What are the top 10 universities in the USA?
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Anonymous
This list is great. |
Anonymous
Not bad if you insert Penn somewhere in there. Likely line 2 or line 3 at worst. |
Anonymous
Top is niche by definition or it would not be top. I would put caltech and mit students up at the top with any students out there. |
Anonymous
Good list. So far the best one. |
Anonymous
I agree with this list as well. I personally think ordering gets vague after HYPSM within the top 15, but this is a reasonable segmentation |
Anonymous
| Holy dullsville...how long does this go on? |
Anonymous
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I find parchment data comparison has matched my perception of rankings on all schools I know of. I will go with it.
https://www.parchment.com/c/college/tools/college-cross-admit-comparison.php?compare=University+of+Chicago&with=Duke+University |
Anonymous
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1. Barden University
2. Faber College 3. Brakebills University 4. South Central Louisiana State University 5. UC Sunnydale 6. Hillman College 7. Coolidge College 8. Monsters University 9. South Harmon Institute of Technology 10. Hudson University |
Anonymous
Harvard, Stanford Yale, Princeton, MIT, Columbia, Caltech Chicago, Penn Northwestern, Duke, Hopkins Dartmouth, Brown Cornell |
Anonymous
For measuring academic productivity this list is more accurate. But for laymen prestige the last one is probably better. |
Anonymous
| Notice how the same 15 schools make an appearance in some configuration for all these lists... |
Anonymous
Caltech has 900 TOTAL undergrad students, 225 per class. MIT has 4500 undergrads, 1100 per class. The other top 8-10 schools are the size roughly of MIT. |
Anonymous
This is what's always tricky with Caltech; it's obviously an incredible world-class institution, but it's so dang small and so dang niche so as to almost disqualify it from being grouped in with the rest. 900 total undergrads is significantly smaller than many high schools. |
Anonymous
Agreed. If someone has to count Caltech he should also count another world class school: Juilliard School . Where would you rank it at in the list? Maybe ahead of Harvard, if included? |
Anonymous
These points bring up a very difficult task of where to draw the line when making tier lists or rankings for universities. If Juilliard is included, then so should Berklee. But Berklee's undergrad size is about the same as Harvard's, so the "too small" argument that was used for Caltech doesn't work in this case. I could then see a whole slew of arguments being made for many smaller or niche schools... I don't even think undergrad student body size should be a major factor in these lists. Why would the undergrads matter more than the grad students? A school like Princeton has almost no grad students when compared to mega universities like Harvard. Since these questions are asking for "the best universities," not colleges (as that would single out ugrad), ultimately rankings like these shouldn't center around the undergrads. It should be a comprehensive review of all departments and schools within universities. This brings me to the point about a school being "too niche." Where do we draw the line there? Although MIT has more developed social science departments and a business school, it isn't significantly more comprehensive than Caltech; it's basically a STEM one-trick pony. Is Princeton really a university? The modern model of a university that flourished in the 20th century, includes graduate schools with an emphasis on professional schools. Princeton has no law, med, or business school. It's more like a super LAC than what we typically associate with the term "university." Here are some examples of what I would define as comprehensive (full arts and sciences) universities (a substantial set of professional schools): Harvard Yale Stanford Columbia UPenn UChicago Northwestern Duke Vanderbilt Cornell UC Berkeley Georgetown etc. |