What college rankings list is the most accurate, or which one do most people use? (US News and World Report, Forbes, Niche, etc.). Thanks in advance.
What are you measuring for? Earnings potential? Prestige? Difficulty of admittance? Academic rigor? Different lists measure for different things, and it would be helpful for you to tell us what kind of criteria you want colleges to be ranked by.
I like forbes because it has zero weighting to what other admissions officers and high school counselors think.
https://www.forbes.com/top-colleges/#7895fd2e1987
It also doesn’t care how much faculty are paid (which I’ve never understood how someone in Boston should be paid the same as someone in chapel hill or durham where cost of living <1/2.)
the times/higher education rankings is more similar to USNWR except it includes liberal arts colleges too, but does include “reputation” and faculty pay. NIche has a very large component of acceptance rate, which should be irrelevant to matriculating students. And only encourages colleges to get as many people applying as possible.
Wow, that is a tough question. I think it depends on what your criteria is, but at the end of the day the absolutely most accurate list is the one you construct against your criteria. If you want to go with what most people not on CC (which believe it or not is still the overwhelmingly majority of people) look at, it is USNWR. It is the most known, the most referenced, and the most hated on CC. That is why the best ranking list is your own. Do you want a city campus? Then places like Cornell, Colgate and Williams won’t rank very high. If you want a STEM education, then rank STEM schools higher. If you want job placement, look at the website and see who is hiring out of the school. If you want a more classical education, then look at places with a liberal arts blend.
Most people don’t go to that level, but in the end that is the only way for you to come up with a ranking system that fits your needs. Most people are “Mutual Fund” college shoppers. They let other people do the research for them and base their decisions on what is important to those other people. Don’t be like those other people, research, visit, talk to people/students at the schools that interest you. The beauty of the US College “Industry” is that there are so many great schools and the difference between 1-150 is not that great. Sure, the CHYMPS schools are what everyone talks about, but places like my very own Purdue will not be far below the M and S in terms of engineering for undergrad.
Most accurate is the one that makes ‘my college’ ranked highest. 
All of the ranking lists are nothing more than popularity contests, with the reasons for popularity being dependent on the organization that creates the ranking. Niche has an advantage in that you can rank in multiple different ways, but they also have an issue that they will often fit the general ranking into your personal ranking. So, for example, if you try and figure out which is the best college for an engineering degree, Niche will often provide you with their highest ranking colleges which also have an engineering degree. It does, however, have comments and rankings by students who went to the colleges, which are invaluable.
USANews tends to be circular, in that they give a lot of weight to “reputation among ‘top’ academics”, which is actually, “reputation among university administrators and HS GCs”, with most of this reputation being dependent on the USANews rankings, so these rankings mostly are a reflection of the rankings given in the previous years. The entire ranking system at USANews was created by Harvard graduates with the assumption that Harvard was the best, and other quality of other colleges was determined by how similar they were to Harvard, so the older ranking gave little weight to the best qualities of large public universities or colleges that served the middle class and the poor. Although the rankings have been changed, as I wrote, the earlier ranking system still affects the present rankings.
USANews has an advantage in that, while they may be comparing apples for baking and apples for eating in the same ranking, they do not compare apples and oranges. So Liberal Arts Colleges are ranked desperately from "National Universities (which match the “Research University” category of the Carnegie classifications system, more or less). they also have separate rankings based on different fields, like Engineering or Arts.
Forbes is a business journal, and that’s their major focus. So their specific rankings can be useful for people pursuing business degrees. By specific, I mean things like “the top college for CEOs in major banking companies”. Less for the actual rankings than for the data the share - things like the number of CEOs, etc, since they don’t always take the number of business majors at a college into consideration.
An issue of all ranking systems is that they magnify very small differences in a variable system. So very minor difference, which could actually be nonexistent, or even in the opposite direction, are interpreted as actually ranking differences. So, any given college is often not significantly different from any colleges about 30 places “up” or “down”.
The actual difference in the quality of the undergraduate education given any of the “top” 1,000 non-profit colleges/universities is minimal.
The major and insurmountable problem of ALL ranking systems is that they do not, and cannot, measure the two most important factors which determine whether a student will succeed. The first and foremost is “fit”. No matter how wonderful the reputation of a college, as student who does fit in the way that classes are taught, who cannot find their social niche, who does not feel comfortable in the physical location, will not succeed. A kid who love the feel of a very large campus, with many social groups, many different things happening, will do best at a large public university. A kid who hate small isolated location will never do well at LACs in rural locations, no matter how well regarded the LAC is.
The second factor is “cost”. The difference between $100K and $15K in student debt is far more important in success later in life than a different of 100 places in rankings. The amount that a college will cost is not something that can usually be standardized, since the prices of public colleges differ. They differ, of course, between in-stat and OOS students. Some colleges provide merit aid, others are less generous. Private schools will often meet financial need, but this often fall far short of affordability for middle-class students. Being a National Merit Finalist will mean full tuition in some colleges, and nothing at all in others. Cost depends on the specific situation in which a student finds themselves, it is critical, and it cannot be ranked. A student can end up paying less at a very expensive private college than they would have, had they gone to a much cheaper in state public college and a kid can pay less for an OOS college than they would for a similar in-state college.
