(09-09-2015 06:39 PM)cr11owl Wrote: (09-09-2015 06:06 PM)JustAnotherAustinOwl Wrote: What is your argument against Vandy and ND being on the list? I'm not disagreeing, I just want to steal your arguments for next time I talk to Vandy or ND people.
It is just my personal experience from people I know who attended those schools. The top students are just as good as Rice students (same can be said of schools like A&M and UT) but there are kids who would have no business being at Rice. In north Alabama Vandy is the default school for the well off families who have kids that are good students but not academic superstars. A lot of the time one of the parents went there. I think 9/70 of my private school class went to Vandy and one of the previous years I believe it was 10/65. For the southeast region I'd say Duke was always top dog while I was growing up with Vandy being a step behind. Maybe I always tied Rice to Duke because they are both the top universities in their region? Don't get me wrong Vandy and ND are good schools but a lot of the people I met at Rice were deciding between Duke/Stanford/Chicago/Northwestern and not so much Vandy, ND, and Emory.
Cr11 hit all of the main spots. I admit that my impression of ND is generally limited to doctoral programs and output - I don't generally see ND labs producing many patents and startups, or presenting much at national conferences. As for Vanderbilt - I can confirm from having TA'ed a number of classes while I was there that there are quite a bunch of people there who were Rice rejects. Having also worked at the Rice admissions office one summer (and having to reorganize a bunch of files, including the response cards from people who had decided not to come to campus), I can say for sure that people who turn down Rice typically do so to go to Stanford, Northwestern, MIT, or UT honors. Never once did I see someone state Vanderbilt on their card.
As a Vanderbilt TA, I also felt that engineering classes were generally easier (homeworks, tests, everything) and the average student's mental tools and career mindset was not as strong as the average Rice student. I felt like my classmates at Rice had strong drives to blaze their own trails to success, were eloquent, and had clear goals and ambitions which drove their selection of activities and investments outside of class. The average Vanderbilt student gave me the impression that they had a rich relative as a fallback plan, had pretty entitled attitudes (even non-premeds acted very premed-like with our grading), and were not as much of go-getters as Rice kids. Of course, I also met my share of people at Vandy who would have fit right in at Rice, but they were generally rare.
As a university, I generally felt free to debate controversial and hot-button topics with my peers at Rice, and I felt that the administration (at least in 2004-2008) treated us like adults and afforded a level of intellectual freedom and space to really grow. Vanderbilt tends to prefer being politically correct, and whenever some conflict came up where some person was offended by an event or some club (there were several in my time there), the administration generally stepped in like a parent stopping a quarrel between their toddlers. Vanderbilt generally markets itself to prospective students as a 'balanced' place where you can have the best academics and have a life. However, I don't really ever feel like the academics side of the equation was strong, in terms of peoples' work ethics and the quality of the product.
Overall, Vanderbilt and ND are stronger schools than a large percentage of the universities across the country, but I am going to stick up my nose here and say they don't belong in the same conversation when we talk about the strongest academic institutions in the country.