So Ivy grads are more successful than Chicago grads, so Forbes does nail it?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I can't trust Forbes if they don't post their calculated numbers for the individual schools. For all we know, it could be conjured up in thin air. It has a veneer of being reputable with HYPMS at the top, the Ivies all in the top 15, and a smattering of the most prestigious LACs (Pomona, Swarthmore, Williams, Amherst are usually considered the big 4 LAC, and all are ranked in the top 20). But rankings can't be based on just popular opinion. They have to be rooted on a methodology that can be reviewed by outsiders to ensure accuracy.

With US News, you see a component breakdown of everything resulting in the rating as it is. It helps understand and compare the difference between schools.

So Forbes hates UChicago (and Northwestern) so much they dedicated resources to a college list so they could in the end screw the city of Chicago's top universities - is that what you're suggesting?

Don't display your ignorance. Forbes is an output based ranking. It says nothing about "incoming student caliber or prestige"

One thing that Forbes values highly is "low student debt and high earning potential and career success". This favors colleges that have huge endowments that throw a lot of financial aid money at needy kids. Nothing wrong with that, it just skews the ROI calculation and hides the real cost of an elite education. To do an apples to apples comparison, they would have to do a ROI calculator for full pay vs non-full pay kids which they don't. Also since career success is correlated to your major, schools with engineering will usually be favored here over other schools.

Bottom line, Forbes is a completely different ranking system that does not try to measure student caliber or prestige at all. In fact they are proud of that, so using their ranking to justify the OP's clear bias and hatred for Chicago is pathetic.

USNews on the other hand is an input based ranking. It is all about prestige and academic caliber. So yes for what OP wants to measure, the USNews ranking is more credible.

Note that I am not saying these ranking systems are good, but if I were looking for Prestige and student caliber, Forbes is the last ranking you should be looking at.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I can't trust Forbes if they don't post their calculated numbers for the individual schools. For all we know, it could be conjured up in thin air. It has a veneer of being reputable with HYPMS at the top, the Ivies all in the top 15, and a smattering of the most prestigious LACs (Pomona, Swarthmore, Williams, Amherst are usually considered the big 4 LAC, and all are ranked in the top 20). But rankings can't be based on just popular opinion. They have to be rooted on a methodology that can be reviewed by outsiders to ensure accuracy.

With US News, you see a component breakdown of everything resulting in the rating as it is. It helps understand and compare the difference between schools.

So Forbes hates UChicago (and Northwestern) so much they dedicated resources to a college list so they could in the end screw the city of Chicago's top universities - is that what you're suggesting?

No, I just think the readership is mostly Northeast and Silicon Valley folks who know those schools more than NU or UChicago. I don't know if it's accurately determined but there's a chance it could be a way to gain legitimacy.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Chicago’s looking for brainiacs, Ivies are looking for ambitious extroverts who will pursue fame/fortune/power. There’s some overlap in those groups, but not much.

Um, the 1960s-1980s called. Current UChicago is nothing like that.

Nah, 1970s-1980s Chicago had very little allure for the smartest undergrads. As Harvard becomes more like Stanford, Chicago becomes more attractive to academically inclined college kids.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:With only 235 students per class and only a fraction of the course offerings of other major research universities, CalTech is an excellent school within its niche. But it’s ludicrous to say other elite schools are building their classes around the single metric of diversity (it’s not like they are pulling names out of various hats) or that they can’t get the highest caliber/most talented students. In Harvard’s or Chicago’s or Princeton’s or Yales’ class of 1300-1600 students you can, no doubt, find 235 kids whose stats are identical to CalTech’s class — as well as many other kids for whom CalTech couldn’t compete because it didn’t have the faculty or course offerings they were looking for.

Yes, there are kids that get into those schools, but since these schools give admission to all kinds of "under qualified" students to promote their diversity obsession, it is no longer possible to say that just because a kid got into Harvard, he or she is smart. You can definitely say that about a Caltech Student.

“No longer?” You could never have said that about every Harvard kid, LOL! If anything, Harvard is more meritocratic today than it was 50 years ago. Re CalTech kids, you can assume they do very well on standardized tests and were quite good at understanding and producing what their HS teachers want. But we don’t really have finely-calibrated or consistent ways of measuring the comparative intelligence of high-performing HS students. The most brilliant kids don’t always get the best scores or grades — they see ambiguities and nuances that standardized test writers don’t notice, they think unconventionally and may not have teachers who recognize/appreciate that, etc. WRT stats, it makes more sense to have a threshhold above which everyone is considered well-qualified rather than to assume you can rank order by the numbers and highest scores = most qualified. Harvard will certainly bet on kids CalTech wouldn’t — that’s about recognizing there are all sorts of different ways that people stand out, achieve, contribute, and/or become forces to be reckoned with in the world and wanting to have influence on/ties to as many different kinds of leaders as they can.

Anonymous wrote:I can't trust Forbes if they don't post their calculated numbers for the individual schools. For all we know, it could be conjured up in thin air. It has a veneer of being reputable with HYPMS at the top, the Ivies all in the top 15, and a smattering of the most prestigious LACs (Pomona, Swarthmore, Williams, Amherst are usually considered the big 4 LAC, and all are ranked in the top 20). But rankings can't be based on just popular opinion. They have to be rooted on a methodology that can be reviewed by outsiders to ensure accuracy.

