How accurate are online college reviews?

I’ve been reviewing some ratings/reviews on niche.com and student review.com and I’m getting pretty scared. Every college i look at has overwhelming negative comments like “this college sucks” “this college is like a high school” “this college isn’t worth a penny” “there is absolutely no social life and all of the students are cliquey” Its very discouraging and i have no idea what to think of them.

I haven’t looked at it a while, but that site always seemed to get an inordinate number of disgruntled students posting.

They are mostly posted by students who were rejected by the school.

No reviews involved, but this ranking seems (to me) more credible than the feedback on the websites you listed.

https://books.google.com/books?id=SU-9AAAAQBAJ&pg=PT3&dq=alumni+factor&hl=en&sa=X&ei=86C1VOurC-bCsAT5joCYAg&ved=0CCUQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=alumni%20factor&f=false

About two hundred alumni surveyed per school for this ranking, ostensibly, fewer than the number of self-proclaimed student reviewers of certain schools on Niche, but I prefer this ranking to everything Niche and Studentsreview have cooked. (Whether or not the ranking is “correct,” or reflects the sentiments of all of each school’s alumni, is another question, and whether or not its “correctness” or incorrectness matters is a third.)

Not very reliable, generally. Students with an ax to grind are often most likely to post.

Read the threads out here… You will probably get a pretty balanced look. Go way back in them…

Read the threads out here… You will probably get a pretty balanced look. Go way back in them…

Those generally aren’t too reliable, most current students don’t post student reviews and out of those that do post are generally the dissatisfied ones. Read “An Insider’s Guide to Colleges” or the site uniggo, those are generally slightly more reliable. However, I think the most reliable are people that have posted on CC so that you can get multiple outlooks and you can talk to them, instead of it being a one way rant. You can also tell a lot about a person by the way they talk about certain things and what they value. Even then, I’d take things you read on the internet with a grain of salt

Still, the best way imo to discern personal fit is by visiting and doing an overnight. What may be a fit for a one person may not be for another and vice versa

What if you hear good things about a school on those sites the OP mentioned?

Thank you guys for the feedback its much appreciated. All along i knew that the reviews had to have been slightly biased by disgruntled students but its still discouraging to see.

@albert69 - take the good things with a grain of salt just like the negative things. If I wanted to, I could register for that website and write a review about any college if I said I went there - there’s no proof necessary. I can say any good or bad things that I want about the university. Besides, some of it is subjective. For example, I looked at Harvard’s reviews. One person says that the food is excellent; scroll down a bit and you’ll find another person who thinks the food is bad. Some people say that the party scene is awesome and others say it sucks.