<p>UCB was 21 wasn't it...not 22?</p>
<p>Chicago is where it should be now.</p>
<p>Interesting…..</p>
<p>Baylor University, please?</p>
<p>Damn, the publics got beat down...they basically all fell, except Texas! Just goes to show how the ranking system changes can screw over one particular genre of school, and how the rankings are dumb. :(</p>
<p>A lot of people are requesting undergrad engineering, which I'd also like to see, please.</p>
<p>I'm sure for enginneer, MIT ranks first.</p>
<p>I'd really like to see top 15</p>
<p>Guys, give this poor guy a rest. He has been doing nothing but answering questions.</p>
<p>Well, this appears to be legit. Thanks a lot for your info. One thing I do have to agree with semiserious is that it appears that the publics got shafted again (although not hard). Oh well, maybe next year. Hey, complaining about Penn worked! Let's work on the publics. :)</p>
<p>yes!! Cornell moves up.</p>
<p>The list presented here differs from the one in the other thread on this forum. (eg. Brown moved up in one, didn't in the other). Guess we'll find out soon enough which is correct.</p>
<p>What do you mean which one is correct? This one is correct lol.</p>
<p>NYU got shafted. It should've been top 30.</p>
<p>does anybody have the full list for the undergrad? and for undergrad bus too.</p>
<p>ugrad business and ugrad engineering up to 15 would be nice.</p>
<p>According to the cover photo posted by the OP, USNews, for the first time in history, hasn't changed the color of the new "America's Best Colleges" from one year to the last. The 2006 edition was also yellow.</p>
<p>The princeton troll refutes a #1 Princeton #2 Harvard ranking? Unbelievable..</p>
<p>Why would Caildan (a senior member with nearly 3,000 posts) ruin his reputation on this board by posting something that was bogus? I believe these are the correct rankings. The same lists are being circulated on other websites as well...</p>
<p>Woot. Duke, WUSTL, and Penn all rightfully ranked lower.</p>
<p>ARTICLE IN NY TIMES ON RANKINGS -- EXCELLENT!</p>
<p>David Leonhardt
Rank Colleges, but Rank Them Right
Published: August 16, 2006
EARLY this morning, U.S. News & World Report will send e-mail messages to hundreds of college administrators, giving them an advance peek at the magazines annual college ranking. They will find out whether Princeton will be at the top of the list for the seventh straight year, whether Emory can break into the top 15 and where their own university ranks. The administrators must agree to keep the information to themselves until Friday at midnight, when the list goes live on the U.S. News Web site, but the e-mail message gives them a couple of days to prepare a response.</p>
<p>Skip to next paragraph
Related
Washington Monthly's Rankings
By now, 23 years after U.S. News got into this game, the responses have become pretty predictable. Disappointed college officials dismiss the ranking as being beneath the lofty aims of a university, while administrators pleased with their status order new marketing materials bragging about it and then tell anyone who asks that, obviously, they realize the ranking is beneath the lofty aims of a university. </p>
<p>There are indeed some silly aspects to the U.S. News franchise and its many imitators. The largest part of a universitys U.S. News score, for instance, is based on a survey of presidents, provosts and admissions deans, most of whom have never sat in a class at the colleges theyre judging.</p>
<p>Thats made it easy to dismiss all the efforts to rate colleges as the product of a status-obsessed society with a need to turn everything, even learning, into a competition. As Richard R. Beeman, a historian and former dean at the University of Pennsylvania, has argued, The very idea that universities with very different institutional cultures and program priorities can be compared, and that the resulting rankings can be useful to students, is highly problematic.</p>
<p>Of course, the same argument could be made about students. They come from different cultures, they learn in different ways and no one-dimensional scoring system can ever fully capture how well they have mastered a subject. Yet colleges go on giving grades, drawing fine lines that determine who is summa cum laude and bestowing graduation prizes all for good reason.</p>
<p>HUMAN beings do a better job of just about anything when their performance is evaluated and they are held accountable for it. You cant manage what you dont measure, as the management adage says, and because higher education is by all accounts critical to the countrys economic future, it sure seems to be deserving of rigorous measurement. </p>
<p>So do we spend too much time worrying about college rankings? Or not nearly enough?</p>
<p>Not so long ago, college administrators could respond that they seemed to be doing just fine. American universities have long attracted talented students from other continents, and this countrys population was once the most educated in the world. </p>
<p>But it isnt anymore. Today the United States ranks ninth among industrialized nations in higher-education attainment, in large measure because only 53 percent of students who enter college emerge with a bachelors degree, according to census data. And those who dont finish pay an enormous price. For every $1 earned by a college graduate, someone leaving before obtaining a four-year degree earns only 67 cents. </p>
<p>Last week, in a report to the Education Department, a group called the Commission on the Future of Higher Education bluntly pointed out the economic dangers of these trends. What we have learned over the last year makes clear that American higher education has become what, in the business world, would be called a mature enterprise: increasingly risk-averse, at times self-satisfied, and unduly expensive, it said. To meet the challenges of the 21st century, higher education must change from a system primarily based on reputation to one based on performance. </p>
<p>The report comes with a handful of recommendations simplify financial aid, give more of it to low-income students, control university costs but says they all depend on universities becoming more accountable. Tellingly, only one of the commissions 19 members, who included executives from Boeing, I.B.M. and Microsoft and former university presidents, refused to sign the report: David Ward, president of the nations largest association of colleges and universities, the American Council on Education. But thats to be expected. Many students dont enjoy being graded, either. The task of grading colleges will fall to the federal government, which gives enough money to universities to demand accountability, and to private groups outside higher education.</p>
<p>The degree of defensiveness that colleges have is unreasonable, said Michael S. McPherson, a former president of Macalester College in Minnesota who now runs the Spencer Foundation in Chicago. Its just the usual resistance to having someone interfere with their own marketing efforts.</p>
<p>The commission urged the Education Department to create an easily navigable Web site that allows comparisons of colleges based on their actual cost (not just list price), admissions data and meaningful graduation rates. (Right now, the statistics dont distinguish between students who transfer and true dropouts.) Eventually, it said, the site should include data on learning outcomes.</p>
<p>Measuring how well students learn is incredibly difficult, but there are some worthy efforts being made. Researchers at Indiana University ask students around the country how they spend their time and how engaged they are in their education, while another group is measuring whether students become better writers and problem solvers during their college years. </p>
<p>As Mr. McPherson points out, all the yardsticks for universities have their drawbacks. Yet parents and students are clearly desperate for information. Without it, they turn to U.S. News, causing applications to jump at colleges that move up the ranking, even though some colleges that are highly ranked may not actually excel at making students smarter than they were upon arrival. To take one small example thats highlighted in the current issue of Washington Monthly, Emory has an unimpressive graduation rate given the affluence and S.A.T. scores of its incoming freshmen.</p>
<p>When U.S. News started its ranking back in the 1980s, universities released even less information about themselves than they do today. But the attention that the project received forced colleges to become a little more open. Imagine, then, what might happen if a big foundation or another magazine or U.S. News announced that it would rank schools based on how well they did on measures like the Indiana survey.</p>
<p>The elite universities would surely skip it, confident that they had nothing to gain, but there is a much larger group of colleges that cant rest on a brand name. The ones that did well would be rewarded with applications from just the sort of students universities supposedly want ones who are willing to keep an open mind and be persuaded by evidence.</p>