7 ms·

I hate to be 'that guy', but I think most would agree that those rankings are silly. They may paint a general picture, but the number and order of the rank is n

• dillonforrest 14y ago
  I agree. Talking about schools and their rankings is very counterproductive. It measures the wrong metrics. I went to Wharton/Penn for undergrad, which favors me in these kinds of surveys, but I'm still against them.
  • rayiner 14y ago
    People who don't care about rankings don't usually go to the trouble of distinguishing Wharton from Penn (i.e. "Penn wasn't the highest ranked school I got into.") /light hearted jab
  • rollo_tommasi 14y ago
    You should be prouder, UPenn is one of the best state schools in the country!
    • hkmurakami 14y ago
      By what measure which we can trust?
      • carbocation 14y ago
        It's an Ivy jab. UPenn is a private institution, hence the joke. The lore is that UPenn students are offended when people refer to their alma mater as Penn State, which is a state-funded institution. Edit: I have no affiliation with either institution and think it's all irrelevant, other than from a cultural awareness perspective.
        • hkmurakami 14y ago
          Oh whoops totally missed the state school phrase! (and I know the joke too!) (imo Penn State is a fine - as in very good - engineering school)
        • mori32 14y ago
          Once you actually study at multiple universities in these rankings you realize what a joke it is. I can't believe Penn is ranked so highly, outside of Wharton. I was recently there for CS coming from a UK top 5 in CS and Penn CIS was a joke. Also, Oxford > Cambridge for CS? Wat. When you get to about the top 50 universities, it becomes so specific to the strengths of the particular department that these universities really can't be ranked in a single field.
    • rayiner 14y ago
      RIP JoePa.
• hkmurakami 14y ago
  While I agree that the rankings are contrived, I don't think this flaw obsoletes the purpose of the poll, which seems to be to get some picture of the distribution in the HN population. Regardless of whether those rankings are accurate, most of us let them inform our college decision to one degree or another. Our affiliation with the various subsets of schools does suggest some traits about us and hence the HN population.
• kbar13 14y ago
  let's fight subjectivity with subjectivity
  • rozap 14y ago
    Touché
• xer0x 14y ago
  Good point. That's pretty silly. It's fun to see these rankings, but they definitely have strange arbitrary weighting. I'd love to see thoughts on ranking CS schools too. I always see MIT/Stanford posts but not much else.
• niggler 14y ago
  The exact ranking is somewhat arbitrary, but the rankings do generally put the schools most people consider as "top schools" at the top. Comparable schools have somewhat similar rankings. But at the end of the day, the education is only as good as the effort you put in. You can graduate from a school that isn't ranked highly and still be incredibly successful
• ultrasaurus 14y ago
  The rankings are more than a little silly. I don't know american schools (I'm UWaterloo) but the difference in Canadian schools seems to be whether you went to a school that took their program seriously or one that just has it their to round out another program (computer science at Wilfred Laurier for instance).