Apparent Tiers [Do they ever change]

College Search & Selection
1

<p>1) Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Stanford
3) Columbia, Penn, CalTech
4) Dartmouth, Northwestern, Duke, Chicago
5) Hopkins, Wash U, Cornell, Brown
6) Vanderbilt, Rice, Emory, Georgetown, Notre Dame
7) UVA, USC, UCLA Berekley, Michigan, Wake Forest</p>

<p>HYPSM Princeton always have the 1-5 spot
Columbia, Penn, Caltech 6-8 spot
Dartmouth, NW, Duke, UChicago have the 9-12 spot
Hopkins, Wash U, Cornell, Brown control the 13-16 spot
Vanderbilt, Rice, Emory, Georgetown, and Notre Dame control the 17-21 spots
UVA, USC, Berekley, Michigan, Wake Forest, UCLA control the 22-27 spots</p>

<p>But will we ever see things like Duke jumping into the 6-8 or Rice jumping into the 13-16? It seems to never happen</p>

2

<p>No. Never. Ever. Ever. </p>

<p>“And on the eighth day God created the US News college rankings”…who are you to question such a holy document? (By the way, God went to a public university)</p>

3

<p>In the real world, no one tiers schools like that. Frankly the only people who subdivide top schools that thinly are high school dorks who think they are cool. There are maybe 2 or at most 3 tiers in that list, not 7.</p>

4

<p>These are complicated communities of learning, research and student life, not horses in a race.</p>

5

<p>Your “tiers” are simply U.S. News and World Report’s rankings. I don’t find them that precise. I see Penn and Brown as peers but you have them two tiers apart. </p>

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</p>

<p>If you’re simply going by USN&WR rankings to define your tier (as it seems you are), this clearly HAS happened. UChicago was 13-15 (in your fifth tier, although you skipped 2 for some reason) from '03 to '06 and then jumped up. UPenn was in the 11-20 range until 1997 and then jumped up. Wash U was in the 14-22 range until 2022 and then went higher. Duke was ranked every single year in the 3-8 range until 2009 and then “fell” to 9 to 2010. I don’t personally see a difference between 8 and 9, however. The rankings are not that precise.</p>

<p>So, yes, schools DO fluctuate in the rankings, but not all that much and I think your tiers are too finely defined to be accurate and actually measure a difference in institutional quality. Schools’ reputations are defined by decades of research and learned prestige. These things don’t change quickly, so it’s very difficult for a school to make a big jump in a short period of time - it takes several years of fundraising, hiring top notch professors, attracting quality students, constructing new buildings, etc. to make a fundamental shift in how a particular university is viewed by someone from the outside.</p>

6

<p>The fluctuations of schools’ USNews rankings is nothing more than Brownian motion, with the occasional rise/fall once or twice a decade.</p>

7

<p>Prestige determines USNWR rankings. USNWR rankings determine prestige. Get the picture? </p>

<p>Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using CC App</p>

8

<p>MY favorite ranking system: [College</a> Ranking Service, A Peerless Evaluation of Colleges, rankyourcollege.com](<a href=“http://www.rankyourcollege.com/rankings.html]College”>College Ranking Service, A Peerless Evaluation of Colleges, rankyourcollege.com) click on the top two( “the classic” and “The fairness”) And keep refreshing. They have it right.</p>