If the Ivy label never existed, what are the true top 10 best U.S. colleges in your mind?

[Anonymous]

In the real world, Ivy prestige does matter whether you like it or not.

[Anonymous]

Depends on how you define “best”. Public schools have very different mandates than privates.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:In the real world, Ivy prestige does matter whether you like it or not.

except in engineering and many other technical fields making money, going to dartmouth or brown over georgia tech/texas/cal is not actually an advantage. Let alone Stanford and MIT along with other schools better than ivies.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Harvard
Yale
Princeton
Stanford
MIT
Northwestern
Pomona/CMC/Mudd (3Cs)
Williams
Amherst
Georgetown

Love this list! Scripps and Pitzer are sadly a drag on the Claremont colleges.

[Anonymous]

True top ten schools have to be strong across the board in all disciplines at the undergraduate, graduate and professional levels. They must also have a high level research output. Look at international rankings for the true top universities.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Pretend you are USNWR and take into consideration all popular majors and the criteria most important to you.

The ask is which are your top 10 if Ivy prestige is not a factor.

Looking through all the responses, it seems that the consensus is HYP are solid T10, whereas none of the other five ivies are solid T10, with frequent mention of Penn and Cornell.

So that begs the question, WITH the ivy label, can any of the five ivies (Penn, Cornell, Columbia, Brown, Dartmouth) make to the true T10 (which is different from US news T10)?

I think Penn could. Cornell is a maybe. C/B/D are not.

I agree with this

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:1) Uchicago
2) CalTech
2) Reed
3) Princeton
4) Deep Springs (but it's not a 4-year), Swarthmore
5) Harvey Mudd
6) Amherst
7) Williams or Pomona
8) Pomona or Williams
9) Berkeley
10) St Johns

I tend to personally rank STEM-heavy colleges lower on the intellectual component, but even I can admit Caltech is deeply committed to science and progress in a way that most colleges with career-hungry stem students aren't.

My main criteria is an intellectual atmosphere that emphasizes rigor aka ... a college.

St John's is only known for two things: Chris Mullin and DMC.

[Anonymous]

Taking the AI-driven new economy into consideration (but not all about AI), these are my top 10:

Caltech
MIT
Stanford
Harvey Mudd
Princeton
Penn
Rice
Yale
CMU
Cal

Cal and CMU could be higher based on AI strength alone but I’m ranking them lower due to sink-or-swim culture

[Anonymous]

Any top 10 list that leaves out Caltech is a top 11 list.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The top tier is HYPSM. After that, it's more program specific. For example, Penn for business is obviously excellent.

And then there is the second tier which is also very good - rest of the Ivies, Duke, Hopkins, Chicago.

Also, it depends on the type of school kids are seeking and whether undergrad or grad. For undergrad, I'd add the top LACs too, such as Williams, Swarthmore, Amherst.

You can’t rank grad schools meaningfully; it depends on the department and what you are studying. You can rank grad schools by subject and that’s about it. And any subject will have lots of surprises if you do not know the field, i.e., Pitt and Rutgers for Philosophy, UMass for Linguistics etc.

In other words, all meaningful rankings (other than subject rankings, and even that depends on subspecialty) are undergrad. Of course WASP is somewhere in the bottom half of the top 10 and probably above all of the lower ivies (including Penn; this is not an undergrad business school ranking).

This is wrong, though with a decent premise. You can rank both undergrad and grad by department, and the departments in which your kids are interest should determine what you consider best.

For example, I don't think anybody looking at History as a likely major would view any small liberal arts college in the top 20 or 30; they simply do not have the scale to offer a meaningful array of courses and professors that would compete with very large departments at excellent universities that may be less selective at the undergraduate level. Why on earth would I go to Amherst or Bowdoin instead of Berkeley or Chapel Hill for History, aside from different campusl environments? The same is true for Psych, Econ, English, Poli Sci and any other number of non-STEM majors.

Aggregate undergraduate rankings at any level are completely irrelevant unless your kids don't have any idea about what they want to study, and even then, are more subjective than objective. And graduate and professional schools know it, as do their students.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The top tier is HYPSM. After that, it's more program specific. For example, Penn for business is obviously excellent.

