Top university in your city/general area

[Buckeye Native 001]

I think Arizona State and University of Arizona are about even. 10, 15 years ago, UofA might've been the state's most-prestigious university, but years of mismanagement (including a president who was once one of the board members at DeVry...) puts Arizona State slightly ahead.

Unfortunately, ASU still has a reputation as a party school with questionable academics. I really don't think that's the case any more. ASU's Downtown campus has almost singlehandedly rejuvenated the central core of Phoenix.

Flagstaff has Northern Arizona University, which is a fucking joke of an academic institution.

For Cincinnati, the big two are the University of Cincinnati a d Xavier. Across the river in Highland Heights is Northern Kentucky University.

[SIGSEGV]

Originally Posted by Pedestrian

No. Rice was founded in 1912. Duke became Duke in 1924 when a small Methodist school named Trinity College took James B. Duke's money in return for changing its name and transforming itself.

The creation of Duke U. virtually from nothing in 1930:



The effort shown required the purchasing of a stone quarry, the building of a rail line and the hiring of an army of Italian stone masons who were brought to the US and the campus and set to work--all during the Depression.

Thanks for clarifying that! Yeah, I originally wrote down Duke and Rice (since I thought I remembered Duke founded in the 20's) but then I took a cursory look at Wikipedia and it listed a much older date, so I took it out without looking more into it. But yeah, I guess the "modern" Duke has only been around for 100 years.

I can't really think of any notable private schools that were founded much more recently than that, other than maybe Pepperdine (1937). There of course notable public schools (UC Irvine, UC Santa Cruz, UIC, FIU) but I guess the robber barons no longer really create universities, so maybe Florida and Texas will be out of luck. There are probably some notable private medical schools and things like that from the last 80 years but I can't think of a general university in the US.

I guess there's Liberty University, but that's notable for the wrong reasons.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

generally true (especially for the creme de la creme), but there are some big exceptions like:

U Penn (#6) - PA
Duke (#10) - NC
Notre Dame (#15) - IN
Vanderbilt (#15) - TN
Rice (#17) - TX
Wash U (#19) - MO
Emory (#21) - GA
Carnegie Mellon (#25) - PA
U of Michigan (#25) - MI


so that's 9 of the top 25 universities in the nation (as ranked by USN&WR) located in states Trump won in 2016.

1- MI and PA are definitely liberal leaning states, despite 2016.

2- If you stretch this out to top 30, Georgia Tech is included. Frankly, it's a better school than quite a few that are listed above it. But that's a tangent...

3- Good schools are geographically biased to the original 13 colonies, Midwest and California. I doubt there are even 5 schools in the top 40 of the US News list that don't fit in one of those categories.

[SIGSEGV]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

1- MI and PA are definitely liberal leaning states, despite 2016.

2- If you stretch this out to top 30, Georgia Tech is included. Frankly, it's a better school than quite a few that are listed above it. But that's a tangent...

3- Good schools are geographically biased to the original 13 colonies, Midwest and California. I doubt there are even 5 schools in the top 40 of the US News list that don't fit in one of those categories.

Yeah, only Rice, Vanderbilt and UF (and Wash U if you don't want to count St. Louis as part of the Midwest for some reason).

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

1- MI and PA are definitely liberal leaning states, despite 2016.

perhaps, but overall, no one would describe them as "ultra-liberal" states.

Originally Posted by SIGSEGV

and Wash U if you don't want to count St. Louis as part of the Midwest for some reason).

Missouri at large certainly blurs some regional lines, but in my mind, st. louis itself is pretty firmly planted in the "midwest" category of cities.

[Pedestrian]

Originally Posted by SIGSEGV

I guess the robber barons no longer really create universities, so maybe Florida and Texas will be out of luck. There are probably some notable private medical schools and things like that from the last 80 years but I can't think of a general university in the US.

I guess there's Liberty University, but that's notable for the wrong reasons.

