Top 10 Universities in US 12-25

Top 10 Universities in US

If you are interested to study in US, it is no surprise because US beholds the image of being the leading destination for international students. You will be amazed by the sheer volume and variety of universities in the US, but can get puzzled when asked to choose from a lengthy list. To make things easy for you, here is a comprehensive guide on 10 best universities in the US.

Rank 10# Duke University

It was founded in 1838. It merged with Trinity College in 1924.

• Location – Durham
• Specialty – Duke University underwent both physical and academic expansion when it got merged with Trinity College. The original campus is now known as East campus.
• Student Strength – It has 10 schools and colleges with over 50,000 students

Rank 9# University of Pennsylvania

It is recognized for its excellence in scholarship, research and service. It was founded in 1740.

• Location – Philadelphia

• Specialty – The campus is the place where students and faculty can pursue knowledge without boundaries.
• Student Strength – It is home to 20,600 full-time and 4,000 part-time students.

Rank 8# Columbia University

It is one of the most important centers of research along with a comfortable learning environment.

• Location – New Work

• Specialty – It has US president Barack Obama among its alumni. It awards the annual literacy Pulitzer Prize and boasts more Nobel Prize winners than any other institution.
• Student Strength – It has 6,084 undergraduate students along with 13 graduate and professional schools.

Rank 7# Yale University

It is the America’s third oldest university, founded in 1701.

• Location – New Haven

• Specialty – It has nurtured five US presidents and 17 Supreme Court justices. The library of this university has around 12.5 million books.
• Student Strength – It has total undergraduate enrollment of 5,430.

Rank 6# University of Chicago

It was established in 1890 by the American Baptist Education Society.

• Location – Chicago

• Specialty – The Chicago School of Economics under the university developed Milton Friedman’s pro-market philosophy.
• Student Strength – Over 5,659 undergraduates enroll under this university that has 125 research institutes and centers.

Rank 5# Princeton University

It is the fourth oldest university in the US, founded in 1746.

• Location – Princeton
• Specialty – It boasts of more than 30 Nobel laureates among its past faculty and alumni.
• Student Strength – It is home to around 5,000 undergraduate, 2,500 postgraduates and more than 1,100 academics.

Rank 4# Massachusetts Institution of Technology (MIT)

Founded in 1861, it focuses on advance knowledge to serve the nation and the world of 21st century.

• Location – Cambridge
• Specialty – This university has produced more than 70 Nobel laureates in 150 years, eight of who are still associated with the faculty body.
• Student Strength – It has more than 10,000 students along with 34 academic departments, divisions and degree programs.

Rank 3# Stanford University

It is the US’s most selective university, founded in 1891.

• Location – Stanford
• Specialty – The alumni of this university has founded multinational giants like Hewlett-Packard (HP) and Google.
• Student Strength – It has 7,000 undergraduate and around 4,000 graduate students.

Rank 2# Harvard University

This university is acknowledged for its excellence in teaching learning and research in many disciplines, founded in 1636.

• Location – Cambridge
• Specialty – It is the oldest academic institute in the US. It has the global academy’s largest financial endowment.
• Student Strength – Over 20,000 degree candidates.

Rank 1# California Institute of Technology (Caltech)

Caltech aims at expanding human knowledge and benefit the society through research integrated with education. Established in 1891.

• Location – Pasadena, CA
• Specialty – It manages the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for NASA, owns and operates a global network of astronomical observatories and research facilities.
• Student Strength – It is home to around 2,300 students.

All these above universities have world-class infrastructure, academic body, facilities and research opportunities that can help you to gain expertise in your subject or field of study.

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This Year's SAT Scores Are Out, and They're Grim 09-26

This Year's SAT Scores Are Out, and They're Grim

Fewer than half of the 2013 graduating seniors who took the test got "college-ready" scores.

timlewisnm/Flickr

Of the 1.66 million high school students in the class of 2013 who took the SAT, only 43 percent were academically prepared for college-level work, according to this year’s SAT Report on College & Career Readiness. For the fifth year in a row, fewer than half of SAT-takers received scores that qualified them as “college-ready.”

