I think that grouping universities together into a tiered system makes more sense than individual rankings and helps give perspective to where schools fit in compared to the rest of the schools in the country. For example, there are about 2500 colleges/universities in the US that offer atleast a 4 year bachelor degree (according to my research on google). Tier 1 might be the top 20 schools, tier 2 the next 100, tier 3 the next 200, tier 4 the next 500, tier 5 the final 1000+. ND is on the line between tier 1 and tier 2 while uconn is in the middle of the tier 2 group. Going to ND over uconn would help you most if you want to work in a field that values prestige and your family has no connections in that field. It might help you slightly with getting into graduate schools compared to a uconn grad. Also, outside the US and a few other first world countries I bet virtually no one knows the difference between ND and uconn academically, where as places like Harvard and MIT are known around the world as elite schools. Therefore, for this reason I think that bumps ND down to uconn's tier for almost all things with a few exceptions. For example, working on wallstreet or getting accepted into hyper competitive graduate school programs where everyone has basically perfect resumes and they need to look to small differentiating factors.WSJ ranking:
ND = 32, UConn = 105.
Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education College Rankings 2020
The Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education College Rankings gives students and their families the information that they need to help them choose where to study. The ranking of more than 800 universities is based on 15 individual performance indicators and responses from more than 170,000...www.timeshighereducation.com