Are American & the Rest of the World Behind India's Education?

I think what Delicate Genius meant is that Harvard is a global brand but the IIT is not.

Of course Harvard is 100% american but it's also a 100% global brand - is THE university to almost everyone in the world. Only Oxford and Cambridge would come closer.

(But I'm not sure if Yale and Wharton are in the same league in terms of world recognition as Harvard. Of course in some circles, like Business and Academia, they are but not for everyone and everywhere like Harvard)

 

This is an interesting observation. Before coming to this board and getting to know a bit more about American education, the following names would have meant something to me:

Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, UCLA, Berkeley, MIT, Columbia, Cornell

On the other hand, names such as University of Pennsylvania, Brown, Dartmouth would have meant absolutely nothing to me. In fact, I believe I would have guessed Dartmouth was a UK institution.

 

Many of the top US undergraduate programs are virtually unknown overseas.

For example, a few years ago, the Wall Street Journal did a study to rank US undergraduate programs by their success at placing their students into top US professional schools. In effect, this is a rating of US colleges by US professional schools, who should be well informed about the matter.

The top 10 undergraduate programs in the US, by this measure:

1. Harvard
2. Yale
3. Princeton
4. Stanford
5. Williams
6. Duke
7. Dartmouth
8. MIT
9. Amherst
10. Swarthmore

Foreigners are often baffled that famous schools like Berkeley (no. 41 on this particular list) can rank far behind schools like Williams (no. 5), Amherst (no. 9), or Swarthmore (no. 10) which they have literally never heard of. There are probably many other schools in the WSJ Top 50 that are equally unfamiliar to you.

 

So true, it was the case with me too.

In my master's program Data Mining course we had a visiting lecturer from Emory (he's from here so he comes during the summer to relax and also teaches a 10-day crash course). The way he was talking about it I presumed it was pretty famous, but I really had not heard of it before. As I see it is ranked above Berkeley in the US News 2010 rankings.

A similar thing happened when another member of the faculty got a grant or whatever to go to Carnegie Mellon. Again, I could see from his excitement it was a really good place, but no light bulbs going off. One place below Berkeley in the 2010 rankings.

What is it with Berkeley being so famous? Might be the movies and the documentaries but I can't seem to remember a specific one.

 

http://www.berkeley.edu/about/hist/timeline.shtml

http://research.chance.berkeley.edu/main.cfm?id=4

http://www.lbl.gov/LBL-PID/LBL-Overview.html

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/science/collections.php

http://www.msri.org/about/mission/index_html

http://hearstmuseum.berkeley.edu/index.php

Berkeley's reputation is built upon its tremendous international-class graduate and research programs. They set the tone for the whole campus (and for the city of Berkeley generally). While the university is outstanding on the undergraduate level as well, there are more schools can equal and sometimes surpass it at that level.

 

The above is at least a fair assessment and not rife with bias or patently incorrect like the one I was initially replying to. Thank you.

Personally, I'd go just for the experience and history/vibe of the place. It's one of those trips that's on the "must do" list along with China and Tibet.

Thanks.

 

"Berkeley's reputation is built upon its tremendous international-class graduate and research programs. They set the tone for the whole campus (and for the city of Berkeley generally). While the university is outstanding on the undergraduate level as well, there are more schools can equal and sometimes surpass it at that level."

Berkeley is pretty much the University that comes to mind when we thing about the 60's, counter-culture and left wing academics. That's one o f the reasons is so well known (other than the top-notch research, of course)

 

Fascinating.