None of these schools have the graduate programs mentioned. Duke does.

Having a law school or business school does not translate to undergrad quality. Especially when there is no undergraduate business major.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:same goes for yale and brown engineering.

Yeah but they have engineering departments. They're not easy to find. The brown engineering building is all the way at the back in a corner.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:same goes for yale and brown engineering.

It's interesting how a school can't just buy a good engineering program. Harvard, Yale, Brown, Chicago, and Duke all have enormous resources. You'd think it would simply be a matter of will. Build the facilities. Use their prestige and money to hire the best faculty. And the good students will come.

But nope. There are still tons of public schools that are better than Brown or Yale and so on at engineering. And often computer science too.

Whereas I'm pretty sure you can "buy" a top 10 humanities program if you really wanted one.

MIT has an english literature program.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:outside of the professional programs, duke’s other areas are lack luster. Its med, business, and law are a touch below the majority of the top 10 schools. but again; the non professional programs are sometimes significantly worse.


im talking chemistry, biology, physics, engineering in aggregate

engineering in particular outside of biomed is particularly meh.

The majority of these top 10 (i.e. at least 5) are not particularly impressive for engineering.

That’s true, but they are impressive in just about everything else. Can’t say the same for Duke.

What exactly is Penn impressive at besides Business?

Penn is stellar or decent at English, Economics, History, Biology, Chemistry. Their medical school and law schools are top notch above Duke as well.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:same goes for yale and brown engineering.

Yeah but they have engineering departments. They're not easy to find. The brown engineering building is all the way at the back in a corner.

They do. I'm just reaffirming that they can't buy their way to top engineering programs. It takes time with ground breaking research.

[Anonymous]

NP, just chiming in to agree that Duke is wildly overrated.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:NP, just chiming in to agree that Duke is wildly overrated.

There seems to be a very unusual consensus on this point.

I think the Forbes T20 list this year was perhaps more reflective of popular opinion. They had Duke at 20 behind Williams, Brown, and Claremont McKenna College. Obviously a more comprehensive list since it included SLACs, but probably more reflective of sentiment than Duke at 6 as in US News.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:outside of the professional programs, duke’s other areas are lack luster. Its med, business, and law are a touch below the majority of the top 10 schools. but again; the non professional programs are sometimes significantly worse.


im talking chemistry, biology, physics, engineering in aggregate

engineering in particular outside of biomed is particularly meh.

The majority of these top 10 (i.e. at least 5) are not particularly impressive for engineering.

That’s true, but they are impressive in just about everything else. Can’t say the same for Duke.

What exactly is Penn impressive at besides Business?

Penn is stellar or decent at English, Economics, History, Biology, Chemistry. Their medical school and law schools are top notch above Duke as well.

In USNWR’s final actual med school rankings, Duke was higher than Penn.

In the USNWR law school rankings, Duke is tied with than Penn at #4.

Your argument about this programs at Penn being a notch above those at Duke does not hold water.