<p>Newsweek's method is really lousy. something like 10% for the amount of international students, 10% for the amount of international faculty, 10% for the amount of books the libraries hold. It's really quantity over quality, and nothing about the education itself. Just random figures which are not directly linked to what it means to be a good university. I don't see how a student or faculty member from every country in the world, or many books in the library actually directly translates into how good the university is. Not that it is actually quantifiable since there's no universal definition for that.</p>
<p>Sorry if somebody mentioned this and I missed it, but what about that study that ranks a school over another by how many students matriculate there after admitted to both? <a href="http://www.nber.org/papers/w10803.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://www.nber.org/papers/w10803.pdf</a> (if you are on campus or logged into VPN you can read it)</p>
<p>Brown is 7, Wash U is 62. It seems to me that students really believe that Brown is one of the best schools.</p>
<p>Alright, no one's going to deny that rankings should be held at face value or should be the sole criterion for picking a school, but, again, international students/faculty actually don't figure into the US News formula, and neither does library size. Here's the link...</p>
<p>Newsweek, on the other hand, might be certifiably kooky. :)</p>
<p>Ok Sweet, since you seem to only want to debate the specifics of USNews setup, let's look at this:</p>
<p>1) Professors-- note the faculty don't have to teach courses on that list, therefore messing with the whole student/faculty ratio thing since if you're not teaching who cares that you're on staff. Also, for a University, this would include many professors that DON'T teach undergraduate courses though they are university faculty. They say these numbers aren't included, but how easy is it to have a professor teach just one seminar of 15 students so that that number can be counted. Don't think it isn't done, on the contrary, I'm positive it is. Compensation also drastically varies for positions like these, and schools that hire famous intellectuals just ot say they're on staff with large compensation packages to make it worth their time are benefitted from this system. To what extent this affects the overall ratings, I don tknow, but that's something that can be manipulated and abused.
2) High School class standing can be a very interesting number that is totally meaningless without context. Sure it's an ok GENERAL assessment, but the reason why most universities use specific admissions people for specific regions is so that tehy can be familiar with all of hte schools in this region (impressively so) in order to understand the quirks of different schools, their competativeness, etc.
3)Money spent per student does not equate money spent for student benefit. Sometimes a school doesn't have as large a project occuring year to year. Some schools are feeling pressured to invest into their endowment more than necessary in order to impress people with an amount of money they don't truly get.<br>
4)Schools that focus on areas that are less tradtionally direct significant employment straight from undergraduate education are screwed. For instance, a school known more for off the wall liberal arts (Dartmouth and Brown, for instance) and then with a percentage going off to preprofessional schools for graduate work are not going to have many alumni who finish undergraduate work, find gainful employment (int he sense they have discretionary funds to donate to their school). The reason I state this is that people give back significantly more to graduate schools in general, so if more students go to graduate school, less undergraduate alumni will be giving back in high percentages.
5)I'm not sure what peer assessment from other institutions from professionals who may NEVER have stepped foot on another universities campus means when it comes to undergraduate quality of education or experience. This number is purely a measure of accepted prestige amongst academics and doesn't really mean all that much when it comes down to the quality of one's education, which I thought is what USNews was supposed to show.
6)Since minorities do worse on the SAT/ACT on average, do schools with greater numbers of minorities get screwed? SAT for writing and verbal for international students don't harm a school? I am not so sure. Let's use a flawed exam and emphasize it's flaws.</p>
<p>So abuse is easy and numerous, problems with all of this are numerous, etc.</p>
<p>Acknowledging it's flawed is the first step, recognizing it as being essentially useless accept to say that the top fifty are generally, "top schools in America" on both the LAC and National University list (well maybe more top 25 for LAC) is reallywhere you want to be at. It's not an indicator of just about anything.</p>
<p>Good God, I'm not picking a fight-- stop seeking one. If you read carefully, I did write I don't believe these should be obsessed over (ahem). I'm only correcting blatant misconceptions-- do we really need more of those floating around? You don't need to regurgitate material that's been covered to exhaustion in these forums and elsewhere.</p>
<p>If you want to brush up your arguments further, you'll find several other criticisms on Wiki. Here, the link:</p>
<p>check out this ranking on the main boards:</p>
<p>that degenerated rapidly</p>