More robber barron money at work but not quite recently enough to win unless you count the merger as the starting date I guess:

Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a world-renowned private research university based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Founded in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools, the university became the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1912 and began granting four-year degrees. In 1967, the Carnegie Institute of Technology merged with the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research to form Carnegie Mellon University.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carneg...lon_University

I looked this up because I remember Andrew Mellon was Treasury Secretary in the 1920s and thought maybe the university was founded after that but no.

[SIGSEGV]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

perhaps, but overall, no one would describe them as "ultra-liberal" states.




Missouri at large certainly blurs some regional lines, but in my mind, st. louis itself is pretty firmly planted in the "midwest" category of cities.

Yeah I agree with that... St. Louis is part of the Midwest even if the rest of the state isn't :p.

[Pedestrian]

Originally Posted by SIGSEGV

Yeah, only Rice, Vanderbilt and UF (and Wash U if you don't want to count St. Louis as part of the Midwest for some reason).

Tulane? Wake Forest? My niece went to Clemson and would probably kill you if she could but not me. Another went to Washington & Lee (not sure how much longer that name will stick) and I might agree with her if she wanted to kill you.

Somebody already said Emory and I think they were correct.

And there are a number of good smaller schools that aren't well known like Davidson.

[SIGSEGV]

Originally Posted by Pedestrian

Tulane? Wake Forest? My niece went to Clemson and would probably kill you if she could but not me. Another went to Washington & Lee (not sure how much longer that name will stick) and I might agree with her if she wanted to kill you.

Somebody already said Emory and I think they were correct.

And there are a number of good smaller schools that aren't well known like Davidson.

North Carolina, Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia are in the original 13 colonies, aren't they?

edit: and yes, I missed Tulane. Sorry Green Wave.

[SIGSEGV]

Originally Posted by Pedestrian

More robber barron money at work but not quite recently enough to win unless you count the merger as the starting date I guess:


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carneg...lon_University

I looked this up because I remember Andrew Mellon was Treasury Secretary in the 1920s and thought maybe the university was founded after that but no.

Yeah mergers are a good point, although I don't know that you get to reset the year in that point (Harvard finished merging with Radcliffe in 1999, for example...). Case Western also was the result of a merger in 1967.

[samne]

Originally Posted by MolsonExport

Newest (published June 2020) 2021 QS World University Rankings, Canadian schools:
(world ranking)
University of Toronto (21)
McGill University (Montreal) (33)
University of British Columbia (Vancouver) (45)
Universite de Montreal (118)
University of Alberta (Edmonton) (119)
McMaster University (Hamilton) (144)
University of Waterloo (166)
University of Western Ontario (London) (203) Woot Woot!
Queens University (Kingston) (246=)
University of Calgary (246=)
University of Ottawa (279)
Simon Fraser University (Vancouver) (323)
University of Victoria (370)
Universite Laval (Quebec City) (420)
University of Saskatchewan (Saskatoon) (465)
Concordia University (Montreal) (477)
York University (Toronto) (531-540)
University of Guelph (571-580)
Carleton University (Ottawa) (601-650)
Universite du Quebec a Montreal (601-650)
University of Manitoba (Winnipeg) (601-650)
Memorial University of Newfoundland (St. John's) (701-750)
Universite de Sherbrooke (701-750)
University of Windsor (751-800)
Ryerson University (Toronto) (801-1000)

all four of Montreal's universities rank in the top 1000. Toronto has 3, Vancouver has 2, as does Ottawa.

And almost half of Canada's top 25 universities are in Ontario.

[Centropolis]

Originally Posted by SIGSEGV

Yeah I agree with that... St. Louis is part of the Midwest even if the rest of the state isn't :p.

st. louis is a sort of freak city-state squarely within the midwestern german triangle and a hockey town but that doesn’t prevent it from hoisting itself by its own petard like bubba.

i guess milwaukee has its own crazy shit but st. louis is uncharacteristically (for the midwest) flashy about.

[craigs]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

1- MI and PA are definitely liberal leaning states, despite 2016.

2- If you stretch this out to top 30, Georgia Tech is included. Frankly, it's a better school than quite a few that are listed above it. But that's a tangent...

