<p>jack63 I don’t want to ber disagreeable but many of your comments are simply not accurate. Your arguments in favor of Grinnell have some merit but i said from the beginning that 5-6 places mean nothing. Which schools in the top ten would you replace with Grinnell keeping in mind it as an acceptance rate over 35% which is far less elective than any other top 12 schools. After all Pitzer is 35th with an admission rate under 15%. Your statements about Berkeley and U of Mich are completely inaccurate. Today Berkeley accepts a huge percent of their students as transfers from CC. They do this precisely to allow unqualified students to graduate from UC. Conversely it’s virtually impossible for a CA resident to transfer back into UC because the corrupt AdComs count the CC GPA in exactly the same scale as a GPA from a top ten school. A large percentage of the student body is completely unqualified to be in a selective school. By stating otherwise you are just exposing how well this information is hidden from the public. The U of Mich on the other hand has an admission rate over 50% and while a few good students who are affluent(150-175k) might choose the school based on price for the most part the great FA at the top schools greatly equalizes the cost for most students. In fact for students with a family incomes less than 100k the top private schools are often cheaper than the state schools. On the other hand these are very large schools and in say premed or engineering there will still be some very smart students but overall there is simply no comparison between the stats of the typical student at Cal or Mich versus any top 15 school. U of Va is a bit different and is the best deal in America if you happen to live in VA. </p>
<p>A few things…</p>
<p>I consider acceptance rate a nearly meaningless indicator of a school’s quality. Oddly, on this point Usnews and I agree…its something like 1.25% of their total rating.</p>
<p>As for Grinnell, I would tie it with Haverford, Davidson, and Claremont Mckenna. One might argue this isn’t much of change because numerous schools are tied…still 9 vs 17.</p>
<p>Literally, 100s of people have made your same argument on the umich college confidential page. Your basically saying take the average student at one school and compare to the average student at the the next school. The school with the best average student is the better school. There is a great counter argument that is relevant to this discussion about Bryn Mawr versus Carleton.</p>
<p>Take SAT scores…there will significant overlap between most top public universities (or any top 30 university or college) and most schools ranked in the top 10 by usnews. Taking SAT scores into consideration the top 40% at UCLA look like the top 65% at a top 10 school in usnews. The question becomes what institution gives these top students the best opportunities (jobs, acceptance into grad schools, etc). Many top public schools can argue they give this group of students better opportunities than many top private schools ranked significantly higher, while at the same time serving the public interest and educating everybody (including athletes and students who want to spend their time in frat parties).</p>
<p>The point is look at results. Yes graduation rate is a result that should be looked at, but public schools don’t have the luxury to cherry pick students. Part of their job is to serve the state…Still top publics have graduation rates in the high 80’s versus top ten schools that have graduation rates in the mid to lower 90’s</p>
<p>jack63 I agreed that one can easily move almost any school 5-6 places but Grinnell’s ranking doesn’t seem far from right. I would agree that acceptance rate isn’t everything but 35% simply is an huge outlier that greatly weakens your argument. At any rate you continue to have a serious misunderstanding about student bodies. Berkeley today will graduate thousands of students who have SAT’s and GPA’s from HS that are frankly embarrassing for a once top school. Yes getting admitted straight up from HS as a white or especially an Asian student still requires a high standard but the radicals on the admission committees have destroyed the school by purposely admitting thousands of very weak students from CC. No other major school has anything even close to this policy except UCLA. So yes there are some strong students at the top UC’s but overall the student body is nothing like any top ten school. Please remember the SAT scores you quote are for students admitted as freshmen and don’t include the transfers which end up constituting almost half the class. The discrimination against Asians at UC is nothing short of scandalous and it is common place to have URM’s in the class with SAT’s 500 points below the Asian students sitting next to them. Univ of Mich is a different story but they also admit large numbers of less qualified students though nothing like UC. Instead of arguing here you need to go look at the real situation at the top UC’s which is a disgrace especially now because they are admitting ever larger amounts of out of state students over the in state kids so they can get the higher tuition fee. The system is now run as a private fiefdom almost entirely for the benefit of the administrators who now are in equal number to the 25k students. </p>
<p>This is an odd, very un-Carleton-like thread.</p>
<p>Not really. I’ve seen the ranking thing argued endlessly before on the Carleton threads. In fact all over this site you can find people making the ridiculous argument that #7 is far far superior to #9 or #10. But on the other hand in a general sense the rankings do reflect some real differences in the schools and while imperfect at best USNWR does a better job than any of the other rankings. Jack 63 however goes way past that when he makes inaccurate claims about the student body of Berkeley or U of Mich that are easily refuted by known facts. Everything I stated in my post above is accurate. In fact the UC system has poster currently displayed in the San Francisco Airport proudly proclaiming that 40% of it’s students are the first to attend college. This type of activism is not compatible with claim that the student body is similar to other colleges in the top 7 as stated by jack 63. Berkeley’s grad schools remain elite but the undergraduate school is far different. </p>
<p>Carleton students and alumni don’t go around holding a usnews number over their heads…at least they shouldn’t. They shouldn’t go around dismissing another school simply because of a number from a for-profit magazine/webpage. Carleton’s official policy is not to acknowledge usnews.</p>
