Please rate the following universities:

Columbia University
Cornell University
Princeton
MIT

for the following subjects / subject areas:

Engineering
English
Art / Theatre Arts / Creative Writing (where offered)
Classics

Thanks a lot!

Reply 1

devil09

Engineering
MIT
Cornell/Princeton
Columbia

English
Columbia/Cornell/Princeton
MIT

Art/Theater
Columbia
Cornell/Princeton
MIT

Classics
Columbia
Cornell/Princeton

Reply 2

llys

Thank you! That was quick. As I'm looking at your sig, may I ask, what universities would you recommend for Ancient Near Eastern Studies/Egyptology? Of the unis I looked at, Columbia seems to offer the most ancient languages (Akkadian, Sumerian, Aramaic, Ottoman), but I have no clue whether that means they are better in general..

Reply 3

devil09

Columbia actually doesn't offer that much in ANES. They have Marc van de Mieroop, but not much else (unless you count Zainab Bahrani in Art History).

For Egyptology: Berkeley, Brown, Chicago, Johns Hopkins, Michigan, NYU, Penn, Penn State, UCLA, Yale

For ANES: the above + Brandeis, Cornell, Harvard

Also see my write up here:
http://egyptological.blogspot.com/

Reply 4

gyyy2807

Engineering

1. MIT
2. Cornell
3. Princeton
4. Columbia

English

1. Princeton
2. Columbia
3. Cornell
4. MIT

Art / Theatre Arts / Creative Writing

same as English

Classics

Columbia
Princeton
Cornell
MIT

Reply 5

devil09

gyyy, Columbia is significantly stronger in the arts and creative writing than Princeton. This is partly due to its location and affiliation with Barnard.

It's also a bit misleading to say Cornell is stronger in engineering than Princeton. At the undergraduate level, both are (barely) top 10 programs and equally strong.

Reply 6

DrAtomic

Columbia University
Cornell University
Princeton
MIT

for the following subjects / subject areas:

Engineering:
1) MIT
2) Cornell
3) Princeton
4) Columbia

English:
1) Cornell
2) Columbia
3) Princeton
4) MIT

Art (History?):
1) Columbia
2) Princeton
3) Cornell
4) MIT

Theatre Arts - I don't know.

Creative Writing (where offered):
1) Columbia
2) Princeton
3) Cornell
4) MIT

Classics:
1) Princeton
2) Columbia
3) Cornell
4) MIT

Reply 7

llys

Thanks for the replies!

devil09

I hope you don't mind if I ask you another question about this - I read your blog and checked out the unis (very useful btw, thank you) - but it's a little overwhelming. For example, I think Chicago looks fantastic (they even offer Hittite), but at Harvard you can learn Old Iranian, however at Brown they seem to have a specialist in science of the Ancient Near East (lots of courses on maths and astronomy etc.). In short, the best courses are scattered over lots of unis...

So I resort to another rating question. How would you overall rate the following universities for ANES (languages + archeology) undergraduate studies?

Chicago
Brown
Harvard
Yale
Penn
Cornell
John Hopkins
NYU

(or others if you think they are better)

Of course this is just out of interest as one would have to get into all of them first anyway. :tongue:

Thanks again!

Reply 8

DrAtomic

by languages, do u mean

Linguistics:
1. UPenn
2. Chicago
3. Cornell
4. Brown
5. Harvard
6. Yale
7. NYU
8. Hopkins

Modern Languages:
1. Yale
2. UPenn
3. Cornell
4. NYU
5. Chicago
6. Harvard
7. Hopkins
8. Brown

Archaeology:
1. Chicago
2. Harvard
3. Penn
4. Yale
5. NYU
6. Hopkins
7. Cornell
8. Brown

Reply 9

devil09

DrAtomic

Archaeology:
1. Chicago
2. Harvard
3. Penn
4. Yale
5. NYU
6. Hopkins
7. Cornell
8. Brown

Stick to music. I'll take this one. :p:

(The order for archaeology would be Penn, NYU, Brown, Chicago, Cornell, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Yale.)

For overall undergraduate ANES studies, I'd say:

1. Chicago
2. Penn
3. Brown
4. John Hopkins*
5. Yale**
6. Harvard
7. Cornell
8. NYU***

*Would've been #3, but they just lost a key scholar.
**Ranked fairly low for its lack of archaeology offerings. It's definitely one of the top 2-3 schools if you're mostly interested in languages.
***Not much offered at the undergraduate level.

Reply 10

DrAtomic

Stick to not being a jerk and acting like your opinion is the only one that counts. All of these "rankings" are people's opinions - no one on here's opinion is more valuable than any other.

Reply 11

devil09

The difference between an opinion and an informed opinion can be quite large.

Reply 12

r0x0r

For what it's worth, I know that at Brown there are several archaeologists working in the Near East, and the department is relatively generous with helping out in funding undergraduate fieldwork. I'm seriously contemplating declaring Archaeology at Brown (though not focused in the Near East) so if you have any general questions about the department or undergraduate life do feel free to PM me.

