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What’s the most reliable source for college rankings?
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The list my kid created for him. The list was created based on our college visits, CDS and our own research.
Sorry, I cannot share that with you. The others answered here may have a similar list, I do not want to compare mine with their list.
IPEDS.
I’m sorry, everything said here is accurate but if we’re being honest everyone (within CC) is at least cognizant of rankings. Why do you think schools like MIT, Stanford, UCLA, USC, Berkeley, Ivies, etc. get the most traction in discussions? Why does UCR or Merced barely get any in comparison?
Is it really this same set of schools that happens to be everyone’s personal fit, and others are never a fit?
Or are people going by rankings… since that’s what everyone else (here) is doing?
We can talk about the importance of a personal ranking while still acknowledging the (hopefully limited) role that rankings like USNews play in peoples college lists.
There is!
College Navigator is one such site and can provide a lot of useful information from admission statistics to financial aid provided to programs offered and, what I found useful, # of graduates per program/major. My daughter is a music major and this last feature helped us find schools where there was at least a critical mass of music majors in the school providing the kind of community she was looking for. This was not something you could easily find in the brochures.
For comparison, if 20 music majors graduated in a particular year, you might assume at least four times that number of majors at the school. This was a big advantage over the school where only 4 graduated in a year (not as robust or supported a program).
There are other comparison engines and lists that can provide information about, for example, great schools that send many students to engineering programs (Great Liberal Arts Colleges with Engineering Programs - College Kickstart), financial aid comparison (Compare Your Financial Aid Awards - See Which Financial Aid Award is Best | CollegeData), etc.
It all depends what you’re comparing.
I also found Princeton Reviews useful for faculty-student ratio, faculty accessibility ratings, etc.). Some of these sites require you to sign up for an account with an email address, but the info gained was well worth it.
A good portion of people on this forum do emphasize how colleges are ranked on various websites. This doesn’t mean doing so is a good strategy for choosing a college. I also doubt that a better USNWR/Forbes/WSJ ranking is the primary reason why there is more forum discussion about MIT or Stanford than UCR or Merced.
For example, Columbia was recently ranked #2 on USNWR, then it was unranked, and now it is ranked #18. Have rate of forum discussions about Columbia dropped since their USNWR ranking plummeted? Was Columbia a better college for you when it was ranked #2 than when ranked #18? Is the large change in ranking likely to negatively impact your outcome and opportunities while a student?
By early information, Columbia’s lowered ranking may have affected prospective students, as indicated by a 9% drop in ED applications:
Money Magazine had a build-your-own-college-rankings option this year:
https://www.money.com/best-colleges/build-your-own-rankings/
Seems to me that rankings are so particular to what you want. As I noted above, I used US News to get a feel for what the outside world said. I already had a long list of schools (I’m on tuition exchange, so we reduced our number of schools based on geography and other considerations down to about 25 schools) and I set them up in an Excel (hence my name). The excel has a lot of things on it (such as endowment per student, faculty to student ratio, etc.) but I used CDS to rank the schools looking at four things: % of students in top two quartiles for ACT; entering freshman GPA, 6 year graduation rate, and retention rate. I figured the first two are indications of academic quality, the third is a proxy for the school’s investment in student success and the last an indicator of student satisfaction. I just did a rough rank - multiplied them all and came up with a raw number, and ranked them. It has worked well for us in this process, and as I said there’s a lot of other considerations we are looking at, so the rank is just one. I can imagine coming up with a very different process. It’s pretty idiosyncratic.
That said, good luck to all!
If you read the article, instead of relying on the clickbait title, it is a very positive article about Northeastern.
Totally agree with this and I find it comical when people say they don’t look at rankings but yet almost everyone on here is applying to the same 50 schools. And it seems like the same people who say they never look at rankings are the same ones whose kids go to T25 schools. So maybe rankings don’t play a part when you are comparing Harvard to Stanford, but they do play a role when you are comparing Hobart (83) to Hamilton (15) to Union (48) and Hartwick(142). All liberal arts schools in upstate NY but probably most people on here would never look past Hamilton or Union as the other ones are ranked too low. I often think the “fit” people are describing is actually based on rankings. Maybe Hartwick would be a fabulous fit for your student, but most people wouldn’t take a look at it. This is why almost every “chance me” post on CC is for T40 schools. Are they truly the only schools that offer “fit” for most kids?
We definitely looked at rankings as a starting criteria. They both wanted to go out of NE and needed merit $$. I didn’t know any schools in OH, IN, NC, or CO, so we started narrowing down choices by rankings. Kids are good, not perfect students, so we looked at schools in the 60-130 range. And they were accepted at all, most with merit. It was a starting point for us, not an ending point. We did lots of on-line and in-person tours to determine fit and both are happy. But if people truly aren’t using rankings as at least a starting point how do they whittle down their lists from the 3000+ schools in this country?
Rankings are reductionist. They can only deal with what can be reduced to numbers. That tells us nothing about the quality of teaching, for example. What I’m most interested in is how students will actually be engaged at any given college, how they will spend their time, what they will be doing. I especially want to know if there’s anything unique or creative in the teaching-learning process. Examples would be the Foundations if Management and Entrepreneurship full year course at Babson. Another would be The Term in Washington DC at Union College. I can’t learn anything about these aspects of a college’s program and student experience from rankings. Equally important is that these qualitative factors don’t even enter factor into the rankings.
