<br>
<br>
These ratings are from Cornell students, and were compiled by another company.
At the risk of sounding repetitive, these aren’t meant to be scientific rankings, and because they are conducted by survey of students they may not be comparable across schools. If the Cornell students surveyed didn’t give the school a high grade in academics for whatever reason, it may get a lower grade than a less demanding school where the students seemed happier with the academics.
<br>
<br>
I wouldn’t use any ranking, including US News, to make a college selection. The best you can hope for from rankings (or ratings) is to give you bits of information that might be helpful in deciding. US News has a lot of statistical data, which is useful in its own way. Those stats are more or less comparable between schools. The ratings chart we put up is student survey data, which is useful in a different way. Since students are answering what is in essence a satisfaction survey, the answers reflect their feelings rather than any kind of absolute standard.
Don’t take these rankings too seriously, folks - personally, if I were looking at a college, I’d still want to see them. A low grade in a category indicates the students surveyed aren’t too happy with that category for some reason, and it’s probably worth investigating further.
I guess any time one publishes ratings or rankings, it’s going to stimulate debate. As far as I know, the methodology for these surveys isn’t dissimilar to PR’s “Top Party Schools” and “Best College Towns”, and the ratings should be viewed in the same context - interesting info, but certainly not definitive.
PETA just came out with a ranking for “Best Vegetarian Colleges” - I was going to post a link, but I fear people might question their methodology, too. 