Ranking America's Best 100 Universities

America's Top 100 Universities: 2009 Rankings by Al6200

Methodology

Only universities in the United States which offer doctoral degrees are ranked.

Major Criteria:

Size of endowment
SAT Percentiles
Freshman Class Rank Percentiles

Minor Criteria:

US News Peer Review Score

Tier 1 - Top 6

1. Harvard
2. Yale
3. Princeton
4. Stanford
5. MIT
6. Caltech

Tier 2 - Top 20

7. Rice
8. Chicago
9. WUSTL
10. Columbia
11. Duke
12. Dartmouth
13. Emory
14. Northwestern
15. Notre Dame
16. Penn
17. Hopkins
18. Vanderbilt
19. Brown
20. Carnegie Mellon

Tier 3 - Top 50

21. Tufts
22. Georgetown
23. USC
24. Illinois
25. Berkeley
26. Michigan
27. Brandeis
28. RPI
29. Georgia Tech
30. Boston College
31. LeHigh
32. Rochester
33. Virginia
34. WPI
35. NYU
36. Wisconsin
37. Case Western
38. Wake Forest
39. William & Mary
40. UCLA
41. Tulane
42. UNC
43. Miami
44. UC San Diego
45. Maryland
46. Yeshiva
47. Cornell
48. George Washington
49. U. Texas
50. Illinois Tech

Tier 4 - Top 100

51. Stevens
52. Wisconsin
53. Tulsa
54. Minnesota
55. Boston University
56. Colorado Mines
57. Florida
58. SUNY
59. Yeshiva
60. Pepperdine
61. Tulane
62. Ohio State
63. Syracuse
64. Northeastern
65. Iowa State
66. Clemson
67. SMU
68. St. Louis
69. Delaware
70. American
71. UNL
72. Texas A&M
73. Drexel
74. Pacific
75. University of Iowa
76. Virginia Tech
77. UC Irvine
78. Pittsburgh
79. Washington
80. Penn State
81. Rutgers
82. Connecticut
83. Georgia
84. Fordham
85. UC Santa Barbara
86. UC Davis
87. Miami Ohio
88. Purdue
89. Baylor
90. Marquette
91. NC State
92. Suny Stony Brook
93. Oklahoma
94. Clark
95. Michigan State
96. Colorado
97. Denver
98. Howard
99. Indiana
100. Florida State

Disclaimer: Like all rankings, this is obviously not perfect and all schools have their own relative academic advantages. But I think my rankings are better than the USNews rankings so I'm posting them anyway.

Comments

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Der-Lowe 2009-04-29 18:57:42

Princeton > Chicago?
hmm

Al6200 2009-04-29 18:57:42 (Updated 2009-05-04 16:37:03)

I'd suppose that Chicago is better for economics. And it does have a law school. But Princeton was at the forefront of all of the cutting edge math/physics research in the early 20th century.

Does Chicago have better international prestige than Princeton? It wouldn't count here since these rankings were generated using a formula that only takes freshman SAT scores and financial resources into account. By SAT scores Chicago is not in the top 10, but it's large endowment keeps it at #8.

Der-Lowe 2009-05-12 09:51:36

Actually, Bernanke and Krugman taught at Princeton.
Samuelson, and many other economists, come from MIT.
I just don't know what to believe in anymore! D:

johnfn 2009-05-26 17:42:30

Gogo Stanford!! :D also, your rankings seem to be how well the students of the university preform solely academically, which is a piece of the puzzle, but I don't know if that's the whole piece!

Al6200 2009-05-26 17:42:30

Yeah, I've wanted to use something like a value added analysis for judging schools. For example, a school which has median SATs in the 1800s and sends 2% of their pre-law students to Yale law is doing a much better job then a school with median SATs in the 2200s that has the same performance.

In this ranking, I used the SAT percentiles to measure a school's "input" and endowment to measure a school's "output" (after all, you have to be pretty rich to give your school billions of dollars).