<p>Thank you for your support fried okra (When we lived in Memphis, we learned to LOVE that gooie veggie! :cool:) It's sad you and I need to even discuss this. These polls and rankings are nothing more than magazine and book sellers. There is zero validity to any of them, despite their rigorous attempts to measure the grains of sand on the beach, then claim this one's "better" than that.</p>
<p>In all of this tripe, there is very little discussion of "value added" to students' via the specific collegiate experience of Dartmouth vs. W&L vs. UVA vs. Unameit ... And in the end that's the real tune. But in truth measuring that in a comprehensive way is virtually impossible and if it were, grossly expensive. And the real bottomline is that many institutions would NOT want to know where they really stand.</p>
<p>There was a professor ... Robert Pace ... at UCLA for many decades who was perhaps the most genuine and honest pursuant of measuring institutional quality. His work was inherited by Alexander Astin, who is the guru of the frosh review administered at a great many colleges and universities. It seeks to gauge vascillating attitudes and values of incoming freshman by institution, vs. other institutions, and over many decades. It's interesting stuff but a digression from trying to assess quality which of course is a "back end" measure.</p>
<p>Pace, Astin and others have concluded that one of the very best alternatives to trying to assess how much value an institution really adds to a particular student is a function of one single variable ... time.</p>
<p>How much time to students devote to ... reading, problem solving, serving others, studying calculus or Shakespeare, etc. etc. And what they've concluded???</p>
<p>Slippery Rock indeed may add much more value as an organizational entity to its student learners than does Harvard. </p>
<p>Now, it can be argued in the pragmatic world that sitting next to Bill Gates' illegitimate daughter @ Princeton may pay real dividends unlike sitting next to my nephew in his history class at Winona State ... </p>
<p>But if we're being honest, that has nothing to do with what an institution purports to be delivering. It's coincidental.</p>
<p>So happy hunting, boys and girls. But please, rise above the mindlessness of trying to suggest that Brown is somehow "superior" to Bowdoin which is inferior to Bates which doesn't get enuff offspring into Ball State's Ph.D. program in ballistics and none of them beats Bryn Mawr in chess and ....</p>
<p>It's just total silliness.</p>