3- Good schools are geographically biased to the original 13 colonies, Midwest and California. I doubt there are even 5 schools in the top 40 of the US News list that don't fit in one of those categories.

You are correct--only Vanderbilt, Rice, University of Florida, and Tulane are not in the Midwest, the original 13 colonies, or California.

Edit: looks like central Tennessee was claimed by New York until 1782 and by North Carolina until it ceded its claim to the federal government in 1790. I'm not sure if that counts, though--there were equally random claims all over the place (e.g. Massachusetts claimed parts of Michigan and even Wisconsin until 1785) but few of them were realistic enough to really count for the purpose of determining if a school emerged from an original colony.

[SlidellWx]

Tulane University.

[JManc]

Originally Posted by SIGSEGV

Thanks for clarifying that! Yeah, I originally wrote down Duke and Rice (since I thought I remembered Duke founded in the 20's) but then I took a cursory look at Wikipedia and it listed a much older date, so I took it out without looking more into it. But yeah, I guess the "modern" Duke has only been around for 100 years.

I can't really think of any notable private schools that were founded much more recently than that, other than maybe Pepperdine (1937). There of course notable public schools (UC Irvine, UC Santa Cruz, UIC, FIU) but I guess the robber barons no longer really create universities, so maybe Florida and Texas will be out of luck. There are probably some notable private medical schools and things like that from the last 80 years but I can't think of a general university in the US.

I guess there's Liberty University, but that's notable for the wrong reasons.

I don't think we'll see any new stand alone universities any time soon. Perhaps a new one formed out of an existing public system but not private. They were conceived when the US was more or less coming into its own as an industrial power. A brand new university would lack prestige, history and pedigree no matter who was behind it and how much was thrown at it. Why create new Harvard when you can make a massive endowment to Harvard and have a building or school named after you?

[craigs]

The University of California, Merced is a brand new university created from scratch by the state of California in 2005.

It's small and not exactly prestigious, but it is in a 13-way tie with much older and better-known schools, many of them flagship state public university campuses, for the 104th best National University in USNWR's rankings: Auburn, Creighton, Howard, Loyola (Chicago), Rochester Institute of Technology, Temple, Colorado (Boulder), Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Utah.

That's not too bad considering the school is only 15 years old.

[SIGSEGV]

Originally Posted by craigs

The University of California, Merced is a brand new university created from scratch by the state of California in 2005.

It's small and not exactly prestigious, but it is in a 13-way tie with much older and better-known schools, many of them flagship state public university campuses, for the 104th best National University in USNWR's rankings: Auburn, Creighton, Howard, Loyola (Chicago), Rochester Institute of Technology, Temple, Colorado (Boulder), Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Utah.

That's not too bad considering the school is only 15 years old.

Yeah, I had a roommate from Modesto in undergrad and he was telling me how a bunch of his friends from high school were then part of the first class of UC Merced. Looks like it's doing quite well! And jeez... I was a college freshman 15 years ago. Time flies...

UC Irvine was founded in 1965 and it's now one of the top public schools in the country. It also predates the city of Irvine...

[SIGSEGV]

Originally Posted by JManc

I don't think we'll see any new stand alone universities any time soon. Perhaps a new one formed out of an existing public system but not private. They were conceived when the US was more or less coming into its own as an industrial power. A brand new university would lack prestige, history and pedigree no matter who was behind it and how much was thrown at it. Why create new Harvard when you can make a massive endowment to Harvard and have a building or school named after you?

Yeah, Bill Gates is happy giving his money to existing universities, but it sucks for places that don't really have established major research universities. Like for Dallas, SMU is decent, and UT-Dallas and UT-Arlington are R1 universities which may become more prestigious in the future, but Dallas is probably at somewhat of disadvantage for not having any elite universities in the metro (smart kids leave and often don't come back).

[JManc]

'Smart' kids are moving to Dallas all the time. It's a strong competitive job market.

[SIGSEGV]

Originally Posted by JManc

'Smart' kids are moving to Dallas all the time. It's a strong competitive job market.

Sure, but Dallas would still absolutely be better off with a prestigious university.