Brainiac Colleges: Daily Beast List

Are you a brainiac? Don't be shy, it is not a bad thing.

The Daily Beast recently compiled their list of the "most brainiac colleges."

How did they calculate this? The Beast has more:

To find the schools where brainiacs flock and flourish, Newsweek/The Daily Beast weighted each of the following equally, using z-scores (how close or distant each school is to the average within each category): number of Rhodes scholars, all time; number of Marshall Scholarship winners, all time; number of Gates-Cambridge Scholarship winners since 2001; number of Truman Scholarship winners, all time; and the number of Fulbright Student Program awardees since 1993.

For more on methodology, and other great rankings from the Daily Beast, click here.

What do you think of this list? Agree or disagree? Weigh in below!

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Comments

[Jake Neuthaler]

02:04 PM on 09/13/2011

University of Chicago should be #1 on this list.

[mjc2003]

04:07 PM on 09/04/2011

Way to just copy and paste a list of they ivy league, one tech school on there really?? like anyone needs to actually know anything to be a literature major even if it is at yale or williams

[deridaa]

09:05 PM on 09/02/2011

No legacy status at MIT& 2 mandatory years of hard core engineering. And you place MIT at 9 on this "list". There are no human resource major types or courses at MIT-( math for poets, how to organize a 14th Century English party, Biochemistry for ballroom dancers etc.) So get with it and separate the tough schools from the silver service please.

[rh654]

02:06 PM on 09/02/2011

CIT ?

[tobereal]

01:12 AM on 09/01/2011

It's the inclusion of the Fulbright winners that throws this study off. Fulbrights are not that exclusive, or carry nearly as much meaning as an award for academic achievement as the other awards included for calculating the rankings. Not that most people on the street would know this. Fulbright's are the most over-hyped by the media and academic outsiders scholarships/fellowships around, and anyone with a serious involvement in academia knows this. A friend got one to pay for his air travel to Africa where he was going to do research. Not for the research, just to pay the air tickets, and not because he was tremendously sucessful. I know someone else who got Fulbright money to study German in Germany, ostensibly. What he really wanted to do was see Europe, and the Fulbright paid hsi way to spend 6 hours a week taking a language course while he gallivanted around Europe the rest of the time.

I'll put in a plug for fellowship that is or was considered on the same plane as the Truman and Marshall back in my day in the 90s: The Mellon Fellowship for Humanistic Studies. I was a national finalist. I was disqualified from Rhodes, Truman, and Marshall competition because I was too old (31 at the time).

[realpragmatist]

12:55 PM on 09/01/2011

I am not sure that it is fair to generalize this about the Fulbright scholarship. I knew a candidate from Nepal (only one from each nation, especially that part of the world seems very competitive) who got a double doctorate in Physics and then in Nuclear Engineering (4.0 CGPA in BOTH).
I do not know whether Fulbright is less prestigious here in N.America because of other scholarships like Rhodes, Truman, and Marshall, as you mentioned. But whatever, it is so exclusive and competitive that any of these winners need to be respected for their hard work and achievement.

[tobereal]

08:10 AM on 09/05/2011

I didn't say that ALL Fukbrights were awarded for less than stellar reasons. Nor did I say that the winners shoudl not be respected.

I said that the Fulbright doesn't belong in the same category of prestige as Rhodes, Truman, etc. I also said that it's overrated because non-academic insiders don't understand how non-exclusive it is. And I gave two examples of student Fulbright winners who were decent students, but got them for trivial reasons.

I'm not sure on the figures for student awards for Fulbright's, but my last undersatndign was that there are about 5,000 Fulbright's awarded--half in the US, if I recall, compared to 32 American Rhodes Scholars every year. Because so many Fulbrights are awarded, thow out their presence in the rankings dwarfs the other awards and makes for a less clear analysis of "eilte" student performers. Throw out the Fulbrights and see what the list looks like.

[FiredUpRTG]

12:33 PM on 08/31/2011

With piles of resumes, I guess looking for these schools on the resumes saves a lot of time in HR. What to do when you've run out of referrals from people you know? Takes too much time and money to administer tests like the government. They are missing out on a lot of good applicants who couldn't afford those schools.

[Kyle Noe]

11:57 AM on 08/31/2011

People should stop trying to make themselves feel better about not having gone to these elite universities by talking up the whole legacy point - the old-boy-type student bodies are a thing of the past at the elite schools like Harvard, Yale, Stanford, etc. At these schools, 80-90% of the student body are non-legacies (that's an actual statistic, varying by school). And it's nearly impossible for legacies to get in - e.g. about 90% of the legacies who apply to Stanford are rejected.

