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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
OP here.

I'm not a student, I'm a foreigner trying to understand the American method of ranking colleges and universities.

In my country there is no "college experience" because there are no campuses. No sports teams. There are some student dorms around certain universities, and low-cost student cafeterias, but mostly students try to find rooms somewhere around the university. There are no fraternities and sororities, very few clubs. Universities are ranked by the quality of teaching: how good the teachers are, how well-funded the programs are, what type of research is done. "School spirit" is not a factor - students want a prestigious degree, but prestige is based on academic prestige and possibly how well-connected the student and professors are in general, although that's mostly reserved for political sciences and things like that.

So... if you take out factors that have to do with sports, leisure, student social life, and keep factors that have to do with quality of learning and teaching...

What do you think would be the ranking of the top US universities? I thought Hopkins was among the best, but perhaps I'm wrong.

[/quote]

OP, it's a fair question. The fact of the matter is that the U.S. university system, especially at the top, is flush with money, so things like educational prestige, teaching quality, research, are a given -- in fact, they're among the best in the world (if not [I]the[/I] best). So all the other trappings that you mention are what add to the American college experience; they are not there [I]in lieu of[/I] the academics and intellectual output.

Roughly, the "rankings" of the tippy top US colleges goes somewhat like this:

Tier AAA+: Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, MIT (some would maybe add Columbia to this tier)
Tier AAA: Columbia, UPenn, UChicago, Northwestern, Duke, Caltech
Tier AA: Cornell, Dartmouth, Brown, Johns Hopkins
Tier A: Rice, Vanderbilt, Notre Dame, UCLA, UC Berkeley, UMichigan

Something that is good to keep in mind is that there is a much higher number of "elite" schools in the U.S. than most other countries, again largely due to the aforementioned wealth concentrated at the top, as well as the general gravity that America commands in the world of academia.[/quote]

I should add that every single one of the aforementioned universities are world-class, extremely prestigious universities, no matter what the commenters on DCUM and elsewhere might say. They all command budgets and endowments that easily place them in a peerless class of their own among world universities. Hopkins is certainly included in this group.[/quote]

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