Wait, whose eyes glaze over at the suggestion that having to pay only $3,700 a year to attend Hamilton College is a damn good deal? I hope it’s not the prospective student or their parents, because that’s about five percent of the total cost of attendance. It is a great deal.
I mean people when you are trying to explain to them what an effective, mature college access program looks like. It’s not everyone goes to Harvard and MIT. It’s not full rides all around. It’s building relationships with dozens of schools, from HYPMS to what I think of as the “genteel LACs” to midsize private schools and the publics with good funding and getting everyone matched with those. If, at the end of the day, everyone gets in somewhere where they get enough funding that it’s possible for them to go–even if it’s not a full ride–that’s a good program. But people want to hear “Harvard” and “full ride”.
I told a prospective parent that we generally got 3-5 each into Harvard, MIT, Standford, and 1-3 each into Yale/Columbia/Cornell and he made a face and said “What? Out of 450?” and I corrected him that that was out of 115ish (senior class size), but I swear to fucking god, those numbers out of 450 would ALSO be impressive for a non-feeder. But no one knows enough about this game to care.
In my area, Law, I would rank Harvard, Oxford, and Yale, as the three most elite in anglo-land.
Sorbonne would be included if we branch into civil law.
Don’t know enough about German or other European universities to comment.
Columbia, Stanford, USC, Berkeley, Duke, Cambridge, Chicago and U Toronto would be runners-up. But it would be close.
I took a look at some online rankings. This isn’t what this thread is about. There are several well-known international rankings. They rank about 5000 universities, not including comprehensive schools, colleges, etc.
If you are in the top 100 schools, you are in the top 2% of universities, which is surely impressive. Their list of the best Canadian and American schools differs from my list and many of the ones here. Of course this thread is about your perceptions, and rankings are approximate and can be incomplete or emphasizing certain factors in a somewhat arbitrary way.
Nevertheless, the Canadian schools do pretty well. Particularly in nursing programs. But I was apparently remiss not to include University of Montreal and McMaster in the above list.
Law schools are kind of weird though, aren’t they, in that getting a law degree from the Sorbonne doesn’t really set you up to go practice law in California like a degree from Stanford Law would?
This is unlike getting say… an electrical engineering degree from University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, which is comparable across jurisdictions and doesn’t come with the same licensing requirements.
To be clear, any accredited American law school would set you up to practice in California, so long as you passed the bar exam.
The top law schools surprised me, when I look at the global rankings. Since law is local, some caution is in order. But McGill did well, among the leaders for civil systems. (Most Dopers know or don’t care that Quebec has a different system of law than English Canada, but may not be considered “Anglo”.). Harvard and Yale were ranked very high but not the very top. And some excellent schools were lower than I would have thought, but what do I know? And these rankings emphasize certain items at the expense of others, of course.
Just looking at the American schools, Duke and University of Southern California don’t belong on that list.
They’d have to get through at least this many law schools–Chicago, Columbia, Berkeley, Stanford, Yale, Harvard, Pennsylvania, New York University, Georgetown, Virginia, Michigan, Northwestern, Cornell, George Washington University. And by that time, I think you’re fading on “elite.”
Richard Nixon earned his law degree at Duke.
Are you trying to lower our regard for Richard Nixon? Well, GOOD LUCK with that, pal.
Yeah well Abe Lincoln didn’t even need to go to law school to become lawyer. (Apparently California, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington still allow people to take the bar exam and become lawyers without going to law school. They do have to study under a judge or practicing lawyer though.)
So, when I first read Loach’s OP, my thoughts were Harvard, Cambridge, Princeton, Oxford, Yale, MIT, Gottingen and the Sorbonne. I suspect I am like most people in that my perception of a university is primarily based on “how many Nobel laureates have they produced?,” and to a lesser degree on “how many politicians go there?”
