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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Best undergraduate
1. Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, MIT, Yale

1b. Columbia, Caltech, Upenn, U Chicago

2. Duke, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins

2b. Dartmouth, Brown[/quote]

What does this even mean?  Are you talking about the prestige of the name or the quality of education?  Harvard, for instance is kind of indifferent to undergraduates, but prestige associated with the name is unmatched.

For prestige, I've always thought these lists with lots of tiers don't really have much basis in reality.  Even within a top tier of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, and Stanford, if you went to Yale or Princeton, many people are going to assume you probably didn't get into Harvard or probably Stanford.  MIT occupies a bit of another dimension in that only Stanford among this set is competitive in some of its core strength areas.  Caltech is competitive with MIT for undergraduates, but it is so small it is really a niche school.

The ones below your top tier have more asterisks. UPenn I've always thought is buoyed by Wharton, and is not as well regarded outside of that.  Duke and Northwestern are viewed by some as  interlopers.  Hopkins is kind of pre-med specialist school.  Dartmouth and Brown are strong undergraduate schools, but are dinged by some for not having strong graduate programs.

Once you get below a couple of top prestige tiers, I think the water is really muddy.  I don't think employers and graduate school admissions are making incremental distinctions between schools that many people think they are.  Law school and medical school in particular are numbers driven, so they are looking much more at GPA and standardized test scores than the name of the undergraduate school.

If I were rewriting your tiers based on prestige, with declining prestige even within tiers, it would look like this.  I recognize it is only my 2 cents:

Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Yale, Princeton (note that 10+ years at the top of USNews hasn't really budged Princeton upward for cross-admits)

Columbia, Caltech, Duke, Penn, Brown, Chicago, Dartmouth, Northwestern (Caltech so specialized they are difficult to place.  If you want to be a star STEM academic, it is very strong.)

By the time you get to Rice, Hopkins, Georgetown, Wash U, Vanderbilt, Cornell, I'm not convinced there is that much differentiation between a number of other privates, LACs, and a number of stronger public schools (e.g. Michigan).

[/quote]

Duke should be around Dartmouth/Northwestern.  Also you can argue that Brown belongs in lower tier[/quote]

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