4 ms·

State schools in US are often the best STEM schools. I have cried myself hoarse on HN trying to make this simple point - but except for Cornell, every Ivy Leag

• dmoy 7y ago
  Do we include math and physics in there? If so there might be a couple other exceptions there.
  • N1H1L 7y ago
    Basically Harvard, and maybe Columbia and that's it. UIUC, Wisconsin-Madison, Berkeley, Michigan-Ann Arbor are orders better schools in the sciences than Dartmouth or Brown.
    • JadeNB 7y ago
      In math, Princeton tops all the non-Ivy's you list, and UPenn has at least a fighting chance, maybe depending on speciality.
      • N1H1L 7y ago
        Specialty fields yes. But Princeton engineering is ordinary, and the state schools often have exceptional faculty across multiple departments - leading to way more collaborative, cutting-edge work.
      • thomashobohm 7y ago
        Once you're at that level, the differences are marginal. It matters if you want to go to graduate school, I suppose, but we're talking about people who just want to get a degree and go into the workforce here. For them, Princeton vs. Michigan won't matter a bit if they're studying to become an engineer.
        • JadeNB 7y ago
          My point was specifically about studying math.
          • thomashobohm 6y ago
            If you want to study applied math and go into the workforce, then my point still stands, going to Princeton vs. Michigan simply doesn't matter. If you want to go to graduate school, it's unclear if it matters all that much. Princeton tends to draw the most talented young mathematicians in the world, and has for decades. Presumably if a student of that caliber went to Michigan, they would do just as well, because Michigan also has talented mathematicians who do good research and can write good letters of recommendation for graduate school.
    • Kephael 7y ago
      The undergraduate students at Dartmouth and Brown are generally much better than the ones at those large publics. The rankings are largely due to the department size and what the professors and their PhD students are publishing.
• mattkrause 7y ago
  I'm not sure that's true for science. Harvard is a biomedical behemoth, especially once you include the affiliated hospitals (MGH, Brigham and Women's, Dana Farber, Beth Israel Deaconess, etc) and research institutes (Broad, Roland). Harvard proper and MGH each receive about a half billion dollars a year in NIH funding. These are usually listed separately in those "league tables", but the whole system must bring in nearly $2B/year (out of a total NIH extramural budget of ~$28B). The other Ivies aren't as big (though not much else is), but all of them have well-regarded medical schools (except for Princeton) and biomedical research programs. Yale, Havard, and Princeton have pretty credible chemistry programs too. Princeton also has the Institute for Advanced Study, which has hosted a crazy number of Nobel/Fields/Wolf/Cole prize winners; it's formally independent but...right there. It may be debatable how much this matters for undergrad teaching--is it better to have a world-renowned expert or someone invested in teaching?--but for anything involving research (including undergrads), they are definitely way up there. (No argument that JHU, Stanford, and other places (CMU, UMich, NYU, etc, depending on field) also have intensive research too). NIH funding data from here: https://report.nih.gov/award/index.cfm https://report.nih.gov/award/index.cfm