<p>I looked at the Forbes college rankings, and couldn't BELIEVE seeing:</p>
<p>61.) University of Pennsylvania
76.) Georgetown University
77.) University of Notre Dame
80.) Duke University
105.) Vanderbilt University
121.) Cornell University (behind the likes of Randolph-Macon)</p>
<p>Apparently Cornell COLLEGE is better than Cornell UNIVERSITY...</p>
<p>These rankings seem extremely skewed, how do they rank schools?</p>
<p>I’m confused?</p>
<p>maybe it was a particular category?</p>
<p>Link straight from CC. </p>
<p>[America’s</a> Best Colleges sorted by Rank - Forbes.com](<a href=“Forbes List Directory”>Forbes List Directory)</p>
<p>Georgia Tech at 501, Clemson at 425, NYU at 324, FSU at 274. this list sucks imo.</p>
<p>Here is a description of the criteria:
[Forbes</a> College Rankings | 2009 | Best College Rankings](<a href=“http://bestcollegerankings.org/popular-rankings/forbes-college-rankings/]Forbes”>http://bestcollegerankings.org/popular-rankings/forbes-college-rankings/)</p>
<p>It appears they are trying to apply a set of outcomes-based criteria, including measurements for both objective and subjective (“satisfaction”) outcomes. There are a number of problems with this. For one thing, there are big differences among colleges with respect to mission-focus. Therefore, it’s not appropriate to consider the same outcomes in every case.</p>
<p>For example, some small colleges seem to be very good at preparing students for graduate work in the arts and sciences. At other schools, more students graduate with a terminal college degree. Alumni of the former set of schools might include relatively many members of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, but relatively few in “Who’s Who”. Forbes, being Forbes, apparently assumes that being in “Who’s Who” is a particularly good indicator of achievement or status, and that inclusion is largely attributable to the college experience.</p>
<p>Awards per capita sounds like a good metric, but what awards are considered? How do they calibrate the different standards students apply to evaluating professors at different schools? </p>
<p>Many factors are involved in interpreting graduation rates or debt. Consider the analogy of the average wage-earner buying a used Volkswagen vs. a new Mercedes. Which one is likely to cause more debt? Which is the better car? If you say the used VW is a more appropriate purchase for the average wage-earner, that it will leave him more content in the long run than over-reaching to buy a more expensive car, you may be right. As long as you don’t confuse that with product quality.</p>
<p>What Forbes is trying to do, I think (and it’s hard to say for sure), is to identify good choices for a hypothetical person typical of a certain level of ability and income (like Forbes readers, maybe). Their idea of good choices means not absolute academic quality as such, but quality that translates to a high level of career success and personal satisfaction relative to actual out-of-pocket costs.</p>
<p>Princeton #1… i don’t see a problem with these rankings :D.</p>
<p>two things to remember here:
<p>Most of the top 25 are plausible members of the set, if you ignore the relative order. The two that would strike many people as odd are Centre College and especially Wabash (which is a much less selective school than the others). But then, those two are by far the least expensive in total cost of attendance.</p>
<p>Someone might be able to convince me that Rice($41,775) is a better value than UPenn, and yes the rankings would look a little less weird if they just removed all the LACs that separate these two by 20 places. </p>
<p>It’s as if they ranked people by height, but mixed the tallest Africans or Texans in with the tallest Japanese according to how much taller each one is than the average in his own population. The result is presented as a ranking by height, but it’s really a ranking of “taller-ness” or something like that. So a 6’2" Japanese guy is ranked above a 6’5" Texan, just because the Japanese guy is “more taller”, that is, commands more respect for height in his own population.</p>
<p>It’s not a bad ranking system. It’s probably the antithesis of USNews, but i strongly supports the idea of how selectivity and “prestige” don’t mean squat when you’re talking about an actual undergraduate education. The book “Colleges That Change Lives” speaks about this quite consistently. With a smaller student body and a more teaching-dedicated faculty, a student will be able to learn in a more intimate environment with more attention from a professor that is there for teaching and not research. And for the opportunities there, however few they may be, it will be a lot easier for a student to be able to participate that then say some 30k+ state school or even an Ivy.</p>
<p>That’s just what I think Forbes/CTCL are trying to say.</p>
<p>Northwestern is ranked #11. Not too bad. GO NU! hehehe</p>
