Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Penn's prestige mainly come from their USNews ranking. Same as Princeton when compared with other top schools.

+1, in terms of academic outcomes Penn does not impress as much. Very low on Rhodes Scholars for a school of their size. Wharton is a beast and fuels the money machine of Penn thought.

Keep in mind that Penn typically beats Duke in rankings that are more outcome oriented too, which is largely why Forbes and the WSJ also rank Penn higher than Duke and in the top 10. Penn's grads are going into the financial sector at higher rates, as was noted, which does help Penn keep earnings higher overall, so the comparisons are not always fully fair and apples to apples.

Penn is clearly a better overall university than Duke though. Its professional schools, in particular, are better across the board. It is a closer call for undergrad.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Penn's prestige mainly come from their USNews ranking. Same as Princeton when compared with other top schools.

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

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.

Anonymous wrote:Penn's prestige mainly come from their USNews ranking. Same as Princeton when compared with other top schools.

+1, in terms of academic outcomes Penn does not impress as much. Very low on Rhodes Scholars for a school of their size. Wharton is a beast and fuels the money machine of Penn though.

Anonymous wrote:Penn's prestige mainly come from their USNews ranking. Same as Princeton when compared with other top schools.

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

Penn's prestige mainly come from their USNews ranking. Same as Princeton when compared with other top schools.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Is Duke really a dream school? I've always thought of it as just below one. You can't say you went to an Ivy, its STEM programs are just okay, and they are better known for basketball than academics by a big % of the population.

It's a solid T20 or even T10 school.
It's better than half of ivies.

+1 in our circles (Chinese mostly, some Indian) Duke is highly respected and many of the kids would take it over ivies with approval of the parents. I think T20 is rearview for Duke, has been T10 for decades.

This is our experience (South Asian) as well. A friend’s son last year turned down two ivies for Duke, full pay for all.

Yes, not usually Harvard or Princeton but the rest are fair game to be turned down for Duke in my experience. In particular with my two older kids I would see a big chunk of their classmates/friends/competition peers turning down Cornell, Dartmouth, and Brown for Duke when they had the choice, definitely a sizable majority. I've seen close to a 50-50 split for Duke and Penn/Columbia. Not sure where Yale is in the picture as I haven't seen many kids deciding between the two for STEM as much, my guess would be majority still pick Yale for the historic prestige but that might not hold as much over time. One of my kids turned down Duke for Princeton but would probably have gone to Duke (over Penn and some other top non-ivies) without the Princeton acceptance.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Is Duke really a dream school? I've always thought of it as just below one. You can't say you went to an Ivy, its STEM programs are just okay, and they are better known for basketball than academics by a big % of the population.

It's a solid T20 or even T10 school.
It's better than half of ivies.

+1 in our circles (Chinese mostly, some Indian) Duke is highly respected and many of the kids would take it over ivies with approval of the parents. I think T20 is rearview for Duke, has been T10 for decades.

This is our experience (South Asian) as well. A friend’s son last year turned down two ivies for Duke, full pay for all.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Is Duke really a dream school? I've always thought of it as just below one. You can't say you went to an Ivy, its STEM programs are just okay, and they are better known for basketball than academics by a big % of the population.

It's a solid T20 or even T10 school.
It's better than half of ivies.

+1 in our circles (Chinese mostly, some Indian) Duke is highly respected and many of the kids would take it over ivies with approval of the parents. I think T20 is rearview for Duke, has been T10 for decades.

Wake Forest, UVA, Northwestern, JH

Anonymous wrote:Is Duke really a dream school? I've always thought of it as just below one. You can't say you went to an Ivy, its STEM programs are just okay, and they are better known for basketball than academics by a big % of the population.

It's a solid T20 or even T10 school.
It's better than half of ivies.

Is Duke really a dream school? I've always thought of it as just below one. You can't say you went to an Ivy, its STEM programs are just okay, and they are better known for basketball than academics by a big % of the population.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:East Asian parents here.

