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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Northwestern is good, but not great, school. Nearby Chicago is not doing well.[/quote]

What does "good" or "great" even mean? USNWR ranks Northwestern ninth in national universities in the nation. I don't take the rankings too seriously, but if you're looking for categorization, does that make NU "great"? Or would it need to be, what ... in the top eight to qualify? The only scale that really matters is the "goodness of fit" ranking for your child and family. I'm surprised by the suggestions I've read (not necessarily in this thread) that schools like Northwestern are left to take the "rejects" who don't get into "great" schools. I find that disrespectful and myopic.

Some studies suggest that people with similar stats do similarly well, regardless of where they attend school. Hence, someone with a 1600 SAT/4.0 GPA who does the honors program at their local land grant university will likely end up just as successful as someone with the same stats who goes to a "great" school. This implies that "top" universities don't necessarily offer a better education than "no-name" schools -- they are just better able to stock up on students who would succeed anyway.

Because of this, I don't find all this labeling and ranking particularly helpful. It all seems somewhat arbitrary. U of Chicago and WashU have higher average SAT scores than Harvard or Princeton, yet they are less highly ranked and less well-known. A more helpful measure of a school's quality is how it improves a student's academic performance over four years. This could be measured by the change in percentile from SAT score (pre-first year) to GRE score (as measured in the senior year of college). [/quote]

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