<p>Here are the leaked 2007 USNews Rankings (with change in position from previous year for each school), should be able to confirm them on Friday.</p>
<p>For all my deprecations of Chicago's essay prompts, I think it is a better school than some that are ranked higher. I won't name them for fear of offending.</p>
<p>Are we sure these are real? I'm not accusing bern, who is a long-time poster, but we don't know where he got them from. I'm only suspicious because Tulane dropped by 7, even though these should be statistics based on 2005 pre Katrina numbers. It isn't impossible, and I'm not sure why someone would bother making a fake version, but I thought it was worth mentioning.</p>
<p>ICargirl: I agree...I just saw them on another forum here on CC and thought they were interesting obviously we need to confirm them when the ranking are available later this week. But in the last almost 4 years here at CC every so called "leak" has been proven correct.</p>
<p>The LAC moves actually surprise me even more than the big university's moves do, making me doubt this supposed "leak," but I guess we will see soon enough. Personally, I'm really hoping it's true but I'm not getting my hopes up (my school would jump two spots even though I expected it to fall approximately the same amount).</p>
<p>I remember when I eyeballed the 2006 data (I didn't buy a copy) at the bookstore when it first came out, I thought the financial resource probably played quite a role in their rank. If I remember correctly, both schools were ranked pretty high in that category. Below is what I wrote on the other board. Feel free to agree or disagree my speculation. No personal attack though. :)</p>
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What do they have in common? Disproportionally large amount of research money for medicine. I don't think the US News separates it from those for <em>academic</em> research. For example, if you look at WashU website under something like Facts-->"How WashU compares with other institution", WashU looks pretty good simply because of the inclusion of $$$ for medical research. <a href="http://facts.wustl.edu/comparison.htm%5B/url%5D">http://facts.wustl.edu/comparison.htm</a> There's no way WashU would be anywhere close to Stanford without such inclusion. In fact, I bet if medical research isn't included, WashU would have been way down on the list, given the fact their engineering/arts and sciences..etc aren't very well-ranked. I think a lot of schools report just the <em>total</em> research expenditure and that becomes part of what's used to calculate "financial resource" rank. Schools with top med schools are gonna benefit more than others. Don't underestimate the impact of such advantage because with schools being so close in all other categories, such separation in this category can be huge on the overall ranking. I think this plays a pretty big role on UPenn and WashU's rank.
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<p>CC member Aurelius wondered why JHU is ranked below WashU in finanical resource if that's the case (I am assuming he/she is looking at the 2006 data) and below was my response:</p>
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Maybe JHU's number excludes the medical expenditure because its number is so enormous that if it's included, it's just way too obvious.</p>
<p>FYI, in 2004, the med research $ for WashU was 371 million. That means the money for non-medical research was only 62 million (14% of the total). US News gets all other data from common data set which does not say anything about the budget and finance. It's up to the school as to what were included as research expenditure and operating budget (schools with big med school will also have big operating budget).
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<p>Some may say the FS is only 10% of the total points and therefore can't be the one driving. I think it depends on how tight the race is for other categories. If 5 schools are neck-to-neck in all others, then this could be what separates them. </p>
<p>A lot of people seemed to be surprised that Stanford wasn't above Penn last year. Well, I remember Penn's selectivity rank was above Stanford. Stanford, with its large D-I athletics program, was apparently penalized for relatively lower % of top-tenth students from HS. This is not something US News would account for. But I think most of us would agree that for students without athletic hook, Stanford should be of higher rank and on par with HYP. It's not that Penn was overranked in this department. It's just how the methodology works.</p>
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A lot of people seemed to be surprised that Stanford wasn't above Penn last year.
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<p>Why anyone would be surprised about anything regarding these rankings is beyond my comprehension. Think if it: factors picked for no reason other than (1) the data is available and (2) they sound good; factor weightings assigned arbitrarily and tweaked from year to year. etc.</p>
<p>This is a magazine, for goodness sakes, not a scholarly journal.</p>
<p>Good entertainment, yes. But why take it so seriously?</p>
<p>Oh, I get it. This is like a sneak preview at the movies????</p>
<p>I don't think so. These are just ranking flukes.</p>
<p>It is precisely comments like the quote that are so troublesome. You will note that, unlike sound ranking scales (consumer reports for example), USNWR has NEVER said that a difference of a few places in the rankings is probably not meaningful. To the contrary, they sometimes feature a college that moved up slightly (and you can bet they get ad sales from those colleges, too!)</p>
<p>Sound scoring and ranking systems publish measures of the validity of the scoring. There are even stastical tools to do so. It is not by accident, or to save space, IMHO, that USNWR doesn't do so.</p>
<p>I would love to see a program that took the schools- and allowed you to plug in your own criteria and rank according to weight.
You could rank by # of years alumni have been waiting to get season tickets to the football games or how many professors won Fulbrights.
OR how many students they cram into a 9x12 dorm room!</p>
<p>All this intense speculation about US News, like they are going to determine the price of crude oil for the nxt 6 months, is pretty amusing
:D</p>