It’s incredible that MIT has such a stronghold on math Olympiads. I suspect students are located around the US and world. Wouldn’t some choose to stay local or choose a big scholarship to a T30 and be a big fish?
I was curious which schools moved up or down the most in this year’s ranking? Florida is ecstatic that it’s now ranked #5 among public universities. Vassar is scratching its head. Oklahoma improved a bit to 120s and Arkansas dropped to 160s. That’s not too relevant in one year. The interesting trends are those like Florida, Tulane and NYU up and some trending down that may need new leadership.
I think these ratings are a lot of noise and find zero utility in wondering why a school moved from #9 to #5 or vice versa. Does it mean that the education you are getting is suddenly much better (or worse) . . . no. All the schools in the top 100 (and many others that aren’t as highly rated) are excellent institutions where a student can receive an outstanding education. In terms of the super elite (top 20/25) they all offer prestige, unique opportunities and outstanding facilities on top of the education. Most are world renowned so does it matter if you are #5 or #1?
One year trends, like weekly stock prices, can be interesting but longer term trends are more interesting. This is one of the few annual scorecards plus common data sets.
U of Florida National Rankings from 2014 to 2022: 49 48 47 50 42 35 34 30 28
Something drives the trend. Yes, I think it’s getting better in some way. So is UT-Austin which has moved up to 38 from the 50s a few years ago. It could just be quality of students as measured by test scores and grades but probably also flowing through to graduation rates and outcomes. Maybe the latter is also driven by more need based financial aid and programs to support low SESs.
Maybe the laggards aren’t doing any fundraising campaigns and are mailing it in.
It has always puzzled me that employers and grad schools are not a factor in the rankings of undergraduate programs. A big reason most kids go to elite colleges is to help their careers. Why aren’t employer surveys a factor in the USNews rankings? Likewise, why aren’t grad school surveys a factor? I assume accurate data is very hard to get, but given the importance of these rankings, shouldn’t USNews at least try?
We have standardized disclosures of so many larger ticket products, like cars and securities. It would only make sense to have standardized disclosures for colleges so that families can make certain apples to apples comparisons across key factors. My list would be outcome focused and would include:
Cost: Gross by component; avg net cost and debt at graduation with a table based on family income (assuming some base amount of assets), with a link to the school’s NPC.
Demographics: By race, geography and by family income levels, using the same family income bands as for costs.
Top 10-20 majors, by major: number of students in major, number students graduating in that major, graduation rate at 4 years and 6 years, overall median GPA, % employed within 1 year of graduation and their median GPA, range of starting salaries and median starting salary, median GPA of those employed, top 5 cities/metropolitan areas of employment for first job, median salary after 5 years, % in grad/prof school within 2 years and their median GPA, top 10 grad/prof schools.
Same outcomes for students not in the above majors as a group.
For such a major investment in time and money, we should be able to compare sets of possible/ likely outcomes. While individual outcomes will be driven by individual effort, talent and luck, an understanding of historical outcomes would help people make more informed decisions rather than rely on rankings that are based on criteria that are not equally relevant to most people and which most of them probably don’t fully understand (at least the derivation and formulation).
Rankings are like comparing apples and onions and calling one “better.” What it really amounts to is a list of pet schools rearranged a little every year, then “the rest.”
Their dream is to be at MIT or Cal Tech or Stanford, maybe Harvard for non-engineering. If they get in and can afford it, they’re pretty much going.
“College football rankings also have a well defined way to validate that the rankings are accurate – by looking at how the colleges performed in football games.”
Sure, but US News can’t change their rankings weekly to reflect anything going on with colleges. And the first set of rankings are even more arbitrary than US News if you can believe that. It’s very reputation based, more than USN. And some coaches have admitted they don’t even fill it out, leaving it to staff and admins, which could be happening at colleges that US News surveys as well, for sure.
At the risk of going slightly off-topic, the people that rank college football teams only needed to be concerned with teams 1-5, and really 1-2 as that dictated who played in the championship game. It’s not really an apt comparison.
One issue is that most schools are not strong in every discipline, so the responses would be highly variable. A classicist would hold U Cincinnati in high esteem but would know little about CMU, whereas a CS professor would have the opposite opinion. You can average the scores together, sure, but that doesn’t necessarily help any particular student find a good match. A student interested in music business may be turned off by an overall poor reputation score at a college like Belmont despite it being extremely strong in his/her intended major.
There have been rankings based on placement into professional schools like medical and law schools, such as the infamous WSJ ranking below, but only a minority of students are interested in such careers.
I expect the overwhelming majority of USNWR college ranking readership and revenue comes from the website, not print copies of the magazine, so USNWR could theoretically update their website list as often as they want, including weekly. The bigger issue is that USNWR doesn’t have any validation that their rankings are correct/incorrect like college football rankings do, so there is no accurate way to correct and improve the USNWR rankings over time. USNWR doesn’t get validation that their current ranking for Caltech is too high/low and needs to be corrected. Instead it’s arbitrary without any validation.
Colleges and fans are absolutely concerned with football rankings beyond teams 1-5 and concerned with far more than who plays in the championship game. This translates in to a variety of influences on the college including quality of future recruiting, revenue and attendance at games, alumni donations, and even number of applications to the college. USNWR rankings influence the latter 2 for similar reasons, and college admins are concerned about them for similar reasons.
The importance of the rankings (beyond to the colleges themselves and those students/alums who seem to live and die by them) is up for debate. And ultimately, saying why doesn’t USNews try is misunderstanding the goal of USNews in this process.
I live in New England. I’m on CC all the time. I had to google Williams to figure out where it was. Swarthmore? Who knew it was in PA? Not me. I couldn’t care less where they are ranked, let alone where they are geographically. I could walk into a busy shopping mall and randomly select people to poll about the location of Williams…and they’d probably think I was talking about the local oil company. USNWR rankings are for a very specific demographic.
I don’t put much of any weight on these ratings, but one positive is that potential applicants learn that excellent under-the-radar schools such as Williams and Swarthmore exist.
So many applicants are hyper focused on the rankings. On CC there are many who ask chance me for T10, T20, T50 schools (based on USNWR rankings). This focus comes from parents, the media, and even some counselors.
There are people here who are focused on rankings. But its not the majority of people here. Or even close to it. And step away from this site and the percentage of people so focused decreases much further.
Depends on the area. At competitive public and private there is definitely a focus on highly ranked schools, as well as at many of the college access CBOs. Some of that focus on the part of CBOs is because the higher ranked schools provide better financial aid.
My kids’ HS is large (1,000 per class) and very competitive, so it’s common for students (and parents) to be talking about and targeting highly selective (rejective) schools even before they are in HS.
I believe a school gets an application bump from ranking focused parents and students after crossing into the Top 50.
NEU is an example. More recently…UF, UGa, Purdue and UT-Austin. Are the latter universities’ demographics or % Greek changed? # Apps relative to others?