The College Board considers a score of 1550 to be the “College and Career Readiness Benchmark.” Students who meet the benchmark   are more likely to enroll in a four-year college, more likely to earn a GPA of a B- or higher their freshman year, and more likely to complete their degree.

“While some might see stagnant scores as no news, the College Board considers them a call to action. These scores can and must change — and the College Board feels a sense of responsibility to help make that happen,” the report said.

The report also offered insights into why some students graduated high school prepared for college and others didn’t. Students in the class of 2013 who met or exceeded the benchmark were more likely to have completed a core curriculum, to have taken honors or AP courses, and to have taken higher-level mathematics courses, like precalculus, calculus, and trigonometry.

Although the SAT takers in the class of 2013 were the most diverse group of test takers ever, the report showed that minority students’ scores have only slightly improved in the past year.

The College Board

While 14.8 percent of African-American SAT takers met or exceeded the SAT benchmark in 2012, 15.6 percent met or exceeded the mark in 2013. Similar gains were made among Hispanic SAT takers: 23.5 percent met the benchmark in 2013, up from 22.8 in 2012. This may be due to differing academic preparation between the groups: Only 66 percent of African American students and 70 percent of Hispanic students completed a Core Curriculum, in comparison to 80 percent of white students.

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Alarming Research Shows the Sorry State of US Higher Ed 07-13

Alarming Research Shows the Sorry State of US Higher Ed

Alarming Research Shows the Sorry State of US Higher Ed

by Andrew McAfee 

It's dismaying how easy it is to screw up college.

I don't know exactly when, why, or how it happened, but important things are breaking down in the US higher education system. Whether or not this system is in danger of collapsing it feels like it's losing its way, and failing in its mission of developing the citizens and workers we need in the 21st century.

This mission clearly includes getting students to graduate, yet only a bit more than half of all US students enrolled in four-year colleges and universities complete their degrees within six years, and only 29% who start two year degrees finish them within three years. America is last in graduation rate among 18 countries assessed in 2010 by the OECD. Things used to be better; in the late 1960s, nearly half of all college students got done in four years.

Have graduates learned a lot? In too many cases, apparently not. One of the strongest bodies of evidence I've come across showing that students aren't acquiring many academic skills is work done by sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa and summarized in their book Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses and subsequent research.

Arum, Roksa, and their colleagues tracked more than 2300 students enrolled full time in four-year degree programs at a range of American colleges and universities. Their findings are alarming: 45% of students demonstrate no significant improvement on a written test of critical thinking called the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) after two years of college, and 36% improved not at all after four years. And the average improvement on the test after four years was quite small.

Consider a student who scored at the 50% percentile as a freshman. If he experienced average improvement over four years of college, then went back and took the test again with another group of incoming freshmen, he would score only in the 68th percentile. The CLA is so new that we don't know if these gains were bigger in the past, but previous research using other tests indicates that they were, and that only a few decades ago the average college student learned a great deal between freshman and senior years.

These declines in learning and graduation rates come during a time of exploding costs. the Pew Research Center found that the price of a private college education tripled between 1980 and 2010, and that average student loan debt for bachelor's degree holders who had to borrow was more than $23,000 in 2011. This debt is not dischargeable even in bankruptcy, and is certainly not erased if you fail to graduate.

Smart students from affluent homes and elite colleges and universities continue to do really well, but the rest of higher ed is sliding backward. Why is this? As was the case with the sub-prime crisis and subsequent economic meltdown, there is plenty of blame to go around. Many non-elite colleges have seen their enrollments jump in recent decades without similar increases in budgets, so resources per student have declined.

It also seems, though, that colleges in general have stopped asking students to work as hard, and the students have been more than happy to take them up on that offer. Arum, Roksa, and their colleagues document that college students today spend only 9% of their time studying (compared to 51% on "socializing, recreating, and other"), much less than in previous decades, and that only 42% reported having taken a class the previous semester that required them to read at least 40 pages a week and write at least 20 pages total. 

