Do you trust US News rankings

[zala2022]

<p>well i trust the rankings enough that I refuse to apply colleges outside the top50
but then again, what can you trust these days anyways?</p>

[Soundwave]

<p>Well… I would say the rank is kinda rubbish… But at least it provided some useful things to me. </p>

<p>I have to agree with GoBlue, the point is “which are the top 20 for me”</p>

<p>BTW, I personally think Princeton Review is better</p>

[Trinity7]

<p>Globalization will continue to play a very important role in labor arbitrage; For global companies, the world ranking will be an important factor in the recruitment of potential talent. </p>

<p>The academic ranking of World universities by Shanghai Jiao Tong University seems quite fact based & credible. Ranking is different for various subjects and fields.</p>

<p>[Academic</a> Ranking of World Universities (ARWU)](<a href=“http://www.arwu.org/]Academic”>http://www.arwu.org/)</p>

<p>This may be used either in conjunction with US News ranking (& others like Kiplinger) or by itself.</p>

[coureur]

<p>^^Considering that the ARWU ranking contains at least two schools (#18 UCSF & #32 Rockefeller Univ.) that are strictly grad schools and do not even have undergrad programs, I’d say it’s a pretty unreliable tool for deciding where to go to college.</p>

[gadad]

<p>

It combines too many factors, in an inexplicable formula

</p>

<p>20% graduation and retention rates
20% faculty resources index
15% selectivity
10% financial resources index
5% alumni giving rate
5% grad rate performance compared to a rate predicted by student stats
Plus 25% for a subjective peer assessment rating</p>

<p>What’s inexplicable about that? In addition, USNWR publishes a long paragraph on each of those factors describing what they measure. One might argue that too much weight is given to one or another area, or that there are other factors that should be considered - that’s just a point of personal opinion that has no definitive right answer. But this rubric is certainly defensible and IMO has a decent degree of face validity.</p>

[confusedboy]

<p>I think that’s the best and most reliable rankings for US universities. You cant find a better one yet. Cos most of the world universities ranking systems would put UCLA, UMich, and UWisconsin above Dartmouth, Brown, and MAYBE Princeton. Those kinda rankings would for sure create an even bigger uproar in CC. haha</p>

[parent2noles]

<p>I know - let’s get USNWR to have their system and analyses peer reviewed every year. :)</p>

[SWHarborfan]

<p>No, I don’t. My child would have made a noose out of her pasta (if MIT valued the importance of the communal dining experience), if she had had to attend MIT–#1 on those silly rankings. Nowhere, based on so much feedback (we now know our 11th MIT student, in 4 years, who has applied for transfer), is more socially unsatisfying.</p>

[Techie1988]

<p>

Cos most of the world universities ranking systems would put UCLA, UMich, and UWisconsin above Dartmouth, Brown, and MAYBE Princeton.

</p>

<p>That’s right. The first three are outstanding research institutions, as is Princeton. Research is where all the worldwide fame and prestige comes from. The profession of teaching, like monkhood, is a calling with little worldly rewards, although the intrinsic satisfaction of teaching excellence is immeasurable.</p>

<p>

let’s get USNWR to have their system and analyses peer reviewed every year.

</p>

<p>The peers of USNWR are other magazines like Time, Newsweek, Washington Monthly, etc.</p>

[parent2noles]

<p>Brian Leiter ([Brian</a> Leiter’s Law School Reports](<a href=“http://leiterlawschool.typepad.com/]Brian”>http://leiterlawschool.typepad.com/)) has some remarks concerning the USNWR rankings as well: [Brian</a> Leiter’s Law School Reports: An Open Letter to Other Law Bloggers Regarding the US News Rankings](<a href=“http://leiterlawschool.typepad.com/leiter/2010/03/an-open-letter.html]Brian”>http://leiterlawschool.typepad.com/leiter/2010/03/an-open-letter.html)

When the new rankings come out in a couple of weeks, may I suggest that you not post the overall ranking. You all know the overall rank assigned to a school by U.S. News is meaningless, often perniciously so. It combines too many factors, in an inexplicable formula, and much of the underlying data isn’t reliable, and some of it (e.g., expenditures on secretarial salaries and electriciy) isn’t even relevant. You all know this. So don’t report it. The fact that this garbage appears in a major ‘news’ magazine doesn’t change the fact that it is garbage.

</p>

[gadad]

<p>

Nowhere, based on so much feedback (we now know our 11th MIT student, in 4 years, who has applied for transfer), is more socially unsatisfying.

