@socaldad2002 Haven’t seen Fiske but we got a copy of the Princeton review from a neighbor, a few years old but I’m assuming the newer ones are similar. At least at all the colleges we looked at in there, it looked like a summary of marketing materials. I don’t think I saw anything critical on any of them.
We started with USNWR but quickly moved on. My kid is very specific about what she wants to do career wise, so she focused on which schools had profs doing research in those areas and where undergraduate research was possible and encouraged.
US News & the Wall St. Journal/ Times Higher Education are two helpful starting sources. But it depends upon the student’s interests.
The print edition of US News is full of helpful information.
Yes! Let’s rank the rankings and see how they like it! 
The rankings: pretty much all the same. The differences are minor.
A good article to read, before taking the rankings seriously:
That being said, Niche is a good place to get a quick summary of the strengths and weaknesses of a school, and of things like the basic stats of applicants and accepted students, which can give a student an idea as to how competitive they are for a school in general. The weakness of these lists of stats is that they are for the entire school, and don’t provide the correct info for students who are, say, looking to be accepted to Computer Science at UIUC.
I would actually recommend using one of those college search engines that they have on Naviance "“Super Match” or whatever it’s called, is good), and then to use multiple other sources to research the “best match” list. One of those sources is the College Confidential community.
What’s really funny about The Atlantic article is that it was a pretty good read until at the end where the author wrote:
“So, my best advice is simply to ignore the U.S. News rankings. If you want to find rankings of American colleges and universities that are far more nourishing and beneficial, look at the ones produced by The Washington Monthly.”
I looked at The Washington Monthly’s college rankings, and I found it as objectionable as the author’s with the USNWR!! Hmmm… “far more nourishing and beneficial”?? :))
I found all the rankings helpful. Even the most ridiculous “here are the biggest party schools” rankings tell you something useful- even if you don’t care about the parties, per se, there is going to be something useful about the overall campus culture. Whether you consider the rankings or not when helping your kid- that’s a different story. But I found all the rankings of some value.
@TiggerDad I was also amused by “nourishing”, too.
I disagree with you about the Washington Monthly rankings being objectionable, per se, since ranking universities by their contribution to society is laudable, especially when compared to the USANews philosophy of “ranking universities by their contribution to the ruling class”.
I do agree with you, though, that it is not a ranking that is very useful for parents who are trying to figure out where they should send their kid. You send your kid to a school based on what it will provide to your kid, not based on what it provides to everybody else, as a group.
I look at college tiers but not at excat rankings, college making # 5 on most lists is probably not going to be all that better than # 11 but likely quite different than #96.
To begin with can look at selectivity as peers matter, at size because community matters, at endowment because faculty/resources matter and merit scholarships or aid unless you can swing full pay.
pishicaca, there are rankings of rankings.
@lostaccount But has anyone ranked the rankings of the rankings?
@MWolf contributions to the ruling class? That’s a good one.
Usnwr changed methodology this year. Eliminated admission rates and added pell grant attendees and outcomes.
My favorite ranking is the Bleacher Report weekly NFL Power rankings.
@privatebanker - schools that are ranked high in USANews mostly educate the top 20%, and, in the process also provide them the social and economic opportunities which allow them to stay within the top 20%. They don’t do much for anybody from the bottom 20%, or even the bottom 50%. So, yes, they mostly contribute to the ruling class.
As for the USANews rankings, they change their methodology every year. That way they differ, and more people will pay to see them.
A few specific problems with their “new” methodology:
- "Graduation rate performance". This is a problematic factor, since it compares the actual graduating rate to the USANews's predicted graduation rate. This means that a school who graduated 95% while USANews's predicted a 93% rate would score lower than a school with a 55% graduation rate, which the USANews predicted would be 45%. The high a graduation rate a school has, the more likely it is that the score of the factor will be low. So this score is actually penalizing schools that regularly have high graduation rates.
