<p>The current issue (February 14, 2011) of the New Yorker has an article by Malcolm Gladwell called The Order Of Things that truly puts the value of US News & World Reports College Rankings in perspective. Unfortunately they only have a short abstract on their website, but you can always go to the library if you don't want to buy the magazine.
This is well worth reading. No one has done a better job of showing the "flaws" in their methodology</p>
<p>I noticed that a large portion of the essay was spent putting Penn State on a pedestal.</p>
<p>He makes including price in rankings seem really simple, even though the whole financial aid system can make tracking affordability and price pretty complicated.</p>
<p>
IPEDS now has net price data from the 2006-07 school year on. It actually makes this process ridiculously simple.</p>
<p>What is IPEDS?</p>
<p>Thanks for the info noimagination.</p>
<p>I looked up my school district.
For every student in Seattle- over $400 a year goes to interest on debt.
:rolleyes:</p>
<p>US News has some useful info- but it is simply one source out of hundreds.</p>
<p>The Atlantic in 2005 had an article by someone who was the dean ( until he assumed a college presidency), of the UPenn law school.
[He</a> has the perspective of being at school that took the ranking seriously… to being at a school that doesn’t.](<a href=“http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/11/is-there-life-after-rankings/4308/]He”>Is There Life After Rankings? - The Atlantic)</p>
<p>The previous college president, also did not cooperate with US News.
[Steven</a> Koblik> News of the College](<a href=“http://web.reed.edu/reed_magazine/nov1997/news/3.html]Steven”>Reed Magazine: November 1997 > News of the College)</p>
<p>As a professor who lived one too many years in a unversity environment enslaved by Business Week rankings, and then fled out of the country where they do not exist…it is bliss. I can not emphasize enough how dealing with/responding to/“playing the game” of rankings HURT the education of our students. God, it was such a stupid manipulative waste of time pursuing so many things that absolutely did not matter to the educational experience. Lord only knows how the data was messed with and sent in (what? you think institutions of higher education are above such self-interested scheming where there is no regulation?)</p>
<p>Kudos to Reed. What a fabulous institution.</p>
<p>I was reading the Gladwell article last night, but fell asleep before I finished it. The part I read was like shooting fish in a barrel: Of course, the one-size-fits-all rankings for disparate institutions are inherently distortive; of course relatively small changes in weightings can produce deceptively large differences in rankings; of course many of the factors used because they are easily measured and verified have a questionable correlation to the beneficial qualities they supposedly index. Diver’s piece makes many of the same points anecdotally.</p>
<p>I will also say that I disagree with many of the factors and weights used in the US News rankings.</p>
<p>That said, I have to acknowledge that on the whole I find the US News project admirable and valuable. However imperfect, it is a good-faith effort to take a variety of data and present it in a useful format. As a life-long educational snob and Establishment guy, I never felt I needed US News to tell me that Harvard, Yale, Williams, and the University of Chicago were the bee’s knees. Reed, too. And US News was NOT going to convince me that the University of Michigan was some sort of mediocrity. But maybe I did need US News to make me pay more attention to what was being offered at places like Northwestern, Vanderbilt, USC, Wash U. Or to alert me that maybe Berkeley wasn’t head and shoulders above UCLA anymore. And if I DIDN’T think I already knew everything I needed to know – say, I was a parent who had never gone to college, or the child of one, and no one had sung me “With Crimson In Triumph Flashing” in the cradle – I’m not certain I would be worse off starting with US News than I would be by talking to someone like me. (It would be dumb, of course, to start with either and to stop there. You need more information than I or US News can supply to make a good personal decision.)</p>
<p>Gladwell makes fun of US News deciding that Penn State is one point better than Yeshiva University, whose target markets barely overlap if at all. But no one is really comparing Penn State and Yeshiva, so that hardly matters. If you don’t get hung up on the false precision of the rankings, it’s interesting and valuable information about Yeshiva (an institution about which I know next to nothing – I learned from the Gladwell piece that it has separate men’s and women’s campuses) that it roughly matches up with solid state universities in US News’ particular blend of quality measures.</p>
<p>And speaking of Malcolm Gladwell, this is over on the Cafe: <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parent-cafe/1084827-tired-glib-pseudo-meaningful-books.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parent-cafe/1084827-tired-glib-pseudo-meaningful-books.html</a></p>
<p>In this Internet age paper-static one-size-fits-none rankings are simply obsolete. Tools like [College</a> Search - College Confidential](<a href=“http://www.collegeconfidential.com/college_search/]College”>http://www.collegeconfidential.com/college_search/) are superior.</p>
<p>I agree vossron- ranking things is for people who are too insecure to come up with their own criteria.</p>
<p>^ False. 10char</p>
<p>I will explain what I mean- I dont have a problem with using info that elaborates on how many students qualify for aid, or what is the amount of debt at graduation, or other info that is already gathered for you.</p>
<p>But develop your ranking for that criteria & decide what is important to* you.*</p>
<p>Don’t be a sheep & use what some magazine is hoping will boost sales for your own ranking, because their interest is in not going out of business, not on what your needs are.</p>
<p>Imagine magazine editors inventing a formula to rank the best music. They could include sales data, musicians’ experience, microphones used, instrument brands, number of performers, price of recordings, years in the business, and so on. The background data would be supplied by the record companies. Imagine that the formula was crafted to make the Beatles and the Berlin Philharmonic come out on top, and the rest of the rankings were what everyone expected.</p>
<p>What I don’t like about the US News ranking is that too many gullible, prestige-obsessed kids take it as their Bible and instead of looking for good-to-excellent schools that work for them, end up thinking that a place or two–or six or twelve—in the US News ranking should be what determines their choice of a college.</p>
<p>What I do like about the US News ranking on-line edition is that it’s a handy, reasonably user-friendly source of data that allows me to compare institutions across many dimensions. I know that some of the data are manipulable. I know for a fact that some schools do manipulate the data, and/or act strategically—not always in the best interest of their students—to gain an edge in data categories that can move their US News rankings. For those reasons some of the data need to be taken with a grain of salt. Nonetheless, much of the data is useful. And I’m free to ignore the data categories I don’t care about, like percentage of alumni who contribute, or even expenditure per student which could just as easily be an indicator of bloat and inefficiency as an indicator of quality.</p>
<p>I think it’s easier to ignore the categories we don’t care about when they don’t influence the rankings; the online tools let us include only what is important to us.</p>
<p>
[The</a> Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System - Home Page](<a href=“http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/]The”>IPEDS)</p>
<p>Your tax dollars at work.
