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Old 10-04-2016, 04:02 PM
 
Location: Houston/Austin, TX
9,774 posts, read 6,439,725 times
Reputation: 6328

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Quote:
Originally Posted by philopower View Post
Look at Rice's global university ranking on us news, 84. UT is ranked 30 in the world. UT is a better university overall though it's undergraduate program can't compete with Rice solely because it can be more picky since it's a private university. What UT does is incredible considering the anti intellectual political environment of Texas
Obviously you're a Rice hater, and you're trying to get UT as the school with most prestige in Texas. Atleast up until now, it hasn't happened. And there's ways to go before it ever happens.
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Old 10-04-2016, 06:42 PM
 
Location: Round Rock, Texas
12,895 posts, read 13,227,554 times
Reputation: 13850
Quote:
Originally Posted by TexasTallest View Post
The 2017 college rankings are out.. While UT and A&M both dropped four spots, the private schools seem to be moving up..

15. Rice University
56. Southern Methodist University
56. University of Texas
71. Baylor University
74. Texas A&M University
82. Texas Christian University

https://www.google.com/amp/www.chron...?client=safari
SMU on a par with Texas?


That list is a joke. Sorry.
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Old 10-04-2016, 06:43 PM
 
Location: Round Rock, Texas
12,895 posts, read 13,227,554 times
Reputation: 13850
Quote:
Originally Posted by HiddenValley View Post
LOL. No. Texas is a great school. But anyone claiming it is the Harvard of Texas smoked too much weed on Sixth Street. It has the reputation of the main public college in its home state. In Washington, the University of Washington would have the same reputation. Let's not get carried away.

Harvard? LOL.
I agree.
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Old 10-04-2016, 07:11 PM
 
Location: Round Rock, Texas
12,895 posts, read 13,227,554 times
Reputation: 13850
This list has been more objective:


https://www.timeshighereducation.com...cols/rank_only
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Old 10-04-2016, 11:17 PM
 
Location: The Bayou City
3,231 posts, read 4,542,231 times
Reputation: 1467
Quote:
Originally Posted by ScoPro View Post
More objective, according to who? Those "rankings" are ridiculous.
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Old 10-05-2016, 05:53 PM
 
Location: Round Rock, Texas
12,895 posts, read 13,227,554 times
Reputation: 13850
To suggest SMU is on a par with Texas is laughable.
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Old 10-05-2016, 08:48 PM
 
1,534 posts, read 2,759,786 times
Reputation: 3593
The USNWR rankings are notoriously biased against big public schools largely because they weigh acceptance/rejection rates (Both UT and TAMU are legally obliged to accept any student who is in the top 7% of their high school class), student faculty ratio and rate of alumni giving highly. Small private universities are always going to do better than big publics on these criteria...Small private universities also have the flexibility to game the rankings.

All rankings are going to be flawed in some way, but I think generally the major international ranking systems are more reliable than USNWR: The Times Higher Ed ranking, the QS ranking, The Centre for World University Ranking. UT, Austin, in these rankings, is always a top 50 university in the world, sometimes as high as 15. Rice generally falls in the 50-150 range, along with TAMU. SMU in the 300-400 range, and sometimes 400-500. These are generally the only Texas universities that make these more objective international lists.

I think Rice is a spectacular undergrad institution, but with the exception of a very few graduate programs, it is generally rated lower than UT, for good reasons largely due to economies of scale. UT has overall better rated graduate programs across the board, way superior research facilities, much bigger libraries and collections ( The Benson, the Harry Ransom Center, The PCL are justifiably the envy of the world), many more programs of study, generally higher faculty research citations, more faculty memberships and prizes in national and global academic societies. Size helps.

Reputation is a nebulous category and difficult to quantify, but anecdotally, I had never heard of Rice until I moved to Texas to take a job at UT. In terms of the OP's question, Rice deservedly has the reputation of the best university in Texas in Texas, but nationally and internationally, my hunch is that it is rated significantly less highly than UT or TAMU (and all the rankings except for USNWR show this). It has only around 6000 students and cannot offer the range or depth of educational opportunities of either of the big state behemoths. SMU, except for the Cox school of Business, and perhaps the Dedman school of Law, is not really in the same conversation.

Anecdotally, I was involved with a research project with a colleague from Harvard that involved visiting universities all over the world. The only university we visited where my UT business card provoked more interest than her Harvard business card was at UNAM in Mexico City. . .
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Old 10-08-2016, 06:48 PM
 
23 posts, read 34,113 times
Reputation: 71
Harvard is more of a football school.
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Old 10-09-2016, 01:50 AM
 
439 posts, read 433,595 times
Reputation: 177
Quote:
Originally Posted by ScoPro View Post
To suggest SMU is on a par with Texas is laughable.
Are all these determinations being made definitively or philosophically? It is impossible to make a rational statement using a single sentence. It might be true definitively, but not rationally. As a complete sentence requires a subject and a predicate, similarly, a rational statement requires the use of at least three complete sentences.

Sorry, I feel the need to point out the difference between what is a quality truth expressed as a rational statement and one expressed as a definitive one.
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Old 10-10-2016, 07:45 AM
 
34 posts, read 26,005 times
Reputation: 47
ALL rank lists are a joke. Their usefulness is as argument fodder for high school students, and the occasional confused few overvaluing their worth.

Whether vying for a graduate position or - you know - an actual job, the strength of the school name is far outweighted by individual qualifications and merits.

If a pair of twins walked into my office with otherwise identical resumes asking for the same job, offering the same identical responses to my questions, with one being a Texas Tech grad and the other an A&M grad, i'd give it to the one with the firmer handshake.

Reputation works at a broad level. The UT and WUSTL and Cal Davis of the world carry more prestige -- if only because of wide peer recognition -- than the East Oklahoma Polytechnic of the world.

Any finer stratification than that is an exercise in futility, like watching 2 overweight men trip over themselves arguing whether Jim Brown could beat up Walter Payton. But carry on.
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