<p>Oh, I agree. The only reason, I think JDs and MDs aren’t including is because the data is just more available for doctoral programs. All a magazine has to do is go to the NSF website and it wouldn’t cost them a lot of money to come up with the figures.</p>
<p>This list makes no sense. Colgate should drop 20 spots at least. Lafayette as well.</p>
<p>Unless you are a school or of low self esteem these rankings do not matter.</p>
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<p>That’s a good question. circuitrider gives a good answer. We simply don’t have the data for MD/JD production that we have for PhD production.</p>
<p>One question to ask about MD/JD/PhD outcomes is whether they simply telegraph college admission selectivity. If colleges cherry-pick HS students with high GPAs and SAT scores, won’t that result in the same colleges having many seniors with high GPAs and MCAT/LSAT scores? Most likely, yes. However, the schools with the highest PhD production rates (adjusted for institution size) aren’t necessarily the very most selective colleges. Many small, obscure, somewhat less selective schools punch above their weight in PhD production.</p>
<p>Earning a PhD is an achievement that presumably reflects, in part, how well your professors motivated and prepared you for graduate work in their field. You can’t say that about MD/JD production, because college students generally aren’t taught by MDs and JDs. They are taught by anthropologists, biologists, economists, and philosophers. The schools with the highest PhD productivity often are schools with small classes and a reputation for strong intellectual focus. They run the gamut of selectivity, from Harvard, Chicago and Swarthmore to Hendrix, Earlham and St. John’s. In my opinion, if you care about the quality of the learning environment, then you probably should care about this metric more than some other metrics such as alumni giving (whether you expect to get a PhD or not.)</p>
<p>Great point, tk.</p>
<p>And what matters really is different for every child. For my older child, this is a metric we valued greatly (and he wound up at one of these schools). For my younger one, we will be looking for colleges with a more pre-professional focus because she isn’t interested in “the life of the mind” as much as she is graduating with tangible skills she can take right to the job market (potentially after a master’s as well, but definitely not a PhD).</p>
<p>This is why blanket rankings lists are so useless for some of us, and why we have undertaken a DIY approach (with the help of this site and others) where we can cobble together the factors we care about most.</p>
<p>It’s silly to disagree with a ranking system because a college you like isn’t ranked as high as it with USNWR. Forbes is ranking on completely different criteria, so one would expect quite different rankings. I’m actually surprised by how similar the rankings are in the two lists . A summary of their ranking criteria is below:</p>
<p>Forbes:
22.5% – Graduates on America’s Leaders List (Power Women, 30 Under 30, CEOs on the Global 2000, Nobel and Pulitzer winners, Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellows, those elected to the National Academy of Sciences and winners of an Academy, Emmy, Tony or Grammy, …)
15% – Payscale.com salary
15% – Ranking on RateMyProfessor
10% – Average federal student loan debt load
8.75% – Graduation rate
7.5% – Graduates competitive award rate (Rhodes, the National Science Foundation and the Fulbright,…)
5% – Transfer out rate
5% – Student loan default rate
3.75% – PhD rate
2.5% – Freshman retention rate
2.5% – Percent of students taking federal loans
2.5% – Actual vs predicted graduation rate</p>
<p>USNWR: National Rankings
22.5% – Academic reputation
16% – Graduation rate
10% – Financial resources
7.5% – Students’ SAT/ACT scores
7.5% – Difference between actual and predicted graduation rate
7% – Faculty salary
6% – Percent of classes with <20 students
6% – Students’ HS class rank
5% – Alumni Giving rate
4% – Freshman retention rate
3% – Percent of professors with PhD’s
2% – Percent of classes with >50 students
1.5% – Admit rate
1% – Student faculty ratio
1% – Percent of professors that are full time</p>
<p>Forbes emphasizes graduate accomplishments (33.75% relate to accomplishments), student loans (17.5%), graduation rate (16.25%), graduate salary (15%), and professor ratings (15%). USNWR emphasizes graduation rate (27.5% relate to graduation rate), reputation (22.5%), financial resources (10 to 30% relate to financial resources), and selectivity (15%).</p>
<p>If someone just listed the weightings above, I’d expect Stanford to top the Forbes list and Harvard to top the USNWR list. I’d expect that nobody reading this thread agrees exactly with either weighting system, so it follows that nobody’s personal rankings are expected to match either list. When I was applying to college, I made my own weighted ranking list, which weighted the criteria that was most important to me. I emphasized things like strength of engineering program & available majors and considered many factors not on any published list, such as location & climate and subjective things I thought I’d enjoy at a various colleges, making them a better fit for me. Stanford and MIT topped my list, while Harvard and Yale were unranked (due to engineering specific issues).</p>
<p>Forbes ranking is a joke, several college placements (#46 JHU & #57 WUSTL) reveal the ideological inconsistency with their rankings.</p>
<p>They use RateMyProfessor as a methodology parameter in deciding rankings…need I say more?</p>
<p>Ponoma is an excellent coach, but I disagree on it being ranked number 2.</p>
<p>Spelling it wrong clearly shows you know close to nothing about the school. </p>
<p>Pomona is a top tier liberal arts college, one of the most selective and endowed schools in the country. People have turned down all sorts of other well regarded schools for a variety of reasons. Like any other top liberal arts college, Pomona provides one of the most nurturing, accommodating, and rigorous academic cultures in the country. </p>
<p>As I said in a previous post, most of the top 10, 20, even 30 schools are good enough to rank 1st without being that surprising.</p>
<p>“I agree Wake Forest should be ranked higher… It’s a better school than Boston College, yet BC was ranked 35. What!?”</p>
<p>What, exactly, makes Wake “better” than BC?</p>
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<p>USN rank and a marginally higher yield. 
