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Going by the top 50 in the rankings published by US News...
Overrated: Dartmouth, Brown, Notre Dame, USC, Boston College, Brandeis, Lehigh, UC-Davis, UC-Santa Barbara, UC-Irvine...All of these are great universities, but I don't feel they should be ranked as high as they are.
Underrated: UC-Berkeley, Michigan, UNC-Chapel Hill, UC-San Diego, Wisconsin, Illinois...These schools are all well known as great schools, but I think they are all even better than what their rankings suggest. It's nuts that Berkeley is not even ranked in the top 20, and that schools like Wisconsin and Illinois are not even in the top 40.
Berekely is ranked #21 of National Universiteis; Illinois and Wisconsin are both ranked #39. (US News, 2010)
Here in Texas, UT is overrated from what I can see. Granted, it's a great school that is difficult to get into, but I don't think it's THAT much better than every other Texas school. For whatever reason, Rice does not seem to get the prestige it deserves and seems like the most underrated school in the state. At work I hear parents talking about UT like it's Harvard. I never hear anyone talk about Rice. I don't know. Perhaps this exists because their football team isn't as successful? Is it simply because it's the flagship university?
From what I've seen, Harvard is BY FAR the most overrated university.
I've come across many Harvard students and a huge number just seem like people with average to slightly above average intelligence who just happened to be the biggest nerds on the planet (hence the top grades). Based on what they said and the way they acted, most of them didn't exactly come across as genuinely highly intelligent.
The lectures I've seen are also very underwhelming, with the pace often being slower than at many lower-ranked universities, and the material often being taught in a very elementary manner.
And then there's the fact that there are many, many universities with a significantly greater number of Nobel Prize winners, Abel Award winners, Academy Award winners, other prestigious award winners, citations in notable papers, top-ranked departments or professors, etc. than Harvard has.
... Yet so many people continue to tout Harvard as being the absolute "best" university. Why?
It's down to crowd mentality: a very flawed human behavior that manifests itself in irrational beliefs.
Ask the average fan why they think Harvard is the best. Chances are they can't give you a specific reason other than something along the lines of "cuz every1 else dose lol".
With the exception of the Linguistics department, I agree.
To add to the list: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, all the other Ivy League school. Ivy League schools are tremendously overrated overall because it's all about the label--"mhmm, yeah, I went to Harvard." Not to say their education is bad, but just that there are plenty of other places where the education is just as good (or dare I say better) but less expensive and not as positively stigmatized as the Ivy Leagues.
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