Agreed.
There’s a cogent argument… 
I’m not sure why you are paying for something that can be had for free from other sources. Unless USNews is making their full online system free now?</p>
<p>I had posted the link to the Malcolm Gladwell title generator just prior to reading this article in New Yorker. And it comfirmed, as JHS aptly demonstrated, how fish-in-a-barrel his arguments are–a whole page on Car and Driver ratings in detail, rather than a passing reference to the fact that, as any thinking person knows, any rating involving choice and opinions which are then weighted is by definition arbitrary at some level. Big duh!</p>
<p>I also agree with JHS that the info on USNWR was informative to me as information–the fact that it was placed in a particular order was not insurmountable to me as regards to using it in ways that were more useful to me–I’d think that should be possible for most people.</p>
<p>And yeah, Gladwell or someone he loves definitely went to Penn St.!</p>
<p>I honestly don’t get why he gets so much attention–his conclusions always seem trivial, obvious, and/or unsupported. But he’s easy to read.</p>
<p>"Don’t be a sheep & use "</p>
<p>define “use” Our DD finally chose RPI after TWO visits (one before applying, one after admission) factors involved included the presentation from their architecture program, personal discussion with the asst dean of arch, things we learned there and elsewhere about their hands on approach to engineering education, a grad student offering to juggle for the passing tour, etc. Addressing concerns about the social scene and the gender ratio by talking with some members of a service sorority, by spending well over an hour at an activity fair, and then talking to some other students.</p>
<p>NONE of that could have been gained from ANY data set or ANY weighting scheme. And it was essential to the decision. </p>
<p>What we did use the rankings for was a VERY preliminary first cut. and what we did and do tend to use it for is the way we use say, a baseball program - for QUICK orientation of where a school we know little or nothing about is, what group of peers it fits with. For a purpose like that, its not worth the time or the mental effort to create our own personal weighting scheme.</p>
<p>When I want to know how liberal or Conservative a pol Ive never heard of is, I tend to use the ranking of ACA, ADA, etc. I dont usually look at their votes on each bill and determine my own weighting - if I am THAT interested I will evaluate them beyond any quantitative scheme.</p>
<p>To find out how the economy is doing, I look at GDP, unemployment, the ISM index, or the Conf Bd index. I do NOT create my own index (if I need to give an INDIVIDUAL advice about their personal situation no index may be suitable).</p>
<p>I really dont get this “go create your own weights” thing. If you use the numbers as a broad, vague indicator of selectivity/rigor/prestige, then the premade weighting is fine, and probably no worse than what I would quickly come up with. If you are making an important life choice, say between two schools you were admitted too, NO rank based on weighted public, quantified factors is really good enough, (there may be rare exceptions, I dont know)</p>
<p>Actually, Gladwell went to the University of Toronto, a college not included in the USNWR ratings. Like Penn State, it admits a lot of student from very diverse economic and cultural backgrounds. Unlike Penn State, it admits many more freshmen than it will graduate, and lets them sink or swim, without charging them very much. (It’s MUCH cheaper than Penn State for in-province students.) Its retention rate and graduation rate are not perfect at all. It has a first-rate faculty and facilities, and awfully crowded introductory classes.</p>
<p>I finally finished the article, and agree with what seems to be its main point, which I regard as more obvious than earth-shattering: A ranking system designed essentially to measure a college’s resemblance to Harvard is not a perfect ranking system.</p>
<p>In a more nuanced way, I think the USNWR system was designed, in a way, to confirm the superiority of HYP (in part because no one would have taken it seriously if it hadn’t confirmed the superiority of HYP), and also to provide a principled basis for debating the eternal question “Which of HYP is best?” It put all three schools on more or less equal footing and inspired them to make themselves better by stealing each other’s good points. Which was a fine, establishmentarian bit of civic journalism. The problem is, though, that they then had a whole ranking system which measured resemblance to HYP. And that failed to account for the different philosophical approaches possible, most notably in state flagships. The stupidest thing about the USNWR rankings is their devaluation of places like Berkeley and Michigan. </p>
<p>n that sense, it’s an earlier version of the recent NRC graduate program rankings, one branch of which asked people which programs they admired most, subjectively, and then tried to derive a data weighting system that would replicate the subjective overall judgments. And of course the results were bizarre, because it turned out that the most important objective data factor was whether students had their own carrels in the library, or something like that – a loose proxy for wealth, but not much else.</p>
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<p>I agree. The presence of stupid people who act as though #5 is meaningfully different from #7, or #17 is so much better than #21, or whatever, isn’t USNWR’s problem or fault.</p>