- "Faculty Resources" (20 percent of the score) are calculated wrong:
A. To begin with, the number of small classes which a school offers do not indicate lower teaching load and thus higher levels of resources. It is pretty easy to beef up these numbers by increasing the number of small classes offered by increasing the teaching load of existing faculty. Without normalizing these numbers to take this into consideration, this factor is meaningless. It should be the proportion of small classes taught by faculty members, normalized by their teaching load. This should be further normalized by the percent of their job which is teaching. At research university, 45% of the job is teaching, whereas at a four-year undergraduate college, it can be anywhere from 60% to 90%. So a teaching load of 2/2 is the “normal” for a research university, with any higher load being considered overly heavy, while, for a teaching only college, it can be 4/4 or higher without it being considered a heavy teaching load.
Also what does “class size” mean? I TAed for a intro bio class which had 1,200 students in it. However, each of my lab sections was 16-18 students. So, what was the class size? The size of the lecture? The size pf the lab/discussion section? Also, optimal class size is not always the smallest class. Some classes are best taught in groups of 15, while, for others, it is best to have 40 students. It is a somewhat crude method of calculation of much of anything.
B. Faculty pay - should be median pay, not average, since academic salaries are always strongly right skewed.
C. Proportion “Full Time” faculty should be replaced with the proportion of faculty who are tenured or on tenure-track. And, for faculty:student ratio, only people whose job description is “faculty” should be considered. Many big schools count graduate teaching assistants as “faculty”.
- "Expert Opinion" (20%) is totally wrong.
A. To begin with, “presidents, provosts, and deans of admissions” are NOT " top academics", especially since they are not academics at all. They are administrators. They do not teach, they do not advise, nor do they do research. Many college presidents do not even have a graduate degree, and have never held an academic position in their lives. The number who come from business or politics is staggering. This means that they more often than not, are not evaluating schools’ quality as institutions of higher education or of research, but rather as “businesses” in which things like “brand loyalty”, “costumer satisfaction”, and “profitability” are the most important indicators of quality.
B. How does “school counselor assessment” actually measure anything, since counselors generally take their information from are rankings like USANews? This is a circular ranking - counselors rank a school high because USANews ranks it high, which it does because the counselors rate it high, etc.
To be totally honest, though, it has improved since they removed the “academic reputation” as the factor with the highest weighting in their rankings.
An enormlous flaw in the whole idea of a single unified ranking system is that there is no clear evidence that many of the criteria that it uses to rank schools have any real correlation with the quality of an education that a school provides. For a student who wants to study agriculture, Harvard is not the best school, nor is Georgia Tech the best place for a degree in fine arts. Like IQ, it is an attempt to describe something very complex as a single number.
I don’t disagree. But boiling it down to the statement that it best judges on contributions to the ruling class, does in fact, “attempt to describe something complex into a single” throw away line.
However, it is still much lower weighted in USNWR than raw graduation rate, which is mostly a proxy for admission selectivity, with some financial component (more wealthy students and better FA for the rest reduces financial drop outs).
In terms of class size, some schools have gamed that part of the rankings by capping sizes at threshold numbers of 19, 29, 39, 49.
The truth is that I do not think that any “global” rankings are useful for prospective students, even if they fixed every one of the flaw that I indicated. Students are looking for the college which is best for them, and rankings are just a distraction.
How many kids have posted on CC that their dream was “to go to Harvard”, without even knowing what they wanted to study or what they wanted to do in life? How many kids who had a better idea and wanted to study engineering but were applying to schools which did not fit them by way of interests, simply because these schools were more highly ranked?
I think that, rather than look at rankings, potential students should look for good college search tools, which at least try to match a school to a student’s interests and stats. Rankings like those that Niche attempts have some utility. Things like “best for LGBTQ students”, or even “best food” or “best dorms” will tell students something that would help them better that knowing that a school is the “best national university”, based on research productivity.
For many students and parents, “fit” appears to be defined mainly as prestige.
I liked Quants and Poets for undergraduate business programs
We bought a wonderful book on Amazon, that I believe was recommended here.
The Best 382 Colleges, 2018 Edition (College Admissions Guides)
Princeton Review
Sold by: Amazon.com Services, Inc
$16.99
The format was wonderful. Every college had a two-page spread, “butterfly style.” One side had the Princeton review info like stats and costs and what the college is known for, etc. the opposite page was from a student’s perspective, such as campus life, professor accessibility, etc.
I can’t remember when the 2019 edition comes out. If I remember correctly, it’s around July/August.