<p>In The Huffington Post, of course. The best online newspaper by far. It's about time. I remember when I was younger, people referred to U.S. News and World Report as "Useless News and World Distort." The first time I heard it, I nearly busted a gut laughing. Today folks on CC, parents and students, seem to consider it the Bible of college prestige.</p>
<p>Anyway, I say it's about time because I don't understand how one can rank let's say Grinnell or Middlebury higher than say Wesleyan or Oberlin. Why is Colby ranked higher than Macalester? I don't see much of a difference in test scores and such. Endowment? The other schools aren't exactly impoverished. How the heck does one determine that one flagship state U should be ranked higher than another? Why is Penn State ranked higher than Ohio State or the U of Minnesota? Why? </p>
<p>For private schools, it seems that all it takes is a bunch of rich people giving money to raise the ranking, which some consider an indication of prestige and even academic quality, even though no one can prove anything. Is there really a difference in academic quality between, say, Yale and U. of Miami? How do you prove it? Because more famous people went to Yale (who didn't play football) than U of Miami? Or is it because a lot of rich people send their kids to Yale, preserving perceptions of superiority, which just perpetuates a cycle of perception that one is better than the other? What if all the blue bloods started sending their kids to private schools like U. of Miami or public schools like OSU and Yale took whatever was left over. I have a feeling U. of Miami would overnight be considered more prestigious.</p>
<p>Kinda old news. The pledge to shun the rankings by a few college presidents they refer to happened several years ago. In the meantime for every college “rebelling” against the rankings there are a hundred others desperately trying every trick they can think of to boost their USNews ranking.</p>
<p>Do college deans have grenades and automatic rifles outside the USNews headquarters? If not, that’s not rebelling. They’re protesting and whining, which is what they should be doing. They shouldn’t be rebelling because it’s not a big deal. It’s like rebelling against election forecasters and meteorologists because they’re not exactly right. Protesting and whining is what you do when something doesn’t really hurt you, but you still don’t like it. Good students still want to go to these LACs, even if they’re under ranked, the rankings don’t have some deadly impact on colleges.</p>
<p>The peer review as I understood it was just supposed to be a “general sentiment” not an exact science. An “of these schools I’ve never been to, which do I hear and imagine are the best” sort of thing. That’s all you should take it as. It’s got nothing to do with what anyone knows is true, it’s got to do with what everyone thinks is true.</p>
<p>They are rankings to be used an simply one of many information sources. I don’t think anyone sensible interprets them to mean definitively that #10 Duke is better than #11 Dartmouth…however one might make a reasonable inference, pending further investigation, that #10 Duke is a better school than #35 whoever.</p>
<p>IMO the rankings are useless for schools that are close. Where there are WIDE differences in the ranking, thats a reasonably accurate indicators of SOMETHING - something outside the pages of USNWR - some combo of broad academic quality, reputation, prestige. Of course thats stuff people know anyway without USNWR, if they know the colleges in question at all well.</p>
<p>So the real value of USNWR is to give you the beginning of a sense of comparability for schools you don’t know at all well. Of course there are many other sources for that, using a variety of different criteria.</p>
<p>If someone say “X is better than Y” cause X is five places above Y on USNWR - they are letting USNWR hurt them.</p>
<p>If someone says “hey, Flagship U is ranked close to the Ivies, maybe I shouldn’t confine myself to the Ivies, but should look more broadly” then they have been helped by USNWR.</p>
<p>I would have no issue if USNWR dropped the peer section of the rankings. The way it is currently set up reminds me of the lists that come out for 100 Top Lawyers. They are voted on by their peers and every year groups of attorneys get together and agree to nominate/vote for each other. It sells magazines and increases their client base.</p>
<p>Is any college prep school rebelling over the rankings of the top 20 schools in the latest Forbes Report 4/30/10. Some very good boarding schools (Choate/Hotchkiss) are missing. Choate won a national Economics competition this year and Hotchkiss consistently outperform Hopkins (a private day school) on endowment and is at least on par if not better on college matriculation to HYPMS and ivies.</p>
<p>This is surprising, how? Podunk schools will always rebel against the ranking system, because they can’t figure out how to game the system and beat it the way more highly-ranked schools do. These colleges are far from mediocre, but they don’t fit into the system and rather than put in the work they decide to just drop out and give up. Typical defeastick attitude.</p>
<p>“Brooklyn - I hate these type of questions. I am going with graduation requirements”</p>
<p>I was thinking of stock price. All the others are measures, designed rationally or arbitrarily, to judge a group of people - employees, students, etc.</p>
<p>Stock prices exist to, well, buy and sell stock. They can (and arguably should) be used to evaluate executives, but they are not determined with that in mind, and they would exist even if companies did not use them to evaluate execs. </p>
<p>Different kinds of metrics, very different.</p>
<p>"This is surprising, how? Podunk schools will always rebel against the ranking system, because they can’t figure out how to game the system and beat it the way more highly-ranked schools do. These colleges are far from mediocre, but they don’t fit into the system and rather than put in the work they decide to just drop out and give up. Typical defeastick attitude. "</p>
<p>I don’t think its just the podunk schools. I think maybe the Ivies ranked below WUSTL aren’t thrilled either. </p>
<p>DD picked RPI over Lehigh. Lehigh ranks 5 places or so above RPI. Wife keeps asking me why, I keep saying go read their methodology, I don’t know. I don’t think its all that important. To me what USNWR said is they are within the same order of magnitude, thats all.</p>
<p>I think part of the problem is that USNWR has taken a sort of monopoly in the college ranking system, and they provide very little context. With stock prices, at least you can get some independent analysis of the company, rather than just a number, and in fact that’s what you’re supposed to do if you want to invest smartly. If you buy a washing machine, or a car, you have many different respected ratings systems to choose from. When you buy a college education, why should you get just one ranking system?</p>
<p>Rankings are OK. The problem is people put too much credence in them when they have to make decisions. Or they bestow attributes that don’t exist onto whatever is being ranked. Or worse yet they have no idea of the methodology used to produce the rankings. I rather dislike rankings…but I dislike “Chance Me” threads for all the same reasons.</p>
<p>I also said grad. requirements… in all other cases, the subject has some degree of influence over the object. A high school student’s work influences his grades, a CEO’s performance influences his company’s stock price, etc. etc.</p>