</p>

<p>How do you figure that the nation’s pre-eminent technology university has commissioned some of the ugliest, most depressing architecture ever built on a college campus?</p>

[JohnAdams12]

<p>for undergraduate school rankings there really should only be two groups:</p>

<p>Group 1 - Princeton</p>

<p>Group 2 - Other colleges</p>

<p>and today is, of course, April 1st</p>

[iamtbh]

<p>

@JohnAdams12

for undergraduate school rankings there really should only be two groups:</p>

<p>Group 1 - Princeton</p>

<p>Group 2 - Other colleges

</p>

<p>Try having a lower admit rate than Columbia or a higher yield rate than Penn before you make such absurd assertions. If you’re trying to be funny, keep trying. Since Princeton has dropped ED, HYS has smoked you in cross-admit battles. But kudos to you for reinforcing the stereotype of Princetonians as snooty elitists. Congratulations for your undeserved self-entitlement!</p>

[kvilledeac]

<p>I think their undergraduate university rankings do an overall passing job especially when you don’t get bent out of shape about little differences. </p>

<p>As far as their other rankings I think they are fairly poor efforts from what I’ve seen. The undergrad biz school one is very poorly constructed. The methodology of solely using PA scores is so bad that its irresponsible that they publish it.</p>

[noimagination]

<p>

^^Considering that the ARWU ranking contains at least two schools (#18 UCSF & #32 Rockefeller Univ.) that are strictly grad schools and do not even have undergrad programs, I’d say it’s a pretty unreliable tool for deciding where to go to college.

I don’t understand your reasoning. Certainly, it would be foolish to copy-paste the top x schools from ARWU and call that a list, but no ranking will fit that desire. Using the ARWU score as a criterion in looking at schools does not strike me as an entirely bad way of measuring prestige.

Cos most of the world universities ranking systems would put UCLA, UMich, and UWisconsin above Dartmouth, Brown, and MAYBE Princeton.

I would too (not above Princeton, but I haven’t seen many rankings that do that!)

That’s right. The first three are outstanding research institutions, as is Princeton. Research is where all the worldwide fame and prestige comes from. The profession of teaching, like monkhood, is a calling with little worldly rewards, although the intrinsic satisfaction of teaching excellence is immeasurable.

To my knowledge, there is no good way of ranking teaching. The qualities that make a good teacher are inherently subjective and vary too much within an individual institution to matter anyway.</p>

[vonlost]

<p>One-size-fits-none. The magazine editors have no idea what’s important to an individual.</p>

[pointoforder]

<p>In response to post #25, here are a few of the things I find inexplicable:</p>

<p>–The justification of the overall formula, with its various weightings, which is impossible to rationalize in any principled way. </p>

<p>–The fact that a large percentage of the criteria can be manipulated by the schools themselves, either through outright (and undetectable) deceit, or other devices (giving fee waivers to hopeless applicants, etc.).</p>

<p>–The fact that the underlying data in some of the criteria (particularly those related to faculty and expenditures per student) are vague and unclear and even schools are not uniform in what data they report. </p>

<p>–In terms of many of the elements of their index (faculty and financial resources) scores. They do a lot of this “we applied a logarithmic transformation to the spending per full-time-equivalent student…” They have refused to explain these logarithms.</p>

<p>–The fact that schools are penalized if faculty (hypothetically, a professor with young kids) decides to go part-time for a couple of years. </p>

<p>–If “alumni giving serves as a proxy for how satisfied STUDENTS are with the school” then why do they treat an alumnus from the class of 2009 the same as an alumnus from the class of 1938? This would clearly be a better proxy if limited to alumni of the past 10-15 years.</p>

[pointoforder]

<p>Here’s what a group of 50 college presidents say about the US News rankings:</p>

<p>We believe these rankings are misleading and do not serve well the interests of prospective students … Among other reasons, we believe this because such rankings </p>

<p>–imply a false precision and authority that is not warranted by the data they use;
obscure important differences in educational mission in aligning institutions on a single scale; </p>

<p>–say nothing or very little about whether students are actually learning at particular colleges or universities; </p>

<p>–encourage wasteful spending and gamesmanship in institutions’ pursuing improved rankings; </p>

<p>–overlook the importance of a student in making education happen and overweight the importance of a university’s prestige in that process; and </p>

<p>–degrade for students the educational value of the college search process.</p>

[coureur]

<br>

<blockquote>
<p>I don’t understand your reasoning.<< </p>
</blockquote>

<br>

<p>My reasoning is the same as a ranking of say medical schools that included Princeton, Caltech, and MIT. That would tell you that the people who put together the ranking didn’t know what they were doing. </p>

<p>It’s the same for colleges. The OP asked about the top 20 colleges. Any school that doesn’t have an undergrad program is a very bad choice for a student picking colleges. And any ranking that includes them, such as ARWU, is clearly worthless.</p>

[noimagination]

<p>

My reasoning is the same as a ranking of say medical schools that included Princeton, Caltech, and MIT. That would tell you that the people who put together the ranking didn’t know what they were doing. </p>

<p>It’s the same for colleges. The OP asked about the top 20 colleges. Any school that doesn’t have an undergrad program is a very bad choice for a student picking colleges. And any ranking that includes them, such as ARWU, is clearly worthless.

A medical school ranking by definition ranks only medical schools. ARWU is a general university ranking that ranks schools as a whole, not specifically undergrad schools.</p>

<p>Look, I wouldn’t weight any ranking too heavily. Especially not one as heavily criticized as ARWU (you can look up the articles with a google search). But I don’t consider your reason for rejecting the ranking reasonable.</p>