So I guess this is some global ranking of university reputation? I guess it mostly makes sense if the criteria is public perception. I’m surprised by a few things though. UCLA > Yale? Is this based on NCAA basketball? #5 Berkeley? I mean, I guess it’s a good university, especially for science graduate school, but I thought more people would say Caltech or something.
Edit: Wow, Dartmouth not even in top 100. They are less reputable than… Rutgers?
I looked up Dartmouth on Wikipedia. Their motto is “The voice of one crying in the wilderness”. Wtf? Is there something really wrong with New Hampshire?
Any university with median SAT of more than 2200 (?) - well, let’s say 1500 using the old system - generally does not have an attractive student population.
I know two people who went there for UG, and both said, “it’s great if you love the outdoors,” which I took to mean it’s terrible for everything else. Sort of like Cornell.
If I understand the rankings correctly, they are based on each institution’s reputation in the eyes of academic folks based on the perceived prestige in both research and teaching. I’m not sure how much people really care about what a bunch of academics think.
Note that this is a general academic ranking, not a finance ranking. Places like UPenn or Columbia are strong in finance, but are not that strong in other fields.
I was speaking of “other fields” where it pertains to these rankings. Based on the broad survey, Columbia is weaker relative to other universities ranked higher on the list (UC Berkeley, for instance) once you consider a wide variety of fields - physics, biology, engineering, social studies, etc. This does not mean that Columbia is not strong in some other fields, albeit with less variety.
Columbia is strong in a lot fields. So is Penn – law, medicine, and probably others. Anyway, the fact that it has Wharton should put it pretty high on the list regardless.
We do probably overly discount top schools in other countries in the US though. I recruited out of some of the schools in Japan, for example, and they definitely produce some very strong candidates.
Whatever the rankings, they are only useful to a point. The quality of experience and opportunities between most of these schools is not that different beyond some point. Whether that’s top 20, 30 or 50 I don’t know, but rankings are pretty overrated after taking into account things like fit.
We should consider that this is a survery of academic reputation, not career placement or sutff like that. Also, it seems to focus on graduate programs, since undergraduates produce little or no useful research. So if you went to Amherst or some place like that that is not ranked here, it doesn’t mean your school sucks. It just means that there were no graduate programs.
I never know how these lists are really created anyway and what they are really supposed to rank. I treat them as curiosities into someone’s way of thinking.
How do you compare things like number of faculty publications. Student/faculty ratio. Career placement. Long term career earnings. Number of graduates in high prestige or power jobs. How much bling the name puts on a resume. Whether students actually know anything. Whether faculty actually knows anything. Whether the alumni actually help each other. etc.
There are dozens of ways to build this into a single score and weight stuff… z-score averaging, regression techniques, overweighing one’s preferred metric to get ones preferred school on top, etc.
And in the US, there’s a distinction between colleges (undergraduate institutions) and universities (institutions that offer graduate degrees). Are colleges on the list?
Anyway, it’s just a curiosity, and the output of someone’s method. Discussing what method leads to what ranking (i.e. a methodology discussion) often tells you more that’s relevant than the ranking itself.
I personally know a kid of NJ from high school, he got accepted to rutgers even though he was the bottom 10% of the entire class and failed a few courses including Spanish 1.