So, bottom line - ignore the rankings that are created for public consumption. They are there for bragging for administrators and graduates, for prestige-chasers, snobs, and reverse snobs, and to provide income for the people who create rankings. The best way to figure out the “best” college for you or your kid is to use search tools that match colleges to students based on the characteristics of the college, like size and available majors, then speak to graduates, look at reviews by graduates on places like Niche, calculate how much it would cost, based on your income location, and other factors, and visit.
There is little of worth to be gained by checking out the ranks of a college in almost any ranking system. I would recommend, though, that you should check out “Colleges that Change Lives”.
Thought the Forbes list would be somewhat legit until I saw Yeshiva in the top 100 ??
^^^gotta admit I never scrolled below 75 on forbes, but I do like removing reputation of other admissions offices and high school counselors.
https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2014/08/26/how-northeastern-gamed-the-college-rankings/2/
“There was one thing, however, that U.S. News weighted heavily that could not be fixed with numbers or formulas: the peer assessment. This would require some old-fashioned glad-handing. Freeland guessed that if there were 100 or so universities ahead of NU and if three people at each school were filling out the assessments, he and his team would have to influence some 300 people. “We figured, ‘That’s a manageable number, so we’re just gonna try to get to every one of them,’” Freeland says. “Every trip I took, every city I went to, every conference I went to, I made a point of making contact with any president who was in that national ranking.””
There’s no such thing as an accurate ranking. It’s all subjective. What you need to do is find an affordable college that works for you. That takes more effort and research. Consider scholarships too. Scholarships are probably the single best way to set yourself up for success.
There are no ranking system out there that’s “accurate” except perhaps for strictly quantifiable ones that are limited in scope, such as “10 Colleges With the Highest SAT Scores” or “colleges and universities with the largest endowments,” etc. All ranking systems are determined by their methodologies, and therein lie flaws, inadequacies, subjectivity and limitations that are matrices.
It doesn’t mean that all ranking systems are useless, of course. Since what each individual looks for can be different, do your own research using the existing rankings as broad reference points. I spent a lot of research time when my son and I were determining which colleges ranked the highest for what we were looking for, namely, the most undergrad focused colleges with my own matrices that were important for us. I’d call that the customized ranking system based on the individual “fit.”
And even those are starting to be suspect as more and more colleges go test-optional.
I don’t like Forbes because some of the rankings are clearly unreasonable. For example: Ranking Georgia Tech at #88 doesn’t make sense when looking at many of the schools ranked higher / ahead of it when considering Forbes standard of “output” or “results”.
@Publisher the 6 year graduation rate for G Tech is only 85%. It may be by design, I know engineering at NCSU has a great co-op plan that nearly guarantees a good job but it adds a year and lowers graduation rates. Typically the T20 schools on that list have 96% + 6 year grad rates… but yes, individual schools are harmed or helped by what is weighted and how much.
Engineering in particular should be judged separately IMHO. There are multiple state schools with engineering programs better than some of the Ivy schools if you want an engineer and not an investment banker, but most rankings will never have them above an Ivy for some reason.
Agree. Probably due in large part to co-op program.
I agree with other posters than differences among rankings usually are attributable, mostly, to different criteria and weights (and not so much to variations in accuracy.) Even so, various rankings tend to point to a similar set of top N colleges, albeit in ~slightly different order. The common denominator among “top” colleges is money. They’re all rich. So they can buy more/better stuff, hence perform well in the rankings, somewhat regardless (within reason) of which stuff the ranking measures.
Take three major lists, Mark schools which made top 25 on all three. It doesn’t matter if they are 1 or 6 or 24th, just go by the fit and cost, they are all good and none is perfect for every single student. You’ll be lucky to attend any and luckier to attend with partial or full merit or aid.
Remarkable consistency in the names that pop up at the high end of all the rankings. When juxtaposed against the rankings by admission rates it suggests the consumer/public largely agrees with a hierarchy that includes all of the following…
Amongst these schools (If lucky enough to have choices) I think it comes down to personal taste, “fit”, finances, major specific. Please keep in mind all have admit rates close to or below 7%. Lastly there are lots of other great school’s and tens of thousands of amazing kids that don’t attend those listed.
Admit Rates
- Harvard
- Columbia
- Princeton
- Yale
- Brown
- MIT
- Duke
- Penn
9 Dartmouth
***Stanford, U Chicago, Cal Tech also at very top couldn’t find their exact figures.
WSJ
1 Harvard
2 MIT
3 Yale
4 Columbia
5 Caltech
6 Stanford
7 Brown
7 Duke
9 Princeton
10 Penn
Forbes
- Harvard
- Yale
- Stanford
- MIT
- Princeton
- Caltech
- Penn
- Brown
- Dartmouth
- Duke
Niche
- MIT
- Stanford
- Harvard
- Yale
- Princeton
- Penn
- Columbia
- Duke
- Brown
- Cal Tech
US News (*lots of ties)
- Princeton
- Harvard
- Columbia
- MIT
- Chicago
- Yale
- Stanford
- Duke
- Penn
- JHU
- Northwestern
- Cal Tech
- Dartmouth
- Brown
- Vanderbilt
- Cornell
- Rice
- Notre Dame.
I do wish liberal arts colleges were included side by side in more rankings. Professors themselves are more likely to send their own kids to LACs,… so that is one of my two critiques of most of the rankings
I’d say they each offer something different. so look at the one that weights the factors you’d weight highly if you were constructing a list. People say they don’t offer anything. That’s not true. But they have become too important and impact on the conduct of schools in an unfortunate way- particularly the most popular list.
forbes is a good list imo