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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]1. Harvard
2. Stanford
3. Columbia
4. UPenn
5. MIT
6. Caltech
7. Yale
8. Princeton
9. UChicago
10 UC Berkeley[/quote]

+1. OP is asking for the top 10 universities, not colleges within these universities; the list must be based on a comprehensive evaluation of all programs within a university. The addition of UC Berkeley is necessary because of its top graduate programs; overall, it's a more productive and successful university than the likes of Duke and Northwestern.

MIT should be ahead of Columbia because its research in STEM is so productive that it outweighs their relative lack of professional schools and non-STEM subjects. The opposite argument can be made about Yale and Caltech, with Caltech being even more niche than MIT. UC Berkeley loses points for not having a top undergraduate college. Columbia ahead of Yale because of better med and business, way better STEM overall that outweighs Yale's slightly better humanities, and other elite programs like Journalism, SIPA, that Yale doesn't have. Penn ahead of Princeton because while Penn's arts and sciences may be weak on this list, their overall strength in professional schools make them above Princeton with only SPIA.

1. Harvard
2. Stanford
3. MIT
4. Columbia
5. Yale
6. Caltech
7. Penn
8. Princeton
9. UC Berkeley
10. UChicago

This list is very similar to the world rankings of US News, ARWU, CWUR, Round University Rankings, etc.[/quote]

When this thread was considering all programs within a university and its actual merit, it was heading in the right direction. But unfortunately, the thread afterwards became another typical USNWR and prestige-obsessed thread.

Can we stop talking about acceptance rates, yield rates, and things that only pertain to the undergraduate schools of these universities? If you think that the undergraduate program is the sole component to what makes a university good, then you are either just delusional, or too uneducated to understand the difference in terminology between what a university or a college is.

Undergraduate prestige is the most subjective and arbitrary part of a university's reputation. Admitted students definitely consider location, fit, and actual quality of education, but they ultimately choose based on prestige. If this was not the case, then Williams, Amherst, Pomona, etc. would be more popular than the relatively mediocre Harvard undergrad.

But it's not, and perhaps unfortunately. It means that the most talented and achieving students do not consider the actual merit of these schools, but rather its social prestige. The acronym "HYP" is a prime example of how arbitrary social prestige is: its a century-old designation for the rich, aristocratic WASP families who were displeased with other colleges that were increasingly filled with hard-working immigrants. Think of it as this: if the large influx of Asian immigrants today all went to Yale (let's say Yale didn't consider race as an admissions factor), and the social norm of the WASP establishment was like a century ago, then Yale would lose all its prestige. That's how arbitrary the acronym of HYP is, and more broadly the Ivy League.

Doesn't social prestige of your Alma Mater provide any practical benefits to your career? That's absolutely true. A Harvard grad would probably find more opportunities than a Williams grad, even though the Williams student would have probably had a better undergraduate education. Due to this reality, the most accomplished students all seek these socially prestigious colleges, creating a perpetual cycle of these individuals boosting the reputation of Harvard even more, even though Harvard's quality of education may not be the best. This is something that must be fixed socially, and not encouraged by DCUM posters who ignorantly assume that a lesser desirable school is automatically inferior (though we should all question the social impact that a DCUM thread has...)

People on these threads saying things like Amherst is full of ivy-rejects, is what makes high-achieving students shallow and obsessed with the prestige of the school. If these college threads would rate schools based on their actual merit such as research productivity, then it would naturally lead to not only students considering more of the actual quality of the schools they were admitted to, as well as social prestige being replaced with a foundation of meritocracy rather than ancient racist ideas. The prestige of a school would then be based on its merit, and the best students would go to the best schools, not an inferior yet more prestigious school.

If you want to argue that school x is better than y, please provide information on its departmental rankings, research productivity, peer reputation, or anything that accurately reflects the merits of the university.[/quote]

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