So you want to go to the best school on the planet that you can get into? Fortunately, if you’re in the United States, you have the your choice of the very best schools on the planet. Below are 2010’s top 50 schools in the United States. Next to each school’s rank in the United States is also its world rank. Thus Harvard is ranked 1 [1] – it’s first in the United States and first in the world. Princeton, by contrast, is ranked 6 [7] – it’s sixth in the United States but seventh in the world (it turns out that Cambridge University in England is ranked fifth in the world).
You might wonder why the rankings below don’t match up with others that you might have seen, like the U.S. News and World Report rankings. Unlike other rankings, which take into account how happy students are with their academic experience at the school or the sorts of amenities the school does or doesn’t have (having a top school right next to a slum doesn’t help its U.S. News ranking), the rankings below reflect strict academic excellence measured in objective terms such as scholarly output of the faculty.
As you look through this list, you’ll see some interesting patterns. One thing that will immediately strike you is that even schools in your backyard that you might not have thought were so great may still be world-class. For instance, some of the big state schools that you might know mainly for their athletics programs are also dynamite places to study and do research. You’ll also find that some of the states that are on the verge of insolvency in the current economic crisis have the best schools (maybe they’ve overspent on education?). Indeed, lots of the best schools are in California.
Just because a school has a terrific academic ranking does not mean that you’ll want to go there. Some schools that are great as a whole may not be very good in the thing that most interests you. In other articles here at SuperScholar we’ll list the best schools by discipline. But even here you’ve got to be careful. Just because a school is great in a given discipline doesn’t mean that it’s got the best person in the area that interests you most (for example, some schools great in history as a whole may not have anyone who works in the given historical period that interests you most).
Other things being equal, however, it’s good to go to the best school you can get into. Why? Because such school attract other bright students, and being with other bright students makes you brighter. “Iron sharpens iron,” as the saying goes. The best schools will help you to be the best that you can be.
1 [1] Harvard University
2 [2] University of California, Berkeley
3 [3] Stanford University
4 [4] Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
5 [6] California Institute of Technology (Caltech)
6 [7] Princeton University
7 [8] Columbia University
8 [9] University of Chicago
9 [11] Yale University
10 [12] Cornell University
11 [13] University of California, Los Angeles
12 [14] University of California, San Diego
13 [15] University of Pennsylvania
14 [16] University of Washington
15 [17] University of Wisconsin – Madison
16 [18] The Johns Hopkins University
17 [19] University of California, San Francisco
18 [22] University of Michigan – Ann Arbor
19 [25] University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
20 [28] University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
21 [29] Northwestern University
22 [30] Washington University in St. Louis
23 [31] New York University (NYU)
24 [32] University of Colorado at Boulder
25 [33] University of California, Santa Barbara
26 [34] Rockefeller University
27 [35] Duke University
28 [36] University of Maryland, College Park
29 [38] The University of Texas at Austin
30 [41] University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
31 [43] Pennsylvania State University – University Park
32 [46] University of California, Davis
33 [47] University of California, Irvine
34 [48] University of Southern California
35 [49] The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas
36 [53] Vanderbilt University
37 [54] Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey – New Brunswick
38 [56] University of Pittsburgh
39 [58] Carnegie Mellon University
40 [59] The Ohio State University – Columbus
41 [65] Brown University
42 [68] University of Florida
43 [69] Purdue University – West Lafayette
44 [77] Boston University
45 [78] University of Arizona – Tucson
46 [81] Arizona State University – Tempe
47 [82] University of Rochester
48 [82] University of Utah
49 [86] Michigan State University
50 [90] Indiana University – Bloomington