And then there is the second tier which is also very good - rest of the Ivies, Duke, Hopkins, Chicago.

Also, it depends on the type of school kids are seeking and whether undergrad or grad. For undergrad, I'd add the top LACs too, such as Williams, Swarthmore, Amherst.

You can’t rank grad schools meaningfully; it depends on the department and what you are studying. You can rank grad schools by subject and that’s about it. And any subject will have lots of surprises if you do not know the field, i.e., Pitt and Rutgers for Philosophy, UMass for Linguistics etc.

In other words, all meaningful rankings (other than subject rankings, and even that depends on subspecialty) are undergrad. Of course WASP is somewhere in the bottom half of the top 10 and probably above all of the lower ivies (including Penn; this is not an undergrad business school ranking).

This is wrong, though with a decent premise. You can rank both undergrad and grad by department, and the departments in which your kids are interest should determine what you consider best.

For example, I don't think anybody looking at History as a likely major would view any small liberal arts college in the top 20 or 30; they simply do not have the scale to offer a meaningful array of courses and professors that would compete with very large departments at excellent universities that may be less selective at the undergraduate level. Why on earth would I go to Amherst or Bowdoin instead of Berkeley or Chapel Hill for History, aside from different campusl environments? The same is true for Psych, Econ, English, Poli Sci and any other number of non-STEM majors.

Aggregate undergraduate rankings at any level are completely irrelevant unless your kids don't have any idea about what they want to study, and even then, are more subjective than objective. And graduate and professional schools know it, as do their students.

You sound like a clueless international. I can assure you, the kids in your mind-numbing history hypothetical who have a choice between Amherst-Bowdoin and Berkeley-Chapel Hill (assuming oos) are choosing Amherst-Bowdoin 10:1. I don’t know “why on Earth” you are such an outlier; that’s a good question for your therapist.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:In the real world, Ivy prestige does matter whether you like it or not.

It does. Which is why we are paying big bucks to send kid to the law school, where I went. And it's important to internationals. So you can post all you want in an imaginary world, but Harvard still is what it is. (and I think it's been terribly mismanaged at the Presidential and undergrad levels).

[Anonymous]

1. Yale
Last. Williams

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Williams
Amherst
Princeton
Dartmouth
Carleton
Pomona
Middlebury
Davidson
Rice
Wake Forest

Wake Forest?? Puuuhlease, girl.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The top tier is HYPSM. After that, it's more program specific. For example, Penn for business is obviously excellent.

And then there is the second tier which is also very good - rest of the Ivies, Duke, Hopkins, Chicago.

Also, it depends on the type of school kids are seeking and whether undergrad or grad. For undergrad, I'd add the top LACs too, such as Williams, Swarthmore, Amherst.

You can’t rank grad schools meaningfully; it depends on the department and what you are studying. You can rank grad schools by subject and that’s about it. And any subject will have lots of surprises if you do not know the field, i.e., Pitt and Rutgers for Philosophy, UMass for Linguistics etc.

In other words, all meaningful rankings (other than subject rankings, and even that depends on subspecialty) are undergrad. Of course WASP is somewhere in the bottom half of the top 10 and probably above all of the lower ivies (including Penn; this is not an undergrad business school ranking).

This is wrong, though with a decent premise. You can rank both undergrad and grad by department, and the departments in which your kids are interest should determine what you consider best.

For example, I don't think anybody looking at History as a likely major would view any small liberal arts college in the top 20 or 30; they simply do not have the scale to offer a meaningful array of courses and professors that would compete with very large departments at excellent universities that may be less selective at the undergraduate level. Why on earth would I go to Amherst or Bowdoin instead of Berkeley or Chapel Hill for History, aside from different campusl environments? The same is true for Psych, Econ, English, Poli Sci and any other number of non-STEM majors.

Aggregate undergraduate rankings at any level are completely irrelevant unless your kids don't have any idea about what they want to study, and even then, are more subjective than objective. And graduate and professional schools know it, as do their students.

For one thing, you don't have to sti through giant history lectures where your classmates are engineering majors who would rather not be there. For another the higher level of professor contact and higher academic expectations can better prepare one for grad school.