<p>I’m no clown. Serious academics do not take US News rankings seriously. They know that the quality of a university rarely changes much from year to year, not to mention that some of the criteria used are irrelevant and can be subject to manipulation and misrepresentation.</p>
<p>pretty good
i would say that UNC is more prestigious than notre dame, and i would switch those two out (i know in state its not THAT hard to get into but OOS is impossible and i personally find UNC to be a whole tier above Notre Dame)</p>
<p>
Most relevant data is available through IPEDS. Anyone can build their own ranking with ease.</p>
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<p>Any ranking is totally subjective because the decision as to what to include in the analysis and the weighting of each criterion is inherently totally subjective.</p>
<p>Your system is nowhere better than USNews. Nor is USNews necessarily better than yours. </p>
<p>Plus you’re operating under the assumption that the endless worshiping of USNews is problematic.</p>
<p>clowns? you sound like a kid. </p>
<p>Anyways, at the expense of undermining your effort of creating this rankings… did you not just recycle USnews rankings but added arbitrary tiers and tweaked the rankings a bit (like bump up Berkeley). I am all for people making rankings as long as they explicitly say that it is completely subjective.</p>
<p>I like your rankings, I just want you to recognize that all rankings are ultimately subjective.</p>
<p>I split my undergraduate years between one of the OP’s Tier 1 schools and one of his/her Tier 3 schools, and found the difference to be negligible.</p>
<p>Graybeard, that’s why I said “real or perceived.” For what it’s worth, I’d bet that most people’s perception is that the grads of the tier 1 schools are IN GENERAL sharper than the tier 3 schools.</p>
<p>Glass, most rankings are somewhere between throwing a dart at a list of colleges and pure quantitative objectivity. There would seem to be little doubt that MIT, objectively (SATs, # of papers published by faculty, etc…which are by no means the WHOLE story, but still can’t be ignored completely) and subjectively (US News peer assessment, etc.), would generally be ahead of, say, University of Miami. While colleges are incredibly complex things and extremely difficult to compare qualitatively, I’m willing to acknowledge that distinctions like that can be made based on all sorts of objective quantitative data and some subjective data.</p>
<p>Which colleges are in which tiers–that can be debated, but I’m guessing even the most enthusiatic booster wouldn’t quibble over more than a 1-tier jump. Alexandre might want to push Michigan up to Tier 2, but even he wouldn’t presume that it belongs in Tier 1. Whereas ordinal rankings like US News leave it open for people to assert that #12 is “better” than #13.</p>
<p>Baelor, I don’t know if you saw the recent Georgetown/Northwestern thread. That’s the sort of debate which could be avoided if people used this approach…it gives them a framework with which to acknowledge some quantitative differences and some regional preferences, without being able to claim clear superiority or inferiority.</p>
<p>oh great, another prestige ranking thread
perfect, all my college problems are solved, hooray to op O.o</p>
<p>on a more serious note, you must realize that “prestige” varies vastly depending on the geographic location. I would just stick with usnews ranking for now</p>
<p>“you must realize that “prestige” varies vastly depending on the geographic location. I would just stick with usnews ranking for now.” </p>
<p>“you’re operating under the assumption that the endless worshiping of USNews is problematic.”</p>
<p>If you want to make regional adjustments with which colleges go in which tier, fine. While I don’t have any major problem with the US News rankings, I do have a problem with the way they are INTERPRETED by 17 year olds who are looking for every possible clue to help them make the huge decision of where to spend the next four years. </p>
<p>Yes, Baelor, I do find it problematic that there is a never-ending stream of high school students on college confidential making posts of this general type: “I’ve been accepted to College A and College B. I’ve loved College A my whole life. It’s close to home and I have gotten a nice scholarship there. But College B is RANKED A LITTLE BIT AHEAD OF COLLEGE A. What should I do?” Threads that start like this are not at all rare here…one sees them all the time. And the US News-type ORDINAL rankings don’t come with any sort of OVERT guidance about minor differences in rankings being insignificant…pople love and trust numbers, and they assume that there really IS a meaningful difference between #12 and #15. </p>
<p>My approach gives people a METHOD for interpreting such rankings…it gives students comparing colleges of relatively similar quality a logical framework for deciding to go to a lower-ranked school knowing they are not sacrificing any tangible prestige or quality. It gives them a basis for comprehending that College A might be about the same as College B, and College B might be about the same as College C, but College A might NOT be about the same as College C.</p>
<p>“Serious academics do not take US News rankings seriously.”</p>
<p>Neither the US News nor my approach is aimed at “serious academics.” Both are aimed at high school kids and their parents who are trying to make the best decision among a lot of options. Again, the problem with the US News rankings is that they are presented in a format that makes it way too easy for people to infer significant differences based on small differences in rank. For people who don’t deal with stats very much, it’s intuitive to believe that #9 really IS meaningfully better than #12.</p>
<p>You seem to think that you are somehow revolutionizing this entire process.</p>
<p>The “tier system” has been in place way before this thread.</p>
<p>All you are offering is a needless restriction on how colleges can be moved.</p>
<p>In other words, this has been done better many times before and this entire thread is therefore a total waste of time.</p>
<p>I’ve seen the tier system before. But it doesn’t do much except put a bunch of schools in a tie for first place, a bunch more in a tie for second place, a bunch more in a tie for third place, etc. It still allows for people to infer significant differences between schools of extremely close “rank”…the normal tier approach makes it look like there is a significant difference between the lowest school in tier 1 and the highest school in tier 2.</p>
