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<p>I hate to be the one to point this out, but Georgetown did not perform very convincingly in the financial health survey! <a href=“108th%20place…”>size=1</a>[/size]</p>
<p>Where’d they put Emory? Out of 650? This is ridiculous.</p>
<p>^ they didnt include Emory because it provided faulty information</p>
<p>One thing that surprised me was where UCSD is… Number 114, the sixth ‘best’ UC, and not even in the top 20 public schools.</p>
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<p>Some of the Forbes measurements trail off in relevance as you move past the tippy top schools. Harvard, Columbia, Chicago and Berkeley each can claim scores of Nobel prize winners. Most schools can’t claim any. Caltech and a few others have double-digit PhD production rates, but for most schools the rate will be below 5%. How many MacArthur fellows or Rhodes scholarships can most colleges claim? As these numbers drop off, Forbes has less basis for distinguishing colleges by the same formula that might apply more or less well to the top schools. Even a number like the average debt load eventually would approach an asymptote (somewhere around the $40K mark, I’d guess).</p>
<p>^^And yet, it would be hard to argue that Rhodes Scholars, Nobel winners and famous alumni aren’t part of the conventional wisdom with respect to what qualities mark the "best"colleges. Take away the annual brag-fest among the “tippy top” colleges and who else would buy the magazine(s?) As someone else noted further upstream, the movers and shakers category in this particular poll is what probably keeps the littler ivies like Bowdoin, Wesleyan and Middlebury in the running.</p>
<p>^^At least in the case of Amherst and Wesleyan, both of which rank higher in the movers and shakers category than their rank inthe poll as a whole.</p>
<p>High scores of Nobel prize winners and double digit phd production rates are indicators of prestige of GRAUATE education rather than quality of UNDERGRADUE education. Also, high rate of phd production means that the college sending relatively less students to professional schools at the same time. Don’t forget there are three career paths rather than one after college graduation: academic grad school, professional school, and job.</p>
<p>^^I’m not sure what your point is here. The Forbes poll doesn’t measure faculty strength; in fact, it’s notably different from the USNews poll in that respect. Any university’s Nobel winners would be counted among its alumni - presumably, holders of one of that school’s baccalaureate degrees.</p>
<p>The same would be true if a Pomona grad ascended to the Supreme Court. Why should’t they receive accolades for it?</p>
<p>Can someone explain how the Rate My Professor ratings work? They don’t use the absolute average on the website, but rather a difficulty vs average score measure that I don’t quite understand. </p>
<p>You can see the methodology for RMP on page 4 of
[url=<a href=“http://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/155553422?access_key=key-9hsj4hyhweigkrfyija&allow_share=false&show_recommendations=false]Scribd[/url”>http://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/155553422?access_key=key-9hsj4hyhweigkrfyija&allow_share=false&show_recommendations=false]Scribd[/url</a>]</p>
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<p>I think you missed an important point from that comment TK, namely the ‘sixth best UC’ part. In the Forbes’ ranking, UCSD is listed behind Santa Barbara, Davis, and Santa Cruz in the ranking. That seems very odd for number of reasons. Firstly, I think UCSD has the second most Nobel prize winners of the UC campus (it has slightly more than UCLA does.) Second, its endowment is fairly high, and quite a bit higher than both SB and SC; and thirdly, I think it has the third-highest rate for pre-med and pre-law students in the UC system, much higher than the other UCs.</p>
<p>I’m not sure what criteria UCSD did so terribly on, but its position in the ranking, at least in relation to the other UCs seems unintuitive.</p>
<p>edit: Actually UCSD over twice as many faculty laureates than UCLA does (16 vs 6 respectively.) But UCLA has twice as many alumni laureates as UCSD does (6 vs 3) Given that the Forbes ranking measures outcomes, of students, this might be what contributes to UCSD’s low ranking. </p>
<p><a href=“http://nobel.universityofcalifornia.edu/list.html[/url]”>http://nobel.universityofcalifornia.edu/list.html</a></p>
<p>UCSD also has two Fields medalists on its staff (but again, they’re probably not alumni):</p>
<p><a href=“Academic Affairs”>Academic Affairs;
<p>I actually think that CAP is a more reputable organization than US News for analyzing higher education. And I also believe that measuring what a college produces has at least as much merit as the “input” variables used by US News. What is so useful about the US NEws peer ranking assessment?? Asking a bunch of college adminsitrator to rate colleges is kind of useless, becuase most of them know nothing about any college other than the one(s) that currently (or formerly) employed them. I would rather know what colleges “produce”. You can debate the weightings of the Forbes and US News on the different variables they use, but I would rather know how many students get top awards at a university than the median SAT scores or peer assessment. In other words what happens to all the resources, faculty and money spent by a university --rather than how much they spend or have in endowment.</p>
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This is something that I think is a problem with a number of the rating schemes-something that makes a big difference when deciding between two colleges in one tier may not matter much at all in another tier. Just as an example, would anybody think that 5-year graduation rate would be a significant factor to consider in comparing Ivy League schools? I think PhD production is a similar factor, that just won’t tell you much you need to know at some tiers.</p>
<p>UCSD was ranked 1st by Washington Monthly in terms of “contribution to the public good”. So the impact to the society is not an “output” … good job… </p>
<p>[National</a> University Rankings 2012 | Washington Monthly](<a href=“http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/rankings_2012/national_university_rank.php]National”>http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/rankings_2012/national_university_rank.php)</p>
<p>Thanks beyphy, that’s what I was more concerned about. I think it’s hard to rank colleges within tiers, which is why some years/lists will have Harvard at the top, and others will have another Ivy/Caltech/MIT/Stanford, etc. It’s also hard to rank schools when they will have different strengths. </p>
<p>For UCSD though, it has pretty much been the third best UC. Davis and Irvine are both great schools, but not in the same league. Santa Barbara is close. I don’t know. It’s pretty much comparing for the sake of comparing, but it was just surprising.</p>
<p>The “Forbes Financial Grade” is inaccurate and misleading. I noticed that Cooper Union received a financial grade of “A”, even though the college has gone through enormous financial issues in the past, few years, and is now charging tuition for the first time since the school was founded. How does that deserve a “A” rating?</p>
<p>Georgia Tech at #83 is an absolute joke. I’m sure that Lehigh, Cooper Union, Centre College, and a million crappy liberal arts colleges (that cost $60,000+ per year) are vastly superior to a top 5 STEM school. I have no doubts that paying $250,000 to hear bizarre leftists debate rape culture utterly outclasses a Georgia Tech degree.</p>
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<p>One could turn that question around and ask how charging tuition for the first time in 100 years makes Cooper Union worse than any college that <em>has</em> been charging tuition for the past 100 years?</p>
<p>“One could turn that question around and ask how charging tuition for the first time in 100 years makes Cooper Union worse than any college that <em>has</em> been charging tuition for the past 100 years?”</p>
<p>It isn’t the charging of tuition that makes me question the “A” financial rating. It is the financial mess that this institution got itself into that caused it to deviate from the way that it has always operated. This story has been all over the New York Times and other news outlets, so it makes me question exactly how Forbes could rate this institute so high with respect to finances.</p>
<p>Wow, is it me or are these rankings really off. Davidson and Washington & Lee rank near the top? Higher than Washington U and Tulane? Really?</p>