<p>Consider only the national universities.
14 of the USNWR top 20 universities are also among the Forbes top 20 universities.
6 universities have exactly the same position among the top 20 universities of both rankings.
So, for the top 20 universities at least, the two rankings produce very similar results … despite criteria that are almost completely different. US News is more input-oriented (looking at which schools bring in the highest-scoring students, the best-paid professors, and the most money). Forbes is more outcome-oriented (looking at which schools produce the most satisfied and successful students.) Both approaches point to pretty much the same set of top universities. That would not be too surprising if all we’re seeing is “selection effects” (schools that cherry-pick the most successful HS students also will tend to produce the most successful graduates.)</p>
<p>
FORBES ....... USNWR
stanford Harvard
Princeton Princeton
Yale ... Yale
Columbia Columbia
Harvard...... Chicago
MIT........... MIT
Penn.......... Stanford
Brown........ Duke
Chicago....... Penn
Duke.......... Caltech
Dartmouth Dartmouth
NU............ NU
Caltech....... JHU
Cornell....... WUSTL
W&L.......... Brown
Berkeley Cornell
ND............ Rice
Tufts... ND
Georgetown Vanderbilt
UVA........... Emory
<p>I don’t see why the Forbes rankings would be any less respectable than the USNWR one (ignoring the silly headlines). In fact, if they measure “output” rather than the “input” USNWR uses they can’t be any worse, IMO.</p>
<p>You still have a LAC, Washington & Lee, in your Forbes list. Forbes #20 university is Michigan, and the 5 schools you list after W&L should move up one spot after you delete W&L.</p>
<p>You’re right, though, that Forbes and US News are basically in agreement on 15 of the top 20 universities, though not on their exact order. But Forbes thinks US News overrates Johns Hopkins, WUSTL, Rice, Vanderbilt, and Emory, and underrates UC Berkeley, Tufts, Georgetown, UVA, and Michigan. I have a hard time disagreeing with that conclusion, even though I think the methodology is garbage. But then, I think US News’ methodology is garbage, too.</p>
<p>High Achiever, looking at the component ranking, Harvard places:
32nd on the Payscale Ratings
15th on Actual Retention Rate
1st on American Leaders Rank
6th in Least Amount of Debt
25th in Actual Graduation Rate
9th in Student Awards Ranking (undergrad only)
17th in PhD production</p>
<p>Compare this to Swarthmore, which is 48th, 16th, 9th, 37th, 1st, 3rd, and 3rd respectively. </p>
<p>So it wins some and it loses some. The sheer number of excellent undergraduate colleges in the country means that it isn’t that much of a shocker that it can be topped by some output measures.</p>
<p>^^ If 2 different magazines ranked colleges using 2 completely different sets of criteria that had no plausible connection at all to academic quality, how likely is it they would both place 15 of the very same colleges in the top 20?</p>
<p>Granted, they may both be piling on extraneous factors (alumni giving, Tony award winners) that contribute little to the predictive value of each formula. They presumably do that as a marketing gimmick (just to create an appearance of complexity). So you could peel off those factors and perhaps generate slightly better lists … if you were willing to do that extra work.</p>
<p>You’re assuming such a coincidence isn’t deliberate. I’m assuming it is. Remember, in the first two years of the Forbes’ ranking, the rankings looked much different. Under a new editor, and under new criteria for the company which conducts the data, does the rankings mirror USN&WR for those 14 schools.</p>
I agree. People are just upset that the colleges they view highly are not rated as high, while the colleges they view not as high are rated not as low.</p>
<p>It seems to me that if a set of input criteria and a very different set of output criteria are mutually corroborating, that suggests they both are identifying factors that may have a strong relationship to true academic quality. </p>
<p>Deliberately tweaking the factors is part of the data-modeling process. You publish one iteration of results; your feedback tells you some of them are way off. You tweak. The feedback gets better. That’s how the process works.</p>
<p>Does this tend to produce results that mirror “conventional wisdom”. Well, yeah. I think the burden of proof is on the critic to show that your contrary intuitions about academic quality (or whatever you want to measure) are closer to the truth.</p>
<p>Skidmore fell in rank from 84 or do to 115. I’m not sure why this occurred. The college had a record number of applicants this past college admission cycle and therefore a lower acceptance rate. In addition not much else changed . Any insight?</p>
To me, it suggests that the input and output criteria have a strong relationship to each other–but whether they really measure academic quality is still unclear. It’s awfully hard to tell whether top schools educate people so they will do well, or if they’re just good at recruiting people who will do well anyway.</p>
<p>Yeah, but what’s an effective measure to decide what to weight the given criteria? Why are NSF and Fulbright weighted at 7.5% and PHD production at 3.75%? LACs would probably do significantly better in the rankings if these weightings were switched, but then the rankings likely wouldn’t ‘make sense.’</p>
<p>I think it’s pretty hard to say that there’s a truth out, or that with every year the rankings are getting more sophisticated ore refined. But here is something i think you’d find to be interesting. I compared Forbes’ 2012 ranking to the 2013 one. There is an overlap of 15 universities between their 2012 ranking and their 2013 ranking. LACs take up a large portion of the 2012 ranking overall, so even though Georgetown is ranked as the 20th university, it’s listed 38th overall in the ranking.</p>
<p>Another thing worth noting is that LACs did significantly worse in the 2013 ranking compared to the 2012 one. In 2013, LACs comprise 8 of the top 30 colleges; in 2012 they comprised 15. Here’s a ranking of the top 20 universities from the 2012 ranking (Note: Universities are listed on the far left side; after it, and separated by forward slashes are LACs and military academies.)</p>