USNWR Top 10 Leaked

[Anonymous]

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.

I cannot tell if this post is tongue-in-cheek sarcasm or if it’s trolling. I’m assuming that it’s the former. 😂

[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.

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

Ask people in Europe what MIT is (mitt ). I was traveling with a Harvard grad who was more than a little amused by it.

Even in the US, there is a huge difference in name recognition. Lots of employers and educated people (even on DCUM) at least somewhat incorrectly think MIT is only good in certain STEM fields and a few social sciences.

[Anonymous]

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.

So the list of USNWR top 10 undergrads that are top 12 in business, law, and medicine (ranks* in parentheses) are (alphabetically):

Duke (12, 4, 6)
Harvard (6, 4, 1)
Penn (1, 4, 6)
Stanford (1, 1, 8)
Yale (7, 1, 10)

These five schools are excellent in that their professional schools all rank highly like their undergrad. There are other schools, like Columbia and NYU, whose 3 professional schools rank top 10, too, but their undergrads were not ranked in the top 10 (and therefore did not make the list above because this thread is about USNWR top ten undergrads).


* Used 2023 rankings for medicine since these were the final time that USNWR assigned numerical rankings to med schools

[Anonymous]

Top 12? C'mon man.

[Anonymous]

The list of USNWR top 10 undergrads that are top 10 in business, law, and medicine-

Harvard (6, 4, 1)
Penn (1, 4, 6)
Stanford (1, 1, 8)
Yale (7, 1, 10)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Top 12? C'mon man.

Fine. Take out biz school. This is the list of top 10’s across undergrad, law, and med):

Duke (6, 4, 6)
Harvard (3, 4, 1)
Penn (10, 4, 6)
Stanford (4, 1, 8)
Yale (5, 1, 10)

[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.

Hopkins has had a graduate business school since 2007.

[Anonymous]

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

+1

[Anonymous]

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.

So the list of USNWR top 10 undergrads that are top 12 in business, law, and medicine (ranks* in parentheses) are (alphabetically):

Duke (12, 4, 6)
Harvard (6, 4, 1)
Penn (1, 4, 6)
Stanford (1, 1, 8)
Yale (7, 1, 10)

These five schools are excellent in that their professional schools all rank highly like their undergrad. There are other schools, like Columbia and NYU, whose 3 professional schools rank top 10, too, but their undergrads were not ranked in the top 10 (and therefore did not make the list above because this thread is about USNWR top ten undergrads).


* Used 2023 rankings for medicine since these were the final time that USNWR assigned numerical rankings to med schools

While choosing top 12 here for MBA is a little odd, I suspect that the poster was trying to debunk the point a previous poster made that Duke’s professional programs lag those of other top 10 undergrad programs since it’s one of only 5 that can make this specific claim, with a later poster identifying the 4 universities that can claim top 10 across the board. To say that Duke lags the other top 10 undergrads when it comes to professional schools is not accurate since there are 5 other undergrads in the top 10 that don’t even clear this bar.

With that said, weird amount of specificity in this board. Duke is a top 10, in a cohort that probably looks like Penn, Duke, and Northwestern. Only Stanford and Harvard can reasonably lay claim to being “the best”, with Stanford probably being the best university on the Laney across the board at this point.

Anyways, my bold prediction for when the full rankings come out is that Brown tumbles (like Dartmouth did last year) and falls to being the lowest ranked of the Ivy League again. Not that bold, I guess.

Have a good weekend, and stay safe.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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.

I've wondered how "Top 20" Berkeley and UCLA select their students these days. Due to state law, only 15 percent or so can be from OOS, unlike Michigan for instance, which has a much more national pool of students. The UCs cannot even look at SAT or ACT scores, which do have a pretty high correlation with student performance in college. They can't look at race either, which is why Berkeley is now even less than 3 percent Black. They get an absolutely massive amount of applications. UCLA got nearly 150,000 this year. Berkeley was only a little lower. There is no way admissions officers are carefully reading 150,000 essays. Grade inflation has been rampant for years now, so GPAs don't tell that much. And anyone applying now also had their schooling negatively impacted by COVID during their formative years, particularly in a really restrictive state like California.

What information are Berkeley and UCLA even using to admit the best and brightest?

[Anonymous]

The top rankings always make me laugh. My kids are at top SLACs and I wouldn’t trade it for an ivy. Move a little further down the list and you get rid of maladjusted kids raised in a pressure cooker. A better measure would be who gets hired. Kids with social skills trump awkward Harvard grads who can’t make eye contact.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The top rankings always make me laugh. My kids are at top SLACs and I wouldn’t trade it for an ivy. Move a little further down the list and you get rid of maladjusted kids raised in a pressure cooker. A better measure would be who gets hired. Kids with social skills trump awkward Harvard grads who can’t make eye contact.

Tons of kids at SLACs fit that definition and there are plenty of Harvard kids with great social skills.

Plenty of both get hired.

Do you have a point?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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.

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

Ask people in Europe what MIT is (mitt ). I was traveling with a Harvard grad who was more than a little amused by it.

Even in the US, there is a huge difference in name recognition. Lots of employers and educated people (even on DCUM) at least somewhat incorrectly think MIT is only good in certain STEM fields and a few social sciences.

All of the Europeans I met knew of both MIT and Harvard, although I don’t think it should be a metric for the quality of a university.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

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

Ask people in Europe what MIT is (mitt ). I was traveling with a Harvard grad who was more than a little amused by it.

Even in the US, there is a huge difference in name recognition. Lots of employers and educated people (even on DCUM) at least somewhat incorrectly think MIT is only good in certain STEM fields and a few social sciences.

All of the Europeans I met knew of both MIT and Harvard, although I don’t think it should be a metric for the quality of a university.

Harvard and MIT are both awesome but Harvard is Harvard when it comes to being the school you go to near Boston or in Cambridge

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

I've wondered how "Top 20" Berkeley and UCLA select their students these days. Due to state law, only 15 percent or so can be from OOS, unlike Michigan for instance, which has a much more national pool of students. The UCs cannot even look at SAT or ACT scores, which do have a pretty high correlation with student performance in college. They can't look at race either, which is why Berkeley is now even less than 3 percent Black. They get an absolutely massive amount of applications. UCLA got nearly 150,000 this year. Berkeley was only a little lower. There is no way admissions officers are carefully reading 150,000 essays. Grade inflation has been rampant for years now, so GPAs don't tell that much. And anyone applying now also had their schooling negatively impacted by COVID during their formative years, particularly in a really restrictive state like California.

What information are Berkeley and UCLA even using to admit the best and brightest?

They use grades, class rank, ECs, essays and (maybe?) AP scores. No SAT/ACT or letters of rec. I think they pay temp workers to read the essays.