<p>" All you are offering is a needless restriction on how colleges can be moved."</p>
<p>If I understand you correctly, I think you are not getting my point. I’m not saying there should be restrictions on where a college can rise or fall to. I don’t even really care which colleges are ranked where. What schools are in what tier is up to you. My main point is requiring meaningful distinctions be acknowledged only between schools that are at least 2 tiers apart. So if a student is looking at schools in adjacent tiers, he now has a method for coming to the rational but counter-intuitive conclusion that there is no appreciable difference in quality or prestige. He has a method for acknowledging that there is a distinction between the two, but there is, in effect, no difference.</p>
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<p>And you are just positing that there is not. Somehow, your blanket statements are unconvincing. I must have missed the memo that describes how the truth is simply determined by what you feel like saying.</p>
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<p>See above. I don’t see any reason why I should accept this belief over that that there are significant differences between each tier. Or between only three tiers. Or four. Or five. Remind me where you proved all of this?</p>
<p>You know this whole debate would not arise if the OP simply said that this was his or her opinion and perhaps many others share a similar opinion. Every is allowed to have his or her opinion. Everyone, however, is NOT allowed to have his or her own facts.</p>
<p>schmaltz,
I think I understand where you are coming from and generally I agree with it. Small differences are regularly posited as determining factors in the “quality” of a college when in reality, most students and most employers see negligible differences. Ironically, the most perverse measuring factor of USNWR is the PA scoring which I think heavily distorts small differences in colleges and does nothing to reflect how individual college prestige varies in different geographies. </p>
<p>I also think that using broad tiers is a good way to look at it. This is one way to express the “gray” that exists in comparing different colleges and acknowledging the vast breadth of the American undergraduate college options. This is probably the single biggest flaw in the USNWR rankings as they give an inaccurate impression that # 14 is measurably different than # 17. It’s not. </p>
<p>One criticism that I would have of your OP is that I think your tiers are too small. There are a ton of good schools that offer an exceptional undergrad experience. In addition, there are plenty of subsets of larger universities that can be arguably included in different (higher) tiers.</p>
<p>I’ll add my two cents on rankings and the various tiers. IMO, the main factors for deciding which tier is appropriate are
- quality of students (stronger students are preferred);
- size of the classroom (smaller class sizes are preferred);
- quality of classroom instruction (profs are preferred to TAs); and
- institutional resources and whether they are committed to help undergrads (more money is better, eg, for things like FA, academic advising, job placement services, etc). </p>
<p>Using these criteria for colleges ranked in the USNWR Top 50 national universities, for UNDERGRADUATE education, the following is how the tiers might break out. My perceptions change over time as I learn more about various schools and the experiences that they provide for students and the quality that they represent for potential employers, but I don’t think this listing is far from the reality that most non-academia observers will have. </p>
<p>Tier One<br>
Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, MIT, Caltech</p>
<p>Tier Two<br>
Privates: Brown, Carnegie Mellon, U Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Emory, Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, Notre Dame, U Penn, Rice, Vanderbilt, Wash U </p>
<p>Publics: UC Berkeley (Eng/Bus), UCLA (Honors), U Virginia (Honors), U Michigan (Eng/Bus), U North Carolina (Honors), W&M (Honors), Georgia Tech (Eng), U Illinois (Eng), U Wisconsin (Eng), U Washington, (Honors), Penn State (Honors), U Florida (Honors), U Texas (Honors/Eng/Bus)</p>
<p>Tier Three<br>
Privates: USC, Tufts, Wake Forest, Brandeis, NYU, Boston College
Publics: UC Berkeley, UCLA, U Virginia, U Michigan, U North Carolina, W&M</p>
<p>Tier Four<br>
Privates: Lehigh, U Rochester, Case Western, Renssalaer, Tulane, U Miami
Publics: Georgia Tech, UC Davis, UC Santa Barbara, U Washington, UC Irvine, Penn State, U Florida, U Texas</p>
<p>^ Once again, I am not comfortable with the idea of categorizing excellent schools like Tufts, Berekeley as “Tier Three” schools… A few posts back, I suggested that a more fitting subgroup would be “Tier 1c” or “Tier 1b” but I see my suggestion is falling on deaf ears. I understand that the teir rankings are all relative but some highschoolers might look at this ranking and think “wow, Wake is Tier 3???” … better to not promote some misunderstanding especially because most schools mentioned on this thread are Teir 1 schools. </p>
<p>Less importantly, Hawkette, since when do publics get the special privilage of having particular programs ranked in order to boost their rankings… That would be like me making a ranking and putting Carnegie Mellon at Tier 1 because of their computer science program. In other words, you are not judging publics and privates in a consistant manner.</p>
<p>alam,
You make a fair point and I’ll try to respond, but I completely agree if you conclude that there is no completely satisfactory answer. </p>
<p>I break out the publics because their large size cloaks the sometimes much higher quality of a subset of their students. I think one can make similar arguments about some privates (eg, your observation on Carnegie Mellon), but I hesitate to do that for fear of getting too lost in the details and not having the full understanding and appreciation of which subjects to break and which to keep as part of the whole.</p>
<p>This is what I think:</p>
<p>Tier One
Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, MIT, Caltech</p>
<p>Tier Two
U Penn, Brown, U Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, Berkeley, UVA</p>
<p>Tier Three
UCLA, USC, Tufts, Emory, Georgetown, NYU, CMU, UMich, Notre Dame, Rice, Vanderbilt, Wash U</p>