<p>SAY…your asking why rational people may want to go to a school with a different usnews number. It is a terrible comment. I’ve given my arguments against usnews rankings. The issue is far deeper than a few rankings being off by 5 or 6 places in my opinion. Some strangeness in the way Cal schools offer admissions and transfers doesn’t matter in my opinion. I’m not going to argue with you anymore. </p>
<p>By the way, if you start making these comments around real people when you are employed or in grad school, you’ll make people irate.</p>
<p>Ah so now jack63 you have dropped the mask and it’s really about ideology. I agree with you that exact rankings mean little but that doesn’t mean they have no meaning. The list of universities and LAC on USNWR are generally correct through fair minded people can find legitimate criticisms about any list. In truth USNWR is really just reinforcing more or less what most reasonably educated people think about the schools. The top 15-20 universities today are little different from what most considered the top 15-20 schools 25 years ago long before the USNWR list had any meaning. The LACs are a bit different since most people really don’t know these schools all that well. The “strangeness” about how Berkeley and UCLA do admissions matters a lot when you incorrectly state that UC should be top 7 and that it’s student body match up with those top schools. You call this an argument which it isn’t because what I posted is verifiable fact well known to any Californian parent who has been through the process. If the truth makes people irate then it’s really their problem. By the way I’m a semi-retired executive that has run a large corporation and hired hundreds of graduates from the top schools. </p>
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<p>I think Carleton and its students should not be acknowledging the usnews ranking not because of some idealogy, but because they are more intelligent than that. By the way I have no trouble with Carleton emphasizing ranks like being 5th in Phd productivity. That is an outcome. </p>
<p>SAY to you (and USnews) it looks like going to college is an “End” itself. To me it is a “means to and end”. Usnews is not an outcomes-based rank. The Peer assessment¶ part of usnews tried to measure some part of the outcomes, but as 2014profdad mentioned, it is very poorly done. A frequent criticism of USnews was that the PA would rank a number of schools either much better or worse than their overall usnews rank. Schools that had noticeably higher PA than over rank included Grinnell, Reed and Bryn Mawr. I think Usnews made this PA thing harder to find recently, which just makes their whole rank system even more useless. </p>
<p>By the way, I did google your Berkeley criticisms. I do agree there transfer admissions policy is baffling, unfair, and transfer students make up a significant portion of the graduating class and almost all of them are from community colleges…I don’t know where you get 50% though. It looks to me like about 20-25% of a graduating class would be transfer students. Is still think there would still be a significant overlap in SAT scores between Berkeley and a so called “top ten school”. These transfer students still get access to great opportunities. </p>
<p>By the way I don’t see how this makes Usnews look positive. To me this is just another reason to scrap USnews, as it looks like Berkeley is just gaming the system to get a better usnews rank. Berkeley is likely not the only one to do this too.</p>
<p>@icsbicr – TL;DR – choose based on what you feel is right. If you have any specific questions about Carleton, feel free to message me (I’m a current student here), but it’s ultimately your decision. The arguments about ranking ideology (see above my post) are probably pretty useless to you since it’s your happiness that matters and both schools are lovely.</p>
<p>jack I don’t endorse the USNWR ranking but I simply point out that in a competitive society like America there will always be a ranking. All rankings systems are somewhat arbitrary but of the ones available theirs has become the most accepted. There is nothing wrong with adding in a college’s rank among many other reasons for choosing a school. Over the years though I think its an accurate statement to say that in general students rarely choose to attend a much lower ranked school unless for FA reasons. For whatever reason the overall public perception of the rankings closely mimics the USNWR Rankings and this has been true long before this ranking became popular. In specific regards to Bryn Mawr the big drop in their ranking closely mimics the long term loss of popularity by the female students for all of the single sex female schools. Vassar saw the writing on the wall and became coed and is still doing well. Unless the female schools become coed all but Wellesley will continue their decline and even Wellesley’s selectivity has been diminished in the past decade. The situation at UC is a different issue and is the result of social justice run amok. I know plenty of URM’s that have been admitted with SAT scores 500 points below rejected students. This is simply unacceptable for in state students at a state flagship. The recent Asian political uprising over trying to reintroduce AA itself back into the UC Admission process shows that the Asians are well aware of this injustice. The UC transfer system is only baffling until you realize the true objective of the administrators which is to hand out admission tickets based on political patronage and allow in students who are completely unqualified to receive a degree from a top college. They purposely changed the transfer policy to assure that only CC students would be admitted and hence eliminating the more qualified students as competition. Now the game is to squeeze out even more upper middle class white and Asian students by admitting ever more out of state students to pocket 4X the tuition fee and keep the spending train rolling. At any rate I am much older than you and I can remember when Berkeley was among the best schools in the country for undergraduates but that time has long since passed in favor of crass politics. </p>
<p>MODERATOR NOTE: This thread has veered way OT and is being closed. The OP can start another thread if they choose to do so; other members are advised to use the New Discussion button on an appropriate forum for continued discussion.</p>