<p>Here is a bit less flattering description of West Point education by a recent graduate. (I have no personal knowledge of West Point or other military academies, but this description was quite shocking to me…):
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<p>You know, I’m a left wing Democrat and haven’t supported the war in Iraq and still don’t. However, I still respect those who are willing to undergo the discipline describe above to accomplish something they believe in. The policy issues are something else.</p>
<p>And most who enroll know what they’re getting into.</p>
<p>^^ Obviously not one who took to military life. Also, it should be three weeks for summer break. I know and work with many WP grads and am a USAFA grad myself. You can’t beat the education (I have 30 hours of science and engineering despite being a management major). The core curriculum, while brutal, is a reason why so many grads succeed. I had an AF career in which I was able to converse (not fluently) with engineers about design problems due to my academic background. The rest of it I look at as experiences that I would never have had in a civilian college (survival training, airborne training, etc).</p>
<p>I guess if you own a magazine, you can rate colleges however you like. The number one college for my kid is the one he chose and where he’s thriving. I hope for equally good fortune for all of your kids!</p>
<p>
A testimony to the rigorous and broad education that all cadets receive.
All are required to take 4 semesters of a foreign language, except engineering majors who take 2 semesters.
All take Calc I, Calc II and Diff Eq, 2 sems of Chem and 2 sems of Physics; all take an engineering sequence.<br>
The credit course load is between 18-21 credits a semester.</p>
<p>I just finally took the time to scan through the list. At the very least, I think the list is interesting because I think it attempts to get to “value” more than US News. Graduation rate - yes important information, # national/global awards by faculty and students gets at the caliber of the education, student satisfaction with instructors is important, and postgraduate vocational success is always an important consideration. The only one that feels like an outlier is the average debt where obviously schools that attract upper income kids will have lower debt levels. Rankings to me are of little importance, but I do like the fact that someone is attempting to get at a “value” equation for college education. I also like that this list doesn’t include the yield which is clearly a number that can be highly manipulated and gives false info.</p>
<p>if that kid didn’t like it at West Point, he could’ve walked away at ANYTIME during the first 2 years with no obligation.</p>
<p>and that might be what he should’ve done. Obviously the military academies are not for everyone.</p>
<p>as an aside, I am currently reading The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier’s Education by Craig Mullaney. He graduated 2nd in his class and got a Rhodes Scholarship. It’s a good read so far.</p>
<p>I’ve heard that one of the more popular extracurriculars for cadets at West Point is complaining about West Point. The moment the cadets graduate and see their alma mater in the rear view window of their car they remember all the good times.</p>
<p>It’s a tough life that they have chosen. The application process can take over a year. For those who decide it’s not for them, they can leave at any time before junior year begins. Every liberal arts major pursues an engineering sequence. Every engineering/science major takes liberal arts classes. It’s a well-rounded education that prepares the cadets well for careers in the Army and later in the civilian world. </p>
<p>In terms of value, every graduate has a job with both technical and leadership training.</p>
<p>My hat is off to anyone who makes their life the armed services – any branch, whether they attend west point or are enlisted. It is not for everyone, but if it were for no one this would be a very different country indeed and forums like this might not even exist!!</p>
<p>So… while I wish there were more non-discriminatory policies in place in our gov’t, and I never liked the reasons behind the Iraq war as it pertained to weapons of mass destruction I fully support the men and women there. It takes a discipline that most would never understand. Whether such a life or education develops creativity or ingenuity is quite besides the point. There are always going to be plenty of those types and it’s not as if you have to have a armed services education to work for the gov’t or be involved in their “think tanks.”</p>
<p>This is one of the weirder commercial rankings. Brown and Berkeley at #72 and #73, respectively (between Wofford College and the College of Wooster)? Even if we accept the Forbes criteria, it is hard to understand this outcome. Berkeley graduates for example have the highest average starting pay and mid-career salaries of any public university (according to payscale.com data). If Berkeley got hammered on ratemyprofessor.com, how do we know if that is because Berkeley students have higher expectations than Wofford students, or are graded more strictly, not because Wofford professors are better than Berkeley professors?</p>
<p>The problem with the criteria, though, is that Forbes mixes cost-related and quality-related factors in such an unprincipled way. This is an unorthodox way to rate things, whether we are talking about cars and washing machines or universities. Better to separate cost from quality in order to expose how much extra value one gets for extra cost. This ranking hides that.</p>
<p>The criteria mix outcomes with satisfaction and performance factors, but the outcomes (Who’s Who listings or top salaries) are not necessarily the ones most sought by individual students or schools (even assuming they are entirely attributable to college quality, which they aren’t).</p>
<p>I think it just goes to show that different people look at different factors when they pick colleges and universities. There are some definite outliers but the world does not revolve around HPY and the rest of the Ivy League so it stands to reason when ranked by different criteria they would fall into different places. You could come up with a dozen different criteria and the list would of course sort itself differently. College of Wooster gives alot of bang for the buck…as do many of the less well known. College also follow trends, those that were hot a couple decades ago have slipped, those that are popular trends rise. As far as quality, cost value, excellence of professors, good outcomes, and the like one simply has to look at Kenyon, Carlton, Beloit, Macalester, Kalamazoo and the like to see a case where they are all over the place ranking wise but for the most part have the same caliber of education and students but right now Carlton is extremely “trendy” as is Macalster which gets alot of press. These schools are very, very different from large universities - some kids love large universities but the sheer mass guarantees that the outcomes, the professors and the cost values are wildy different. I really don’t like rankings, but I think it’s pretty healthy to have some competition for US News as way to many people read far too much into those rankings.</p>
<p>^ Sure, as momofthreeboys says, you could use all sorts of criteria. If you sort schools according to the age of the bricks in the buildings, some of the most respected schools still will float to the top. But that does not make it a very good criterion. </p>
<p>Glaringly absent, in all the Forbes focus on outcomes and satisfaction, is any consideration of selectivity. If you ignore selectivity (scores, class rank, admit rates), you are ignoring how the most capable students, the ones with the greatest range of choices, have voted with their feet and with their parents’ wallets. The “votes” of every student - not just a self-selected few who report to payscale.com or ratemyprofessor.com - are aggregated in the selection metrics. So I think these (or other data reported in the Common Data Sets, such as freshman retention) are more reliable indicators of quality than the metrics Forbes uses.</p>
<p>I strongly agree that many schools that are not so well known do provide a lot of bang for the buck. However, if that is what Forbes is trying to expose and quantify, they need to reexamine their approach.</p>
<p>WOOT ITHACA College at 1451</p>
<p>I like the Common Data Sets…too bad you can’t find them for all colleges. Those plus a few alumni magazines give you alot of information.</p>
<p>What makes a rankign credible? Is it only good if it is similiar to the another ranking that in your favor? Or … Is it it good if it matches USWR? What happens if they think a school is better this year than last, so they put it above your favortie school? Does it lose all credibility now?</p>