<p>Sam, it is true that USnews has never released the "real" ranking formula, which probably changes every year. I bet if you reverse-engineered the formula for 2005, and compare it to a reverse-engineered one for 2006, they are different.</p>
<p>My speculation on the "Faculty Resource rank" is something similar to </p>
<p>20*(1/x), with an added modifyer to decrease the decay of the curve with respect to x.</p>
<p>Where x = the rank. So here, due to the 1/x function, the difference between 1 and 2 is much greater than the difference between 10 and 11. </p>
<p>If USN&WR separated Wharton out of the Penn considerations, Penn would maybe make the Top 15; however, Penn does have Wharton & that gives it a boost, but it is nowhere near the educational institution of an MIT or Stanford. Perhaps this egregous error will finally get people to realize that the USN&WR rankings are a sophisticated and overly touted parlour game, IMHO.</p>
<p>How does Duke rate 5th then? I'm not arguing it's just that I don't think the reasons for Penn's rank are as facile as that. I agree that Duke is not top 5...but why? How did it get that rank?</p>
<p>duke gets that rank b/c of faculty resources and financial resources and so does penn. Without that, duke and penn would drop really bad. I am not sure how they calculate that either.</p>
<p>Faculty compensation 35% 35%
Percent faculty with top terminal degree 15% 15%<br>
Percent full-time faculty 5% 5%
Student/faculty ratio 5% 5%<br>
Class size, 1-19 students 30% 30%
Class size, 50+ students 10% 10%</p>
<p>collegeparent, can you take some time and explain "the educational institution of an MIT or Stanford" and also explain that of Penn? or maybe you were referring to "the educational reputation"...</p>
<p>if you think out financial resources and stuff it would look more like this: Harv, Pton, Stanford, Yale, MIT, CalTech, Columbia, Duke Dartmouth Penn...I think. Just food for thought. </p>
<p>But I don't see why you'd take it out completely</p>
<p>Why do very few in the south give UPenn the respect it deserves as a top 10 university? Among the schools in the top 10, Upenn is the only one that is rarely recognized or acknowledged in the south. Even though it has been ranked above duke, stanford, and mit for the past 2 years, most people from the south wouldn't put upenn anywhere close to the same category as those schools. Why is that? (i'm not looking for an evaluation of upenn's current ranking - it may be ranked higher than it should - i dont care. what i'm concerned about is why it is not even considered a reputable university by most from the south). Along the same lines, is Upenn more respected in the north or west? Is it commonly recognized as one of the best universities in the nation?</p>
<p>1sokkermom, even as a person who has gotten into and visited both Duke and Penn, I believe they don't really deserve their rankings. Sure, they're great schools but just visit HPYSMC and see how they're influencing our world in the news and you'll know the difference from the cream of the crop and the OK. MIT, Stanford, Caltech, even Columbia, Northwestern and some other Ivies deserve to be up there much more. Duke and Penn may be here to stay but only on this OVERRATED US NEWS LIST!! Tell me where you see them so high up on other lists. Their rankings factor in things like how much alumni give back to the school...who cares? So if Melinda Gates (Bill Gate's wife who went to Duke) donates some of Ol' Billy's bling to Duke, they can get a higher ranking? Things like that shouldn't affect where you go to school!!</p>
<p>Collegeparent: If they took Wharton out sure Penn would barely be in the top 15 but then people on here would be complaining about Wharton being above HYP. What's with all your hate for Penn, did your kid get rejected or something ? lol</p>
<p>Stop the jealousy people it's just a number. Go get lives and stop worrying about some arbitrary ranking. There will never be a way to really evaluate the quality of a whole university against another.</p>
<p>nerdrocker27, you're correct that the money donated to a school doesn't have much redeeming value in and of itself, but you're forgetting the implications of a larger endowment. Having more money to entice better professors from other schools, hire better researchers, and improve school facilities can go a long way in directly providing a better education. If Mrs. Gates gave a several million to Duke, which was then used to improve their campus libraries, then Duke's students would thereafter enjoy better researching resources and capabilities. The correllation between money and improved education is surely not absolute and definite, but it can be used (and often is) to better the university in some way, thereby warranting an higher ranking.</p>
<p>nerdrocker, Duke's in the top 10 on the top feeder lists, along with Harv Pton Yale Stanford and the like, thats the only other ranking that people usually use on this site. Most people agree that Duke isn't overall better than Stanford, that Penn isn't better than MIT and so on, even if the ranking says they are. But thats been noted ad nauseum already, and the majority of people who even are attending Duke say that Duke's peer insitutions are Dartmouth, Columbia, and Penn (since these are the most popular places of acceptance of Duke students). No one is saying Duke's better than every school that its ranked higher than.</p>
<p>We just returned from a visit to Saratoga Springs last week checking out Skidmore. The campus was disappointing to say the least. August is not a good month to visit any college campus but Skidmore was really in rough shape. Dark and foreboding buildings hidden in dark pine trees with no centricity to the campus. The meager athletic facilities were high schoolish.
The school is filled with frustrated NESCAC rejects who narrowly missed at Union. Wheaton in MA is easily as good if not better than Skiddie. There has to be a New York bias to the rankings in U.S. News. This is true for Hamilton which no way belongs higher than Trinity, Colby and Bates. Union is truly ballooned up out of proportion year after year. Even Syracuse in the National rankings is out of its league. Bard is ridiculously high for what it offers. Hello Hobart? What kind of miraculous transformation took place on Lake Geneva's shores that I missed this year? Something stinks in the state of Denmark-no New York in 2006. Next thing you'll see is Hartwick breaking into the top 50 next year.</p>
<p>Hartwick in Top 50, that'll be the day, but yes, I think the people assessing Skidmore must not know the campus downgraded to its present location in 1965 ;)</p>