My kid told me a few years ago that fit conversations make sense only when talking about schools in a tier. And we can debate why a particular set of schools are in a particular tier.
What kind of tier?
Whatever the kid feels is in a tier I guess. USNWR is a starting point. And then there is a sense at our school that some schools are stronger than others – there is a sort of elo ranking at the school for colleges – if people more often pick Princeton over Harvard (on acceptance, or even for EA), the Princeton is ranked above Harvard or vice versa. Then you overlay your particular needs and rework the order – e.g. GTech figures in the top 10 if you want to do just CS, but lower down if you have more diverse interests etc. Then you group schools based on some clustering approach, and you have your custom set of clusters. A cluster is a tier.
LOL! Outside of the Northeast almost no one has heard of these schools. I had no clue they were in NY and I live in the Boston area.
Our family literally never consulted rankings(well, the kids did look at campus food rankings).
That’s me fear. Kids get locked into tiers and miss some great opportunities at schools which are eliminated by rankings. They also miss schools which offer great opportunities because they organize things into categories. Babson, for example, is a business school, but most people don’t realize that you can get a great liberal arts education there.
I have two kids that have gone through the process. There are no hidden gems that were missed :-). Lot of agonizing. Hard decisions. Talking with all kinds of people etc. Many people I know have gone through this. E.g. for a particular school, we talked to two faculty, five current and past students. Poured through the college website. Visited after decisions came through. Talked to particular resources at the university etc.
There are several issues to break down. Your comments suggest that most students strive to attend colleges that are top ranked on lists like USNWR, so the higher the ranking, the more students are expected to apply. However, actual application behavior doesn’t follow this pattern well. For example, prior to COVID, the colleges with the largest number of applications as listed in IPEDS were as follows. Even looking within subgroups of colleges that are more selective or equally selective, the number of applications still didn’t follow the rankings well. For example, Cornell was top among Ivy League colleges. BU and Northeastern topped Boston-area colleges, rather than Harvard and MIT.
Colleges With Most Applications Prior to COVID
- UCLA
- UCSD
- Penn State
- UCI
- UCSB
- UCB
- NYU
- UCD
- CSULB
- SDSU
This forum presents a different pattern for a variety of reasons. The many kids who are not interested in extremely selective colleges don’t tend to spend their free time starting “chance me” threads on a forum that is largely focused on admission to highly selective colleges. Looking at forum posts can present an extremely biased view of which colleges interest students. However, students that favor lesser ranked colleges do exist outside of the forum.
For example, I grew up in upstate NY. The valedictorian of my HS went to Hartwick… a college that you say most wouldn’t look at because of their ranking. Other kids from my honors classes also attended both Hartwick and Union. However, by far the most popular colleges among honors kids from my HS were SUNYs. Among selective colleges, Cornell was by far the most popular, with more applications than the other 7 Ivies combined. There are a lot of public HSs like this where most students who apply to colleges favor in state publics… rather than colleges highest ranked on USNWR.
Another issue is assuming that if a lot of persons on the forum seem interested in higher ranked colleges, then the ranking is a primary reason why those persons are interested in the specific colleges. I think what may appear to be ranking is often more a general aura of selectivity, prestige, or encouragement/imitation of community/parents/friends/peers/… . Being correlated with ranking does not mean ranking is the primary driver. For example, suppose USNWR decided to permanently remove Columbia from their rankings instead of temporarily making them unranked. Do you think interest in Columbia would largely disappear, or would many forum members still consider Columbia a selective/prestigious college that they strive to attend, in spite of not appearing among the T## ranking list?
There are many search tools for which you can list specific criteria that is important to you, and the search engine will output a list of colleges to use a starting points, including one on this website (https://www.collegeconfidential.com/colleges/ ). This criteria can include available majors, location, urban vs non-urban, availability of specific sports/ECs, availibility of merit scholarships, and other criteria that is specific to the student. In contrast, a USNWR ranking does not consider this type of specific to student criteria.
When I was looking at colleges, I started with a list of all colleges that were highly selective and offered an electrical engineering major. Among that group, I created a ranking based on weighting of the criteria that was important to me. There were some similarities between my personal ranking and USNWR ranking, such as my top 2 being MIT and Stanford. But there were also numerous major differences, such as Harvard and Yale being ranked extremely low on my personal ranking.
Make a spreadsheet.
The column headings are School and 5-10 (or however many…) of the things that are important to you. The last column is titled “Total”.
Assign a weight (total of them equaling 1, or 100%) for each of those 5-10 variables – for example, Setting might have a weight of 0.05, class size might have a weight of .15, etc. The weights need to total 100%.
The row headings are different schools. Assign values to each school for each of your column variables, multiplied by the weight for that particular fit variable – so if a school is a 5 (1-10 scale) for class size, you’d put 0.75 down as the value. (5 x 0.15)
Add up the total for each school, and then sort by that final “Total” column. That is your ranking.
It is a deeply subjective process. I am unsure if the spreadsheet approach is robust enough to do full justice. But I guess if it works for you then you are lucky. One of my kids thought about this over a 2 year period, attended lectures at various universities when we went to visit, talked to some 30 kids from various schools he is interested in, read research published by faculty at these schools and more.