I was just looking at StartClass’s college rankings and was very shocked to find many good colleges ranked so low.
This site is far from accurate, right? How does it even determine ranks?
Be advised that U.S. News ranks National Universities and National Liberal Arts Colleges separately, whereas StartClass combines them. That’s why there’s a substantial difference in their rankings.
I think it’s a pretty lame ranking.
I was prepared to dislike the ranking when I saw your thread title, but having read through the order of the schools, it seems as reasonable as many of the others out there.
Regarding a school such as Wake Forest (88th), they place 83rd nationally by standardized scoring, so startclass’ ranking basically parallels their selectivity in this example.
It’s all relative. I would argue that ranking 77th out of 2000 colleges is pretty dang good.
There are SO many differnt rankings out there. It depends on what the list makers prioritize. The college my kid is going to ranks 90 on one list and 1000 on another. Another very well known list doesn’t even have my kid’s LAc listed at all. I like the Forbes lists personally. They break it down into different categories. For instance, I like the Grateful Grads list, which ranks by how much money alumni donate to the school, and is often a good indication of how active alumni are with the college following graduation, and if they actively recruit from that college. The Forbes lists actually helped persuade my skeptical husband to let our kid attend a particular college.
I don’t think any ranking can be described as “reliable.”
@merc81 That makes sense, but why would they rank NYU so low. I would say they are pretty selective.
Rankings are designed for the non-existent generic college applicant.
NYU is very selective (60th in the country by standardized scoring), @emory323.
When I posted earlier that I think the rankings are pretty reasonable, it was from a general impression that many of the schools in the ~top 50 are academically excellent and generally interesting and desirable colleges. However, in many cases, I also thought, “What is that school doing there?” So to give you an opinion on your title question, this ranking cannot be said to be reliable, but nevertheless gets quite a few schools about right in terms of their general appeal. From a fuller perspective, I’d say that commercial websites generally do not bring statistical sophistication to their methodology, and that the expectation that they will provide useful information should be adjusted accordingly.
Since the rankings don’t change based on search criteria, it seems fairly useless.