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

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]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. [/quote]
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).[/quote]
Which is why Ph.D. feeder rank for history, per capita, is 15/20 SLACs. Here’s the cite:

https://www.collegetransitions.com/dataverse/top-feeders-phd-programs/#history

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.

[/quote] 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.[/quote][/quote]

Which is why Ph.D. feeder rank for history, per capita, is 15/20 SLACs. Here’s the cite:

https://www.collegetransitions.com/dataverse/...hd-programs/#history[/quote]
No citation, link doesn't work.[/quote]

https://www.collegetransitions.com/dataverse/top-feeders-phd-programs/#history[/quote]
No surprises Berkeley is number 1![/quote]

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