What’s the most reliable source for college rankings? Personally I have seen the list for US news, Forbes and Wall Street Journal and they are so far apart… Let’s quote the sources that are deemed reliable, public data and not someone’s personal opinion.
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They’re all someone’s opinion, even if they engage in analysis paralysis
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The hypothetical one that happens to weigh all the different objective measures and subjective factors by the same percentages that you personally would have used, and audits every datum submitted by colleges.
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The methodology and weighting is tweaked differently between all reviewers, and from year to year, to force newsworthy „changes“ every year, even though in reality, nothing changes substantially between all the colleges in such short periods.
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The best ranking is the one YOU create based upon YOUR needs and interests.
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They are all ranking based on a formula using an arbitrarily selecting weighting of criteria that is probably not meaningful to you, with a focus on increasing profit for the website/magazine, rather than creating a formula that truly represents the best college for you.
Rather than focusing on 3rd party rankings, I’d suggest instead considering what criteria is important to you in a college and reviewing which colleges do well/poorly in that criteria. Rather than rankings, “sources” might include things like the websites of the different colleges, their CDS, CollegeNavigator/IPEDS, etc.
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I know what your asking and the advice given is superb. We used a list like US News to gain a list of schools. Many we would never of considered since their not popular in our region. We had like 37. Then we narrowed that down to proposed major and back up major. Cause… You never know. Kids change gears like my daughter did.
We and child went on the college websites, went to information meetings regionally, visited campus that make sense to us to whittle that down for each child. Some school fell off and some were added from suggestions on here, counselors and others.
Fit is more important for most students then rank. Rank did come into play with my son and engineering schools so I will be honest about it. But that was his doing not ours. But,I made him go through the top 10, 11-20,21-30, etc to 50. He had to research at least one school from each segment. The point was he found great schools at every level. It made him realize that fit made more sense then rank. Also that many schools were very similar to the top 10. Plus, the lower down you go the more money /merit he got. All important factors.
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The one that ranks your favorite highest.
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I’m kidding of course. Excellent advice by other posters above. Don’t rely too much on published rankings.
The USNews ranking in particular, uses factors and weights that favor a small set of private elites and disfavor public flagships (many of which have excellent programs). So do your own research and find schools that are best for you.
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Thanks for all the info posted! I was less worried about the rankings but more about the statistics. I believe for the education system affecting millions of lives there would be some kind of a national database where all colleges at least post basic data and leave the interpretation to the consumer.
Parsing out the individual common data sets is probably the closest you are going to get to finding the basics.
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You can Google each college’s, with the caveat that each college leaves open to interpretation what that data means. This is particularly apparent in the reporting of HS GPA
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Here you can access IPEDS:
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Make a list of whatever criteria are important to you (could be 75th percentile SAT scores, endowment per student, expenditure per student, class size), look the numbers up for a few dozen or maybe 100 colleges, convert the data to Z-scores, add up the Z-scores for each school across all categories, and sort from highest to lowest.
Voila: the floridadad3 college rankings
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As I like to say, the most reliable source is the one that places my kids’ colleges the highest. That source can change every year.
There are so many different rankings, and they really don’t mean a lot. No one should be choosing based on rankings.
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US News is the defacto ranking and what the colleges themselves focus upon.
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I don’t think anyone on this board needs a ranking to tell them that Princeton is likely a more highly regarded academic institution than Texas Tech. People seem to get the most fired up about discussions between peer institutions, let’s say Indiana and Maryland, when in reality there is likely no door opened for a graduate from one of those 2 schools that is not opened by the other.
I am intrigued by the rankings of particular academic disciplines. Engineering school rankings, undergraduate college of business rankings, etc. I think these have the potential to be of real value but I genuinely don’t know how they are assembled and if their conclusions are valid.
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I made up my own, using my own formula based on quantitative measures that mattered to me. I look at US News, but just to see where other people likely rank the schools. But my own ranking was/is the one I rely on.
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We never even bothered to look at rankings.
Pick the best financial, academic and campus fit your child can get into.
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US News was super helpful to us in our search and selection process. We used the different filters and created search criteria based on enrollment, majors, distance, SAT scores, suburban, urban, etc… The original list we generated from US News was very close to the final list our S20 applied to, and the information we took from US News gave us very accurate insight into these schools.
Right or wrong, I look at the rankings of schools primarily on how selective they are. For the most part, that seems to be pretty close to the US News Rankings.
IMO it makes sense to use ranking as one of your data points, but it should not be close to the most important or, in some families, the only one. The deciding and most important factor for us was where our son felt he best fit. The fact that the school was well-ranked certainly helped make that decision feel even more right.
IF you do consider any rankings be sure to take the time and understand the methodology/criteria behind calculation of those rankings.
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This is what comes to mind every time a parent talks about “rankings.”
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