<p>^^ Selectivity may be over-emphasized, but it is not meaningless. A more selective school will tend to have a more talented, serious student body. All things being equal, that should translate to better classroom discussion and a better overall learning experience. Furthermore, if a school were not living up to its reputation, you’d think it would start having trouble attracting the best students. Not that reputation isn’t at all self-feeding.</p>
<p>This ranking may be well intentioned but IMHO it would make sense to separate it into at least 2 categories, national universities and LACs (and then maybe “best value” schools), unless you are going to rank them all according to some solid, objective measures of academic quality only. The way they’ve done it winds up with a mish-mash of academically stellar schools adjacent to above-average schools that happen to be inexpensive.</p>
<p>If you want a ranking that mixes LACs and Universities, I think stateuniversity.com does it better. They include more objective measures and no subjective ones (like teacher evaluations). Plus, you can isolate some factors like SAT scores and rank by those alone.</p>
<p>CTCL is a whole 'nother animal. That one is a holistic assessment that goes well beyond number-crunching (perhaps to a fault).</p>
<p>Who’s Who is such a terrible metric that Forbes should be embarrassed for even considering it.</p>
<p>While I’m no fan of the U.S. News rankings, and I support trying to come up with different systems, the inherent problem with rankings like these (with absolute numbers rather than relative groupings) you get the same problem: attempting to quantify something that isn’t quantifiable. What is the relative difference between numbers? How much “better”, really, is #1 than #2? Is the difference between #1 and #2 the same as the difference between #50 and #51? Also, make no mistake, Forbes isn’t trying to “shake things up.” The issue of U.S. News & World Report with the college rankings is one of the most popular (if not THE most popular) and best-selling issues of the year. They’re trying to cash in on some of that popularity.</p>
<p>Besides, I like the car analogy used earlier. Could you really tell a student who hates the cold, loves to cheer for Division I football, and thinks the idea of eating clubs are asinine that Princeton is #1? This isn’t something that can be done objectively.</p>
<p>Anyway, I think that the methodology is stupid anyway. Who’s Who in America…maybe. Not relevant to the student who is not interested in being famous, and many of the Who’s Who honorees are in family money or come from wealthy backgrounds where going to a non-elite school wasn’t an option anyway. Reputation is self-perpetuating, in a sense. But Rate My Profesors evaluations a full 25%? I used to be an admin on RMP. The ratings are asinine. People rate their professors low because they don’t like the way they look, or because they failed them on a test or in the class (despite the caliber of the work the student did being worth an F), or because they had to leave halfway through the year because of an illness or a pregnancy (ignoring the caliber of their teaching before then). Likewise, some professors get high ratings because they are physically attractive or gave everyone in the class high grades. The only ratings we removed were ratings with profanity or that were very obviously malicious.</p>
<p>I’m sure they shook some people up when they rated Wabash and Centre as 12 and 13 above some others, and notably that half the Ivy League are missing from the top 25.</p>
<p>I have yet to see a ranking system that takes into account things like a rating of student satisfaction (it would be relatively easy to get an educational psychologist to come up with a quantitative survey of student satisfaction), parent satisfaction, first-year alumni who actually have a job, average time it takes for alumni to find a job, graduate/professional school acceptance rate, 5-year alumni satisfaction measure, etc. Those things aren’t obviously directly tied to the already-established prestige of a school (like Who’s Who, national scholarships, and alumni giving are) and are probably more important to incoming students and parents than who’s in Who’s Who, but they also require more work on the part of the people putting together the rankings rather than soliciting some records from the school (some of which are poorly kept), throwing it into a statistical program and spitting out the results into a list that confirms what most people already want to believe anyway.</p>
<p>Hahaha. What a complete joke!. Anywho, back to the actual <em>official</em> rankings.</p>
<p>Does anyone know the exact date when USNWR rankings come out in August?</p>
<p>Must be an old ranking. LEHIGH (Tier 1 with USNWR) is here #310 with an admittance rate of 28% and a tuition of ~$44,000. Forbes has no credibility…tuition is only $49,000!</p>
<p>errr
there is DEFINITELY something wrong this this ranking
why the hell are Wabash College(12)and Centre College(13) ranked before MIT?
