Anonymous
Post 01/14/2024 13:31     Subject: What are the “top 10” schools?
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:Harvard
Stanford
MIT
Yale
Princeton
Columbia
Penn
Duke
Northwestern
Chicago / Brown / Dartmouth



1. Harvard Stanford MIT Yale Princeton (no particular order)
2. Columbia Penn Duke Northwestern Chicago Hopkins, Cornell (no particular order)

Undergrad focused institutions:

Williams, Brown, Dartmouth, Amherst, Swarthmore, Pomona


William & Mary: every course is taught by a Professor.

Princeton is also very undergrad focused.
Anonymous
Post 01/14/2024 13:19     Subject: What are the “top 10” schools?
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:Yale has a reputation of being the school "where science majors go to die."


As a general matter, good luck getting any real professors teaching your DCs at the top schools. Maybe they see one in their final year before graduating. The rest are grad students and adjuncts. Those profs that do teach can't wait to get the hell out of the classroom..


If your kid's at an ivy level, s/he is expect to know or teach the class himself or herself. Anyone at that level needing a handholding by "any real professors" doesn't belong there.


This is correct. Students at this level also challenge themselves and tend to set standards well above the norm. Profs at this level become facilitators and, if needed, a resource.
Anonymous
Post 01/14/2024 13:07     Subject: What are the “top 10” schools?
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:Yale has a reputation of being the school "where science majors go to die."


As a general matter, good luck getting any real professors teaching your DCs at the top schools. Maybe they see one in their final year before graduating. The rest are grad students and adjuncts. Those profs that do teach can't wait to get the hell out of the classroom..


If your kid's at an ivy level, s/he is expect to know or teach the class himself or herself. Anyone at that level needing a handholding by "any real professors" doesn't belong there.
Anonymous
Post 01/14/2024 10:10     Subject: What are the “top 10” schools?
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:Yale has a reputation of being the school "where science majors go to die."


As a general matter, good luck getting any real professors teaching your DCs at the top schools. Maybe they see one in their final year before graduating. The rest are grad students and adjuncts. Those profs that do teach can't wait to get the hell out of the classroom..


Where are you getting this from? Take a quick look at the course catalogs say at MIT and Yale (just two random picks). Pretty much everyone in the Physics and Math departments (and others) are teaching undergrad courses. Perhaps not the 500 person freshman physics courses, which are much better done by instructors and grad students leading recitation sections. But undergrads certainly have the opportunity to take classes with top professors/researchers. The Nobel Prize guys mostly teach grad students but a bright junior/senior can definitely take those classes as well.


A bright junior/senior? Aren’t they all supposed to be bright if they got into HYPS!?

Anonymous
Post 01/14/2024 07:55     Subject: What are the “top 10” schools?
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:Yale has a reputation of being the school "where science majors go to die."


As a general matter, good luck getting any real professors teaching your DCs at the top schools. Maybe they see one in their final year before graduating. The rest are grad students and adjuncts. Those profs that do teach can't wait to get the hell out of the classroom..


Where are you getting this from? Take a quick look at the course catalogs say at MIT and Yale (just two random picks). Pretty much everyone in the Physics and Math departments (and others) are teaching undergrad courses. Perhaps not the 500 person freshman physics courses, which are much better done by instructors and grad students leading recitation sections. But undergrads certainly have the opportunity to take classes with top professors/researchers. The Nobel Prize guys mostly teach grad students but a bright junior/senior can definitely take those classes as well.
Anonymous
Post 01/14/2024 07:03     Subject: What are the “top 10” schools?
Anonymous wrote:The ivies plus Duke, Stanford and JHU


That’s 11. Remove JHU and the lower ivies (Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth) and add MIT, Caltech, Northwestern and you’re on the ball.
Anonymous
Post 01/14/2024 05:46     Subject: What are the “top 10” schools?
The ivies plus Duke, Stanford and JHU
Anonymous
Post 01/14/2024 05:41     Subject: What are the “top 10” schools?
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:And curious if there is a subset that there are no disagreements about?


One of biggest mistakes new parents make is to ignore what their kid wants to focus on. Yale is amazing but STEM kids from our private school are often disappointed at the lesser strength of its STEM departments. Duke is much stronger in certain areas than others. Cornell is very strong in CS and Engineering, less so in Humanities.

So please think about top 10 at least somewhat in the context of what your kids is broadly interested in.

I remember seeing on some website that Yale engineering degree grad earning very similar salary to MIT engineering grad
Anonymous
Post 01/14/2024 02:08     Subject: Re:What are the “top 10” schools?
Kind of a dumb topic. Depends on the major. And vibe. And lots of other things. But generally?

Stanford
MIT
Princeton
Harvard
CalTech

And then a lot of schools - Brown, Vanderbilt, Penn, Duke, Williams, Columbia, Rice, Dartmouth, Berkeley, Amherst, Michigan, Swarthmore, Yale, Cornell, Northwestern.
Anonymous
Post 01/14/2024 00:14     Subject: Re:What are the “top 10” schools?
Sure

UCLA
UF
Clemson
Wisconsin
Michigan
UMD
Rutgers
USC
U of SC
UNC

Anonymous
Post 01/14/2024 00:13     Subject: What are the “top 10” schools?
Anonymous wrote:Harvard
Stanford
MIT
Yale
Princeton
Columbia
Penn
Duke
Northwestern
Chicago / Brown / Dartmouth



1. Harvard Stanford MIT Yale Princeton (no particular order)
2. Columbia Penn Duke Northwestern Chicago Hopkins, Cornell (no particular order)

Undergrad focused institutions:

Williams, Brown, Dartmouth, Amherst, Swarthmore, Pomona
Anonymous
Post 01/14/2024 00:09     Subject: What are the “top 10” schools?
Anonymous wrote:Yale has a reputation of being the school "where science majors go to die."


As a general matter, good luck getting any real professors teaching your DCs at the top schools. Maybe they see one in their final year before graduating. The rest are grad students and adjuncts. Those profs that do teach can't wait to get the hell out of the classroom..
Anonymous
Post 01/13/2024 22:54     Subject: What are the “top 10” schools?
Yale has a reputation of being the school "where science majors go to die."
Anonymous
Post 01/13/2024 18:21     Subject: What are the “top 10” schools?
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:And curious if there is a subset that there are no disagreements about?


One of biggest mistakes new parents make is to ignore what their kid wants to focus on. Yale is amazing but STEM kids from our private school are often disappointed at the lesser strength of its STEM departments. Duke is much stronger in certain areas than others. Cornell is very strong in CS and Engineering, less so in Humanities.

So please think about top 10 at least somewhat in the context of what your kids is broadly interested in.



Very much this.

Harvard and Yale are great schools of course. But they are much better at the graduate level. For STEM, there are quite a few pretty normal publics that are more highly regarded.

Context matters.

Anonymous
Post 01/13/2024 14:04     Subject: What are the “top 10” schools?
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:And curious if there is a subset that there are no disagreements about?


One of biggest mistakes new parents make is to ignore what their kid wants to focus on. Yale is amazing but STEM kids from our private school are often disappointed at the lesser strength of its STEM departments. Duke is much stronger in certain areas than others. Cornell is very strong in CS and Engineering, less so in Humanities.

So please think about top 10 at least somewhat in the context of what your kids is broadly interested in.


Agree with this. Also a lot of schools discussed here have a reputation as great because of grad schools. As an example Harvard undergrad is know for being easy with not a lot of work required of the students and rampant grade inflation.