Reply to For Fellow Asians: What are the Popular Schools You've Seen Kids Looking at?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Penn's prestige mainly come from their USNews ranking. Same as Princeton when compared with other top schools.[/quote]

My typo. I mean Duke's prestige mainly comes from the USNews ranking, not Penn.[/quote]

I tend to agree, at least to a certain degree. Duke is very good; however, in the other big rankings, Duke often ends up more in the 15-25 range.
This year they are #16 in the WSJ rankings and 17 in the Forbes rankings. Duke is a great school, don't get me wrong, but people should just be sure to know it isn't universally regarded as a top 10 school even by rankers, let alone by lay people who view prestigious colleges in different ways and can skew toward seeing Duke more as a basketball school like Kentucky or Villanova. 
Looking at the Times Higher Education world university rankings, Duke hasn't been above #20 since 2020 and is #26 in this year's 2024 edition. [/quote]

Eh I disagree, for undergrad Duke is pretty much as good as it gets. If you're looking at other rankings, just know in general rankings fluctuate every year. Last year Harvard was #15 on Forbes for example, but now it's #9 which is still a joke. And last year Duke was #5 on WSJ and #9 on Forbes.

[img]https://i.imgur.com/eMTzkRP.png[/img][/quote]

What people considering Duke and Chicago (and others) should be aware of is where they might end up as the rankings evolve. The main ranking institutions have undergone significant methodology changes recently that have hurt and will continue to comparatively hurt certain schools (many very good but maybe not quite elite private schools are the ones who are nervous). 
People should be aware that median 10-year earnings are lower at Duke than they are at schools like Penn, Dartmouth, Williams, and Georgetown. That doesn't mean Duke isn't a great school, it just means there is a lot more info than USNWR rank that people should consider. Rankings are great for grouping universities and Duke is one where people are divided as to which schools are truly its peers. You can go either way but make your assessment knowing the data and with your eyes wide open![/quote]

TBH the median 10-year earnings mostly measure what regions the "average" students from each school settle in. Most of the ambitious kids at all these top schools get recruited out the gate to big cities and by 10 years into their career are receiving most of their compensation through bonuses, stock/equity, etc. which are not part of base salary measures and will fluctuate year-by-year. Of course tech still has a fairly high base salary, but many of the other high-earning professions like finance and consulting will not have the compensation properly reflected through salary. The 10-year base salary is more about the cost-of-living of where the more balance-oriented grads at these schools end up. So more kids who go to Rice will have low COL in Texas where the salaries may be slightly lower, but their dollar will go much further. Same with Duke grads in North Carolina, who can live extremely comfortably with a salary that the DMV would consider difficult to get by on. This would also apply for Northwestern grads who may not even settle in Chicago, but another part of the midwest where their $$ goes a long way. So, as for now, I just stick with US News for a ballpark approximation of where schools are and then look at things like salary with the appropriate context of where the school is.[/quote]

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