Duke cares about its US News ranking. A lot.

[OldPhiKap]

This kid could be Persian. I feel like the worst liberal ever. I may just drink a lot of gin and walk up and ask him. Hope he doesn't think I'm hitting on him.

He's not Panamanian. Of that I'm sure. His cut fastball isn't good enough.

(Too soon?)

[Emily Latella]If he is Pandamanian, he will eat shoots and leaves.[/Emily Latella]

[johnb]

I'd view schools less as tiers--which implies they can be neatly ranked-- than as categories. Duke is most similar to Vandy, Stanford, Northwestern, Wake Forest in terms of college structure. Large flagship staff universities are more similar to each other, regardless of location, than, say, Carolina and Duke (even though both are excellent and adjacent). The difference isn't really the students, who are very similar, but the administrative organization. DBR people do sometimes fall into the trap of looking for small differences between us and (choose a prominent school that is just below us in US News) while lumping us in with the 7 or 8 schools that are generally seen as our superior at whatever the variable happens to be (we're in the top 7 with Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and above Chicago and MIT, which tied for 10th). Sloppy and self serving and pointless.

School choice for the kids is a tough one... my daughter is 4 as well, and I'm still trying to figure out kindergarten (I live in NYC, and there literally dozens of choices, none of them entirely automatic).

[mph]

I dated a girl from Liberty, and I'm not really going to finish that sentence.

You can't yada yada the best part...

Here at Liberty, we encourage students to remain masters of their domain.