They write that "The portrayal of higher education emerging from [this research] is one of an institution focused more on social than academic experiences. Students spend very little time studying, and professors rarely demand much from them in terms of reading and writing."

Here's my advice to recent high school grads (and their families): don't be part of this shameful and lazy bargain. Resolve to work hard, take tough classes, and graduate on time. Many changes are necessary in higher ed, most of which will take a great deal of time. But the most effective interventions can start the day you show up on campus. Crack the books, find good teachers, and take the education part of your education seriously.

Arum and Roksa found that at every college studied some students show great improvement on the CLA. In general, these are students who spent more time studying (especially studying alone), took courses with more required reading and writing, and had more demanding faculty. So the blueprint is here. Please take my advice and spend some time this summer thinking about how you'll put it into action.

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Students Fall Flat in Vocabulary Test 12-07

Students Fall Flat in Vocabulary Test

By STEPHANIE BANCHERO

U.S. students knew only about half of what they were expected to on a new vocabulary section of a national exam, in the latest evidence of severe shortcomings in the nation's reading education.

Eighth-graders scored an average of 265 out of 500 in vocabulary on the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress, the results of which were made public Thursday. Fourth-graders averaged a score of 218 out of 500.

The results showed that nearly half of eighth-graders didn't know that "permeates" means to "spread all the way through," and about the same proportion of fourth-graders didn't know that "puzzled" means confused—words that educators think students in those grades should recognize.

Most fourth-graders did know the meaning of "created," "spread" and "underestimate." At eighth grade, most students knew "grimace," "icons" and "edible."

Read the Report

'Vocabulary Results from the 2009 and 2011 NAEP Reading Assessments'

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The new vocabulary test was embedded in the biennial national reading exam, known as the NAEP. Last year's scores were in line with those posted in 2009, the first time vocabulary scores were broken out, but the latest results are the first to be made public. Experts noted that the results mirror the performance on the national reading test, which has yielded fairly static scores for a decade.

Margaret McKeown, a senior scientist at the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh, said she wasn't surprised by the results but that they are cause for concern.

"There is very little vocabulary done in any classroom at any age," said Ms. McKeown, whose research focuses on reading and vocabulary. "There is quite a bit of research about vocabulary and the best ways to teach it. Unfortunately we are not seeing that go into the classrooms as much as we would like."

Leslie Russell, a reading specialist at Butts Road Intermediate School in Chesapeake, Va., said the vocabulary scores could be improved if students were more immersed in literacy at school and at home. "We need to make more of an effort to get parents involved in teaching reading and teaching them how to help children make sense of words they do not know," she said.

The U.S. Department of Education administered the 2011 exam to a representative sample of 213,100 fourth-graders in public and private schools in all states. About 168,000 eighth-graders were tested.

In 2009, 12th-graders also took the exam. Their average score was 296 out of 500 on the vocabulary portion. The high school exam is administered every four years.

Enlarge Image

The department has given the reading exam for decades but decided to add new questions in 2009 to more fully test students' knowledge of grade-level vocabulary. The words were embedded in reading passages and students were asked their definition in a multiple-choice format based on the context of those passages. The selected words are familiar concepts, feelings or actions.

African-American and Latino students posted scores lower than white and Asian students at every grade level. Low-income students scored far below their wealthier counterparts. The gaps between the groups ranged from 28 to 31 points.

Girls scored a few points higher than boys in fourth and eighth grade, but the results of girls and boys were nearly identical in 12th grade.

Data showed scores for the highest-performing students dipped slightly from 2009, while scores for the lowest-scoring students remained unchanged in fourth grade and increased slightly in eighth grade.

"Without a strong vocabulary, any child's ability to read and to learn suffers dramatically," David Driscoll, chairman of the National Assessment Governing Board, which sets policy for NAEP, said in a statemen

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From: Online Universities Blog

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These are the Info-graphics related to United States. But what is true for USA, is true for India, True for the rest of the world


Institutions make Hay, while the sun sets gradually on meaningful Education.

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