Yes there is a list of top schools that many Asian parents want to send their kids to.

But not all Asian kids are super smart. For those kids, I noticed that Asian parents prefer big in-state public schools (for Virginia, UVa, VT, GMU, VCU, etc) over smaller public schools (such as MWC and CNU).

You will have a hard time finding Asian kids at less known private schools like Roanoke college or Randolph Macon.

yep, like the SLACs because the ROI is not there.

https://www.dcurbanmom.com/legacy/posts/list/1160539.page

Depends on who is doing the calculation and with what data. Princeton Review's list of top 50 ROI among privates is about 40% LAC.

https://www.princetonreview.com/college-rankings?rankings=top-50-best-value-colleges-private-schools

Depends on what they target to for studies. Most Asian kids likely target STEM and SLACs are weak in that area. By STEM, I mean the hard-core variety like CS and Engineering.

Not sure what you mean but the link for ROI would take available data from any major into account.

STEM major percentages at most high ranking liberal arts colleges are on par with most high ranking universities, per the other recent thread. That’s not counting social sciences as STEM. Most LACs don’t have engineering but I don’t know of any that don’t have CS, natural sciences, and math. I don’t consider engineering more “hard-core” than natural sciences.

If a school without engineering has a higher ROI than one with, that would suggest the one without is outperforming the one with in the majors they do share.

The generic ROI rankings use an average price as the denominator that most Asians don't get. Most pay full price so the ROI argument is just BS. Secondly, the list is a solid list of schools that offer Engr/CS for the most part anyways and the liberal arts schools don't even enter the raking until way towards the bottom. Why would I pay $80K to study CS at Haverford or Wabash? Liberal arts schools are not highly ranked for CS. Period. They also have a difficult time finding/retaining CS faculty. Most of the CS faculty at WPI, ranked $45 on this list, are visiting professors and the school is not ranked that high anyways.

Anonymous wrote:Nobody mentioned USC - University of Spoiled Chinese?

USC is very popular among Asians for these reasons

https://www.collegetransitions.com/dataverse/top-feeders-banking

https://www.collegetransitions.com/dataverse/top-feeders-engineering

https://www.collegetransitions.com/dataverse/top-feeders-tech

Your "dream school" list is for parents. For kids, Asian or not, they are actually more focused on the majors that interest them. For CS/engineering kids, they might lean to CMU, GaTech, Purdue, UIUC, UMich, UWisc, UTAustin, and of course UMD for our DC kids.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:East Asian parents here.

Yes there is a list of top schools that many Asian parents want to send their kids to.

But not all Asian kids are super smart. For those kids, I noticed that Asian parents prefer big in-state public schools (for Virginia, UVa, VT, GMU, VCU, etc) over smaller public schools (such as MWC and CNU).

You will have a hard time finding Asian kids at less known private schools like Roanoke college or Randolph Macon.

yep, like the SLACs because the ROI is not there.

https://www.dcurbanmom.com/legacy/posts/list/1160539.page

Depends on who is doing the calculation and with what data. Princeton Review's list of top 50 ROI among privates is about 40% LAC.

https://www.princetonreview.com/college-rankings?rankings=top-50-best-value-colleges-private-schools

Depends on what they target to for studies. Most Asian kids likely target STEM and SLACs are weak in that area. By STEM, I mean the hard-core variety like CS and Engineering.

Not sure what you mean but the link for ROI would take available data from any major into account.

STEM major percentages at most high ranking liberal arts colleges are on par with most high ranking universities, per the other recent thread. That’s not counting social sciences as STEM. Most LACs don’t have engineering but I don’t know of any that don’t have CS, natural sciences, and math. I don’t consider engineering more “hard-core” than natural sciences.

If a school without engineering has a higher ROI than one with, that would suggest the one without is outperforming the one with in the majors they do share.