With US News, you see a component breakdown of everything resulting in the rating as it is. It helps understand and compare the difference between schools.

So Forbes hates UChicago (and Northwestern) so much they dedicated resources to a college list so they could in the end screw the city of Chicago's top universities - is that what you're suggesting?

I can't trust Forbes if they don't post their calculated numbers for the individual schools. For all we know, it could be conjured up in thin air. It has a veneer of being reputable with HYPMS at the top, the Ivies all in the top 15, and a smattering of the most prestigious LACs (Pomona, Swarthmore, Williams, Amherst are usually considered the big 4 LAC, and all are ranked in the top 20). But rankings can't be based on just popular opinion. They have to be rooted on a methodology that can be reviewed by outsiders to ensure accuracy.

With US News, you see a component breakdown of everything resulting in the rating as it is. It helps understand and compare the difference between schools.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Does Forbes list nail undergrad caliber and status better than US News?

#1 Harvard University
#2 Stanford University
#3 Yale University
#4 Princeton University
#5 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
#6 California Institute of Technology
#7 University of Pennsylvania
#8 Duke University
#9 Brown University
#10 Pomona College
#11 Claremont McKenna College
#12 Dartmouth College
#13 Williams College
#14 Columbia University
#15 Cornell University
#16 University of Chicago

Hahaha. That Chicago hater is back!!! No matter how hard you try, Chicago is ascendant and better for undergrad education than the school you would love to see at #3 spot in the USNews rankings.. Keep on dreaming!!!

Why does Forbes rank them #16 for undergrad? Is the old money Forbes family full of Chicago "haters"?

Also, if you don't think Caltech cares about diversity, you'd be wrong. They have a whole center dedicated to it: http://diversitycenter.caltech.edu/ They track the URM percent each year: http://www.registrar.caltech.edu/academics/enrollment Their admissions page lists it: http://www.admissions.caltech.edu/content/diversity And their CDS puts that race is considered: http://finance.caltech.edu/Resources/cds

Um......no one at the top schools is unqualified. Harvard rejects 93% of Black applicants. The SAT scores might be lower, perhaps, but those kids are still star students in their own right.

Anonymous wrote:Chicago’s looking for brainiacs, Ivies are looking for ambitious extroverts who will pursue fame/fortune/power. There’s some overlap in those groups, but not much.

Um, the 1960s-1980s called. Current UChicago is nothing like that.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:With only 235 students per class and only a fraction of the course offerings of other major research universities, CalTech is an excellent school within its niche. But it’s ludicrous to say other elite schools are building their classes around the single metric of diversity (it’s not like they are pulling names out of various hats) or that they can’t get the highest caliber/most talented students. In Harvard’s or Chicago’s or Princeton’s or Yales’ class of 1300-1600 students you can, no doubt, find 235 kids whose stats are identical to CalTech’s class — as well as many other kids for whom CalTech couldn’t compete because it didn’t have the faculty or course offerings they were looking for.

Yes, there are kids that get into those schools, but since these schools give admission to all kinds of "under qualified" students to promote their diversity obsession, it is no longer possible to say that just because a kid got into Harvard, he or she is smart. You can definitely say that about a Caltech Student.

We Harvard alums employ Caltech alums in the companies we create. Enough said.

Anonymous wrote:With only 235 students per class and only a fraction of the course offerings of other major research universities, CalTech is an excellent school within its niche. But it’s ludicrous to say other elite schools are building their classes around the single metric of diversity (it’s not like they are pulling names out of various hats) or that they can’t get the highest caliber/most talented students. In Harvard’s or Chicago’s or Princeton’s or Yales’ class of 1300-1600 students you can, no doubt, find 235 kids whose stats are identical to CalTech’s class — as well as many other kids for whom CalTech couldn’t compete because it didn’t have the faculty or course offerings they were looking for.

Yes, there are kids that get into those schools, but since these schools give admission to all kinds of "under qualified" students to promote their diversity obsession, it is no longer possible to say that just because a kid got into Harvard, he or she is smart. You can definitely say that about a Caltech Student.

With only 235 students per class and only a fraction of the course offerings of other major research universities, CalTech is an excellent school within its niche. But it’s ludicrous to say other elite schools are building their classes around the single metric of diversity (it’s not like they are pulling names out of various hats) or that they can’t get the highest caliber/most talented students. In Harvard’s or Chicago’s or Princeton’s or Yales’ class of 1300-1600 students you can, no doubt, find 235 kids whose stats are identical to CalTech’s class — as well as many other kids for whom CalTech couldn’t compete because it didn’t have the faculty or course offerings they were looking for.

Anonymous wrote:Does Forbes list nail undergrad caliber and status better than US News?

#1 Harvard University
#2 Stanford University
#3 Yale University
#4 Princeton University
#5 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
#6 California Institute of Technology
#7 University of Pennsylvania
#8 Duke University
#9 Brown University
#10 Pomona College
#11 Claremont McKenna College
#12 Dartmouth College
#13 Williams College
#14 Columbia University
#15 Cornell University
#16 University of Chicago

Any accurate list of undergrad caliber, that doesn't have Caltech at #1 is a joke. The Ivies don't get the highest caliber kids, because they don't have the sense to recruit the most talented anymore. They are building their classes on one metric only "diversity" and that doesn't correlate very well with academic caliber in this country