Reply 13

DrAtomic

I based my list on the NRC rankings... rankings that have a methodology, I didn't just pull them out of thin air. That makes them informed. Why are you so well informed? Do you happen to be a scholar in the field? A professor at one of these schools?

If you asked me to rank a dozen of the best music programs in the country, I'd put them into categories, but wouldn't be able to rank them - it all depends on what one wants to study. You can't just start ranking programs blindly without knowing what a person wants to study. That makes a very big difference.

Reply 14

devil09

Atomic, I really was not trying to start an argument with you (hence my smiley after that perhaps ill-advised comment). I respect your views, and (unlike others, such as ILIGAN) you try to be a helpful and impartial poster.

That said, I actually do know quite a bit about these programs. I applied to the vast majority of them for grad school and visited the departments and met the professors at most of them (and, unfortunately, had to read their major publications). I have presented at conferences and participated on excavations with some of these professors -- so yes, in that sense, I am a scholar in the field (albeit extremely young and inexperienced!). While I frequently cite the NRC rankings, they're not the best measure for such tiny programs, particularly since archaeology is not ranked.

I agree with you that music would be difficult to rank. An instrumental major would look somewhere different than a voice major, and a flutist might look somewhere different than a cellist. Archaeology is a bit different. Although there are specializations, most of the universities that offer archaeology offer most areas, and there IS a strict pecking order. Penn, with by far the largest university archaeological collection the US, has more to offer than Yale, which has fewer than a half dozen archaeologists. Similarly, Brown has an entire newly renovated archaeology department and building, with several excavations and the resources of the RISD museum; Hopkins has a total of two archaeologists and a couple art historians.

Reply 15

DrAtomic

That is fine - Your points make sense.

Although, I was definitely not talking about instrumental majors. I was talking about musicology. We don't have instrumental majors at the University of Chicago. I was saying that I can't rank music depts because there are so many different areas of study within music... music history (and the infinite periods within), music theory (and the infinite areas of specialization), ethnomusicology, composition, etc etc... How is it possible to rank???

Reply 16

llys

Thanks guys. DrAtomic, I meant languages of the Ancient Near East in particular, so it's much more specialised than modern languages or linguistics, though I'm also interested in linguistics, so thanks. :smile:

The problem is that subjects like Ancient Near Eastern Studies are usually really tiny departments (only two or three profs) even at big universities, so their specialisms and so on are very "hit and miss" with your particular interests, which really makes it a pain to figure out what would be "best" overall for a particular person.

I've narrowed it down to

Chicago
Penn
Brown
Cornell/Yale

Penn and Chicago offer most and most diverse languages (Egyptian, Akkadian, Sumerian, Ugaritic, Hittite, Aramaic/Syriac)

Brown offer Egyptian, Akkadian and seem to specialise in Aramaic, which is a pity beccause Archeology-wise Brown seems fantastic.. btw thanks a lot r0x0r, I might take you up on that offer. :smile:

OK I hope you are bored, because I have a few more questions now. :tongue:

A general question about archeology courses: are there more history/social science/art-type courses, or more 'scientific' (like geology/geo-archeology) courses? I'm guessing it's a mix, but at most places most of the courses offered seem to fall in the first category (going by their names) - do you know of places that specialise more in the science of archeology?

Also do you know of places that have a more technical than artsy approach, i.e. evolution of technology and stuff like that?

Finally, how would you rank

Chicago
Penn
Brown
Cornell
Yale

for English/Creative Writing/Theatre/Theatre Arts / Classics?

THANKS!

Reply 17

devil09

llys

Brown offer Egyptian, Akkadian and seem to specialise in Aramaic, which is a pity beccause Archeology-wise Brown seems fantastic.. btw thanks a lot r0x0r, I might take you up on that offer.

Brown's website hasn't been updated. The current lecturer in Akkadian (Jamie Novotny) has been replaced, starting in the fall. The new Assyriology hire is Matthew Rutz, who recently got his PhD from Penn. He specializes in Akkadian and Sumerian (but also teaches Ugaritic, if I remember correctly). Unfortunately I didn't get the chance to meet him, but the other people in the department are amazing. A lot of them are fairly new/young scholars and very enthusiastic. (Nowhere else have I seen a MacArthur "genius grant" professor dance on a table and play beer pong. :eek3:

)

llys

A general question about archeology courses: are there more history/art-type courses, or more 'scientific' (like geology/geo-archeology) courses? I'm guessing it's a mix, but at most places most of the courses offered seem to fall in the first category (going by their names) - do you know of places that specialise more in the science of archeology?

The scientific aspects of archaeology (zooarchaeology, GIS, archaeochemical analysis, and the like) are often housed in anthropology departments.

Reply 18

DrAtomic

Classics:
1. Yale
2. Brown
3. Chicago
4. Cornell
5. Penn

English:
1. Yale
2. Cornell
3. Penn
4. Chicago
5. Brown

I don't know about Creative Writing/Theater, but if I could make a guess, I'd say that schools that are good in English are likely good in Creative Writing, too. For theater, I know that the Chicago program is quite minimal, so it wouldn't be your best bet of that list for a school to major in theater. Yale would probably be a good place for that.