Which site is more liable? I have always used USNews, but one my cousin is telling me Forbes is more accurate! I don’t know which site is better regarding college rankings!?!?!
More “accurate”?? Your question has a faulty premise. There is no objective metric to rank colleges… they all have biases and flaws in their methodologies. They all make different choices in what data to use and how to weight them. They should only be used as a very rough guide and small differences in rankings should be ignored.
I think Forbes has a lot of articles that really should be in the trash.
Do u pick your vacation spots based on Conde Nast Traveller’s or based on Travel & Leisure’s “accurate” and totally unsubjective rankings of best vacation destinations?
Freudian. Too bad either USNWR and Forbes don’t have some liability for partially fueling the admissions rat race and the out-of-control tuition costs.
This is the only time I’d ever say this LOL:
US News is more reliable.
Neither, because they are claiming to measure something that cannot be measured to begin with. How do you take something as subjective and abstract as what is “best” when it comes to a college and measure it? What are you measuring that really relates to what is best for you? The vacation reference is a good one. Someone ranks a beach resort as the “best” vacation spot. How in the world does that help someone that likes mountain climbing? Or let’s take every sport that exists in the world. Can we really rank what is the “best” sport? People will disagree based on personal preferences, as they should. What’s the point? Universities are too complex an experience to have rankings that mean anything. It is one thing to rank the best car rental companies, because within pretty narrow parameters they pretty much all do the same thing. Even then people won’t agree, because they like this feature that only Hertz offers or that one that only Avis does. Multiply that by 10,000 for picking a college. At least for the car rental companies it might make some sense. Not even close for universities and colleges.
Even looking past that, the data (which sometimes isn’t really hard data but unreliable surveys) that they use cannot really be used as a proxy for what makes a college good. Just because Professor H in Spokane Washington is not familiar with Centre College in Kentucky, does that make it a bad college? How is he supposed to know anything about the quality of the experience undergraduates have there? I could similarly tear apart every single measure USNWR (and I assume Forbes as well, but I don’t pay any attention to them whatsoever) uses, because none of it makes any sense. But there really is no need, because the exercise is doomed before starting as it makes no sense.
Do yourself a favor and ignore the rankings. If you want to focus on certain pieces of data and ask why it is this for one college and something else for another, that makes sense, if that is important to you. Like why does College X have only a 80% freshman retention rate while College Y is 92%. Or why does one have a 4 year graduation rate of 50% while the other is 75%. Narrow down your initial list based on the obvious factors. Match to your academic credentials, affordability (i.e. do they have great merit awards or are they known for superior need-based aid), size, location, reputation if that is important to you, sports scene, Greek life, etc. Once you have it down to a reasonable number, you can research each one and figure out which ones are starting to emerge in your mind as places where you can really see yourself.
It isn’t an exact science by any means. But using a crutch like the rankings from the profiteering vultures at the magazines is a very poor substitute for the research you need to do for yourself.
US News is terrible and Forbes is even worse.
US News uses many objective factors and at least asks academics for peer assessments. Forbes uses Rate My Professors, which is a complete joke, and payscale, which is a very dubious measurement, favoring schools with business and engineering majors.
US News is better, although it should definitely viewed with skepticism.
The publisher graduated from Princeton and the rankings debuted Princeton at number one.
I agree with your statement, and the rest of your post. I am not arguing with you but just want to emphasize that the issue is whether those objective factors have any correlation to the quality of the education one receives at different schools. That (quality of education) is hard enough to measure, let alone the idea of a “best” college, which involves more than just the academics. That is precisely why the entire premise is so completely bogus.
“US News uses many objective factors and at least asks academics for peer assessments.”
midatlmom, while that is true, the USNWR is very flawed.
For one, it uses a single methodology to rate universities with vastly different operating standards. How can you use the same methodology to rank a public university with 40,000 students to a private university with 6,000 students? From that point of view, it is clear that its methodology favors smaller private universities. For example, it fails to account for economies of scale or the effects of in-state tuition subsidies on financial aid. Using the same methodology without making necessary tweaks to adjust for institutional differences. Another example is the alumni donation rate, which the USNWR claims is an indicator of student/alumni satisfaction, but fails to take into account the size of the alumni body, the history/tradition that the institution has in raising funds from alumni and the aggressiveness with which the university can solicit donations from alumni.
The second problem with the USNWR is that it does not audit content for consistency and/or accuracy. The most blatant of which is the student to faculty ratio, where the majority of private universities do not include graduate students (sometimes thousands of them) while the majority of public universities do in fact include graduate students. Also, over the years, several colleges and universities, like CMC, Emory and GWU to name a few, have admitted to reporting exaggerated SAT/ACT ranges.
Those are just some of the problems with the USNWR ranking. If the USNWR methodology adjusted for the differences mentioned in the first paragraph and audited data properly to avoid the inconsistencies and inaccuracy mentioned in the second paragraph, the ranking would actually be reasonably good. However, as it stands, it is not reliable whatsoever.