[Phate]

There's loads out there, but my knowledge is pretty much limited to the ivy league and the few places i've visited.

What would be some equivalents of say the Russell groups be?
And ones slightly below the russell groups that would be easy entry?


thanks

[benq]

A few good universities apart from Ivy's from the top of my head:

MIT
CalTech
Stanford
UChicago
Vanderbilt
Duke
Carnegie Mellon
John Hopkins
UMichigan
Georgetown

[Phate]

Thanks

And a few less-good ones? I'm looking at small-medium sized that have good liberal arts/sciences really.

[Helloworld_95]

University of Washington, Wisconsin-Madison, most of the University of Californias

[roh]

(Original post by Phate)
Thanks

And a few less-good ones? I'm looking at small-medium sized that have good liberal arts/sciences really.

Small-medium by British standards (somewhere like Leicester or Bath with circa. 10000 students) or American where some of the Liberal Arts colleges have only a couple of thousand students?

[Sharri5]

University of north Carolina, duke university, Amherst, Dartmouth

[Descartesz]

A few "Ivy-peer" schools not on Benq's list:
Northwestern University (Chicago)
Washington University in St. Louis
Rice University (Houston)
Tufts University (Boston)

These will usually be in the 5-10K range for undergrads, but Rice is about 3K.

Incidentally, it's Johns Hopkins.

If you're including public U of Michigan, you have to include U of California-Berkeley and UCLA. Other top publics not already mentioned:
U of Virginia
College of William and Mary
U of Texas-Austin
U of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign
U of California-San Diego

But the publics will be large to very large (15K-30K undergrads) except for William and Mary, which is very undergraduate focused and has about 6K undergrads.

Assuming you are looking for 4K-10K undergraduate schools that have good reputations and are a little less selective than the privates already mentioned, here are a few more to look at:

Boston College
Emory U (Atlanta)
U of Rochester (Rochester, NY)
Case Western Reserve U (Cleveland)
Tulane University (New Orleans)
Lehigh U (Bethlehem, PA)

You could, of course, consider liberal arts colleges, too (such as Amherst mentioned above) but these probably qualify as small to very small for you - under 3K undergrads. They have excellent reputations for developing future Ph.D.'s in all fields, including the sciences. Indeed in the U.S. they lead almost all other schools in the number of future Ph.D.'s earned per student they graduate. Some of these have Ivy-like exclusivity (again, like Amherst) but some that are a little more open and have strong science reputations include Haverford, Oberlin, Carleton, Reed, Grinnell and the women's colleges such Smith, Bryn Mawr, and Wellesley.

[NYU2012]

None of the top schools in the US have "easy entry" - they range from quite selective to ultra-super-extremely selective (i.e. Harvard/Yale/Princeton/Stanford/MIT).

Admission to any of the T20 schools will be quite difficult and is definitely not assured -- these schools reject people with perfect and near perfect test scores and GPAs, etc.

Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, Columbia, California Institute of Technology (CalTech), University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, Duke, Dartmouth, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, Washington University in Saint Louis (WUStL), Brown, Cornell, Rice, Vanderbilt, Notre Dame, Emory.

Some of these schools are better as research schools; others as more undergraduate focused and some a blend of both.

Research schools: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, Columbia, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, Duke, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, Washington University in Saint Louis, Cornell.

Undergraduate focused: Dartmouth, Rice

Blend: Brown, Emory, Norte Dame, Vanderbilt.

The top 20 can be grouped by level selectivity, but the differences are very marginal.

Following these are the next 10-15 schools:

Georgetown, University of California -Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, University of Southern California, University of California - Los Angeles, University of Virginia, Wake Forest, University of Michigan, Tufts, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, Boston College, Brandeis, College of William and Mary, New York University.

Of these schools, some are much better than others if you're looking for a major research institution: University of California - Berkeley, University of California - Los Angeles, University of Virginia, University of Michigan, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, University of Southern California, Carnegie Mellon and New York University are "big hitters" in research output, as they all have world-class, very large, faculties.

[heliix]

I have a good friend studying at the University of Kansas, and she loves it (though she isn't an international student). KU is a good liberal arts college with a fairly large student population and (from what I've heard) international program. But, I can tell you from experience (moved from Maine to Kansas when I was younger), the area isn't for everyone! Though, it's not the dry, barren wasteland many people think it to be

[Descartesz]

Like most colleges/universities in the USA, most KU undergraduates pursue a liberal arts curriculum, requiring students to study in multiple disciplines. It is not correct, however, to call it a liberal arts college. These schools focus almost exclusively on delivering a baccalaureate liberal arts curriculum to a small (under 3K) group of undergraduates. KU, on the other hand, has almost 20K undergraduates, some of whom are pursuing more specialized degrees (e.g., engineering) and includes in its mission many graduate and professional program(me)s (e.g., medicine and law) suitable to support the needs of the state of Kansas.

And, no, I don't know why the University of Kansas is "KU" and not "UK".