The latter tells you how good the alumni network is, while the former tells you how good the research programs are. Neither, of course, tells you very much about the quality of education, though we tend to assume both of those shorthand measures correlate to academic rigor.
What I didn’t realize until I looked it up just now is that Harvard has produced the most Nobel laureates in every category, or near enough (MIT has one more physics prize, Chicago has two more economics prizes).* That is truly astonishing. Cambridge is second, and has almost twice as many as Oxford, which I suspect is mostly based on the Cavendish.
I think of Princeton as more elite than Yale outside of law. Perhaps that’s because of the weight I give the hard sciences.
Actually, it means people don’t agree on what “elite” means. A Maybach is just a rebadged Mercedes. It’s only elite in one very narrow sense of the term. Also, I think you mean Porsche. 
Of course, that doesn’t hold for all states; California has its own accreditation system for law schools which isn’t recognized anywhere else. If you attend a law school in California, you can’t practice elsewhere unless the school is also accredited by the ABA (though in this context that’s irrelevant because any school reasonably considered “elite” is ABA-accredited).
The ABA does not accredit foreign law schools, but a Sorbonne-educated lawyer can practice in California by taking a one-year program (typically an LLM) that covers California law.
*the center of gravity in economics seems to have shifted lately; since 2000, MIT has far more economics prizes than Chicago.
Except Louisiana’s law schools, I believe.
Doesn’t goinng to an in-state school confer some kind of benefit on passing the bar in that particular state though?
Louisiana’s law schools are ABA-accredited, just like everyone else’s except California’s. Going to an in-state school likely means you will have electives available to you which cover the law of your home state, but most people learn that stuff to the extent necessary during bar prep. For example, I didn’t know anything about Florida juvenile dependency/delinquency, evidence law, remedies, commercial paper, secured transactions, property law or corporation law after law school. However, all of those subjects are bar-tested so I did learn them afterwards.
In one or two states (Wisconsin I think), graduating from one of the in-state law schools automatically confers admission to the state bar, but otherwise there’s no real advantage to attending a local school except for the local alumni networks.
ETA: the Florida bar passage rate for non-Florida law school graduates usually hovers at a few percentage points below the overall pass rate, or what you’d expect based on the small benefit of local law knowledge. In July 2018 the overall pass rate was 67.2, while non-Florida graduates passed at a rate of 63.8%. Since the overall rate includes bar takers who have already passed a bar exam elsewhere (who are counted separately from graduates from other states who haven’t already taken another bar exam) there is a small selection bias against out-of-state students. As you might guess, the pass rate for people who’ve already passed another bar exam is slightly higher than the overall pass rate (68% in 2018).
California bar passage rates are frankly not worth looking at, because they include the graduates from the law schools which are only accredited in California. Those schools are almost universally a joke.
That was what I had thought I’d rememebered, from attending the University of Wisconsin-Madison (and having two friends who went to the law school there), and it appears that this is, in fact, true of graduates from there, as well as Marquette.
Princeton doesn’t have a law school.
Caltech is elite among people in the know, but when I got in as a high-schooler from Georgia, a lot of people were like, “Where’s that?” When I walked across the stage at graduation, the audience was informed that I’d be attending the “California Polytechnic Institute”. This may have changed since Breaking Bad and Big Bang Theory, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it hasn’t.
I remember telling someone from Georgia that I was a student at Georgia Tech, and they asked if it was a vocational school. And no, they weren’t a UGA fan just pulling my leg.
Ha! I had a college-educated parent want to know why we were pushing his kid to apply to no-name colleges like “Carnegie Mellon”. Truly, the only colleges everyone has an accurate idea about are HYPSM.
My freshman year at MIT the professor lecturing for 8.01 (Physics at MIT) mentioned Feynman at CalTech. Someone in the audience booed. The professor said “he’s pretty good for someone working at a trade school.” 
Ocean’s Eleven probably didn’t hurt either (they break into what I assume is a fictional lab at CalTech to steal the EMP device).