Being wealthy does not get you into these schools, either. The admissions and financial aid offices are separate, and those reviewing applicants don't see any info whatsoever about your income; it's explicitly not a factor for admission (that's why they're 'need-blind').

[Lucky S7even]

09:22 AM on 08/31/2011

glad penn state wasn't on here. i don't want our reputation to be ruined by being called nerds.

[Fodder-wing]

04:45 PM on 09/14/2011

I believe Penn houses the brain trust in PA.

[novowel4me]

09:10 AM on 08/31/2011

This isn't a very well researched articled. Pomona is one of the "Claremont Colleges" of which Harvey Mudd is by far the nerdiest. Omitting Caltech suggests the editors sat around and discussed where they wish they had gone to school ranked the list by prestige and threw in a token. Maybe, they forgot there is a difference between the terms college and university.

[Tom Joad]

08:51 AM on 08/31/2011

...someone at Daily Beast must be a Pomona College alum...

[pattileigh]

08:15 AM on 08/31/2011

Big surprise, Harvard and Yale. In order to progress in the academic world, it's a shoe in if you go to these top Universities. That is why the competition of the bright crowd is so high to go there but many very bright people can't afford it even with help. They do accept the rich dumb kids to make money and the rich kids get to flaunt their degrees from the top universities, even though there are smarter poor kids coming out of state colleges. There is a lot of prejudging based on the university you attend. Went to Yale or Harvard your degree will be taken more seriously no matter how bright your competition. I believe that is why we have very little new innovation just more reworking of the old ideas.

[Fremon]

07:32 PM on 08/31/2011

Many have commented about the entry into the elite and mostly Ivies. There is a history in this country that most of those going to the "best" schools of their time did so because they had the money to attend. Children of the middle and lower economic classes have always had problems to attend. It was a fact of life although in each generation there were always students that could get in and that were from the middle and poorer classes. Prior to WW2 it seems that most of these were usually white males who could fit, with intelligence, into the University Community. This, for the most part eliminated blacks and minorities as well as women. Paul Robeson comes to mind as one black with intelligence that was a Phi Beta Kappa at Rutgers, all american football player, and who went to Columbia Law and graduated second in his class. Upon graduation he could not get a job in a NYC or other major city law firm. That was the state of America in the 30's and before. So much for advantages as many whites of lower classes who got the better education became prosperous and sent their children as legacies to these great schools.

[ghost geezer]

02:33 AM on 08/31/2011

The list is silly. It is primarily a "because they were or might have they forever are" list. It ignores the special features of dozens of small, often eccentric schools, such as Deep Springs College, who some say is the toughest two year college on earth, Reed College which is notorious for expecting its average students to memorize the universe in their first year, Juilliard, a funny little place in New York where people waste time seeing who can learn some solo concerto in three days or less. The absence of Cal Tech is telling here, the University of
Chicago as well. There was a time when Tulane University had the best drama department in
the country. I could go on and on. Would you learn more about advanced music design at
Princeton or at Mills?

John Cage, with whom I once studied, snapped at me one night that universities are contraptions. They are. Even the word itself is silly, a relic expression. But wildfires do occur in them when the right combination of teachers and students come together. And then there was Black Mountain College. Cage told me that in the final year, the students paid the faculty with food and a good lecture might sometimes get a steak. It died of poverty and gave us some of our greatest recent artists. Phooey on this lazy list.

[Kmuzu]

12:53 AM on 08/31/2011

Didn't Bush go to Yale .. lol .. whatever H P

[ghost geezer]

03:04 AM on 08/31/2011

Skull and Numb

[pattileigh]

08:17 AM on 08/31/2011

The rich kids can go to these universities no matter how dumb they are. They just have to have a C average and have millions. That's how they afford getting the really smart people. Although I don't think they get enough bright people based on the millions these universities have stashed.

[TexiCali]

12:05 AM on 08/31/2011

Hey, where is Caltech? It should be in the top three!

[Teacher Trish]

11:44 PM on 08/30/2011

Wow...No University of Phoenix!

(snort, laugh, haha)

[ghost geezer]

03:07 AM on 08/31/2011

It was a good idea, but few got it. The University of Phoenix does something that
none of those schools could ever do. It proves Fitzgerald wrong.