I have never heard of either one of them >.></p>
<p>btw some stats for Wabash College (12th):</p>
<p>SAT Range: 1060-1290 **</p>
<p>ACT Range: 21-27 </p>
<p>% of applicants admitted: 47%</p>
<p>…I still fail to see how this “Wabash College” is better than MIT…</p>
<p>What I like about this ranking is how high the military schools are ranked.</p>
<p>This ranking is complete BS. The critieria are based on how many graduates are listed in Who’s Who as well as evaluations from ratemyprofessor.com. I don’t even feel the need to explain why those are horrible things to create rankings based on.</p>
<p>And this is from somebody who’s school is ranked 17th, above Chicago and Stanford! Maybe I should anonymously publish these rankings anywhere I can without explaining how they were created and just say that they are from Forbes Magazine.</p>
<p>At first glance, the Forbes rankings look outrageous. Cornel and Dartmouth are not ranked in the top 100 and Michigan is out of the top 150. Wisconsin was not even in the top 300! The methodology is definitely lacking robustness!</p>
<p>However, if you separate universities according to types, the ranking makes a little more sense. It is still flawed, but not as ridiculous. For example, if one were to look at how the research universities are ranked, one would get this order:</p>
<ol>
<li> Princeton University </li>
<li> California Institute of Technology</li>
<li> Harvard University</li>
<li> Yale University</li>
<li> Columbia University (a wee bit high)</li>
<li> Northwestern University (a wee bit high)</li>
<li> Massachusetts Institute of Technology</li>
<li> University of Chicago</li>
<li> Stanford University (a little low)</li>
<li>Brown University</li>
<li>Brandeis University (too high)</li>
<li>Boston College (too high)</li>
<li>Rice University (a little high)</li>
<li>University of Virginia (a little high)</li>
<li>Tufts University (a little high)</li>
<li>College of William and Mary (a little high)</li>
<li>University of Pennsylvania (a wee bit low)</li>
<li>University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (a little high)</li>
<li>Wake Forest University (too high)</li>
<li>University of California-Berkeley (a little low)</li>
<li>Georgetown University</li>
<li>University of Notre Dame</li>
<li>Duke University (a little low)</li>
<li>Johns Hopkins University (a little low)</li>
<li>Emory University</li>
<li>Vanderbilt University</li>
<li>University of California-Loes Angeles</li>
<li>SUNY-Binghampton (too high)</li>
<li>Cornell University (too low)</li>
<li>Dartmouth College (too low)</li>
<li>Tulane University (a little high)</li>
<li>Washington University (a little low)</li>
<li>University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign</li>
<li>University of Michigan (too low)</li>
<li>University of Florida (a little high)</li>
<li>University of Georgia (a little high)</li>
<li>University of Washington</li>
<li>Southern Methodist University (a little high)</li>
<li>James Madison University (a little high)</li>
<li>University of Mississippi (a little high)</li>
</ol>
<p>Only 7 of those 40 universities are ranked “too high” or “too low” (more than 10 spots from where they should be). Most of those 40 universities are within 5-9 spots of where they should be.</p>
<p>I think the use of Who’s Who is one of the stupidest criteria I’ve ever heard for ranking colleges. Using RMP as a metric is also pretty dubious - RMP can be a useful tool for students picking classes, but should be taken with about a shaker’s worth of salt, and I think it’s a poor proxy for teaching quality, which I’m guessing is what they were looking for. And those two components are half the score right there.</p>
<p>However, if you care about those criteria, this is a good ranking for you.</p>
<p>That’s the point with rankings. Any ranking is good for people who care about its criteria, and bad for people who don’t. That’s why you should always read the methodology of any ranking you are considering using as a tool.</p>