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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]So I’ve noticed this thing with college rankings and it appears that the universities we consider to be “top” are top because of specifically business and law school rankings ( medical school is a different). With the exception of a handful of privates like Johns Hopkins or Rice, along with the ivies of Princeton and Brown, most universities derive their reputations primarily from just these two subjects. Take UVA for example. Historically, it is not well known in either stem or humanities quite frankly. Just compare their department rankings in economics or history to the more historically prestigious Michigan and Wisconsin. But, UVA is seen as comparable and even better than those two, based purely on business and law schools. Furthermore, undergraduate selectivity seems to be primarily generated through competitive pre law/pre-mba finance bros. [/quote]

You're mistaken. Quite a few "elite" American universities don't have top tier business or law schools - Princeton, CalTech, Duke, Johns Hopkins, Brown, West Point, Annapolis, Williams, Amherst, Carnegie Mellon to name a few.

I'll grant you UVA though. Excellent law and business school.

And some are really well known in one graduate field and not the other. Or don't do it. Like Dartmouth and business. But no law school. [/quote]

Duke currently has the #4 Law School and #12 business school according to U.S. News. [/quote]

No one in law actually considers Duke a top 4 law school.  harvard, yale, stanford, penn, chicago, northwestern, michigan, NYU, boalt, all out class it.  This shows in the entering class stats as well.[/quote]

People "in law" don't have intelligent opinions that are formed independent of US News.  For as long as US News has been around, HLS has always had the absolute #1 Peer ratings (sometimes tied with Yale).  But when US News changed the formula to heavily factor expenditure per student, they ensured that all smaller law schools would go up in rankings and HLS would go down. In the 1960s Yale made the curriculum kinder and gentler and thus started taking away many students who previously would have chosen Harvard.  All of Yale's faculty stars are now at retirement age, and [b]HLS is on the upswing again in terms of superb faculty quality, not to mention HLS' exceptional depth and breadth, and a general increase in quality of life (no grades)[/b]. but it makes no difference until the USNEWS gods decide to change their bizarre quantitative weighting of various factors, which they will never do.

Duke is always regarded as a top law school by everyone.  But a smart group of people might figure out that USNEWS is complete pile of crap.  and should probably be ignored.  This is DCUM, so unfortunately, this crowd will never figure it out.  [/quote]

But Harvard does have "grades" - it simply swapped out A,B,C D, fail for "dean's scholar, honirs, pass, low pass and fail"[/quote]

Honors = A & A- (Dean's scholar is similar to A+ you could say); Pass = everything else (B+ and below).  Almost no one gets a lowpass or fail.  There is a similar system at Yale.  Unfortunately, it appears that the adoption of the new grading system at HLS has done absolutely nothing to reduce the neuroticism of the student body.  Also, it seems that levels of brown-nosing and backstabbing have reached new heights at Yale, though I'm not sure why.  [/quote]

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