I’m sure I’m forgetting a few things. </p>
<p>BC has a higher six year graduation rate, greater selectivity, larger endowment, and a marginally higher retention rate. I don’t remember their PA scores.</p>
<p>With all those factors you cite in BC’s favor, it sounds more like it is equal to and possibly ‘better’ than Wake…</p>
<p>Well spotted. I almost went to BC and I think the place is perfect.</p>
<p>However, these differences are small and I wouldn’t say that one is definitively “better” than the other. The difference between #27 and #31 isn’t terribly meaningful, as you know. </p>
<p>Quibbling over who’s ranked higher, in Forbes of all places, does a disservice to BC and Wake, schools which already get the respect they deserve.</p>
<p>I think BC is probably a slightly better college than Wake, though I agree the differences are marginal. BC is somewhat more selective than Wake, with a lower admit rate and higher median SAT scores, despite the fact that Wake is test-optional, which typically means that only the applicants with relatively high scores submit them, artificially inflating the school’s medians. BC also has a higher freshman retention rate and a higher graduation rate, as well as a higher PA score (BC 3.7, Wake 3.5) and a higher HS GC score (BC 4.5, Wake 4.3).</p>
<p>So why is Wake ranked ahead of BC in US News? Well, this is a classic case of how some dumb metrics taint the US News ranking. Wake ranks higher than BC in alumni giving: BC’s alumni giving rate is 26%, good for 29th place, while Wake’s rate is 28%, good for 25th place. One might think the difference between 26% and 28% is trivial and shouldn’t affect the ranking, but what matters to US News is the ordinal rank; Wake comes in 4 places ahead of BC (25th place to 29th place), and to US News, that’s what counts. Alumni giving is “only” 5% of the overall ranking, but when two schools are this closely matched, every point counts.</p>
<p>Wake leads BC by a bigger margin in “faculty resources,” where Wake ranks #26 and BC #48. That’s a big difference, and “faculty resources” accounts for a whopping 20% of the overall ranking. The two biggest factors in “faculty resources” are faculty compensation (salaries + benefits) and class sizes. I’ve noticed that pretty much all Catholic universities fare poorly in this category. I’m not sure why that is, but I wonder if perhaps priests still do enough teaching, and are still generally not highly compensated, that it brings down the school’s average. That seems like a silly reason to punish a school. Class sizes are a more legitimate difference. Here, the differences aren’t huge; BC has 52% of classes with less than 20 students to Wake’s 56.5%, and BC has only 6% of its classes with 50 or more students to Wake’s 1%. But especially if US News converts these small differences to ordinal rankings, it could play a big role in the ultimate outcome.</p>
<p>Finally, Wake has a huge advantage in “financial resources” (10% of the overall ranking), with Wake ranked #6 among national universities, and BC #72. “Financial resources” is spending per student. So BC and Wake draw similar students and get similar results, but it costs Wake a lot more to do it, therefore (in US News’ twisted logic) Wake is a better school. Say what? In most other parts of our society and economy, we’d say that the institution that achieves the same results at a lower cost is the more efficient, and the one deserving of praise. But oh, no, not to Bob Morse & Co. Spend lavishly, and you’ll be rewarded with a higher US News ranking. Now at some level spending matters, but when you have schools that meet full need, have fine facilities, attract excellent students and excellent faculty, and so on, more spending doesn’t necessarily translate into more excellence. I’m not sure why BC spends less; it might in part just be double-counting faculty compensation, since faculty compensation is also a very large component of spending-per-student. But unless BC is so cash-starved that it negatively affects the quality of students’ educational experience or the quality of campus life (and I’ve never heard of such complaints regarding BC), relative levels of spending should be a non-issue. Either that, or we should go in the other direction and reward the school that achieves the same results more efficiently, given concerns about rising tuition and rising student debt and all.</p>
<p>Bottom line, I think US News gives it to Wake on points, for some pretty bogus reasons. I’d give it to BC on points.</p>
<p>Excellent analysis yet again, bclintonk. I appreciate your hard work. </p>
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<p>I’ve noticed this as well. Gtown, for instance, has a relatively small operating budget and, sadly, a relatively small endowment, although I understand that it only started gaining momentum in the 70s. (I might be wrong.) </p>
<p>If you have the time, I would love to hear a comparison of Notre Dame vs. Georgetown vs. Emory, especially in explaining how USN gets to their respective ranks.</p>