How accurately do the USNWR rankings reflect a school's strength?

Parent Cafe
37

I think much of the same colleges surfacing near the top of every list is by design. If a ranking list did not have HYPSM… type schools near the top, then readers would be more likely to dismiss the ranking as garbage, resulting in less advertising money for the ranking maker. Washington Monthly used to suffer this problem. Their rankings used to focus on things like difference between actual and predicted grad rate, social mobility for low income students, and percent giving back to the country. Back in 2015, the top 4 with this criteria were:

2015 Washington Monthly Rankings

  1. UCSD
  2. UCR
  3. Texas A&M
  4. UCB

The rankings didn’t match expectations, which led to many dismissing them as garbage. So over the past few years, Washington Monthly has gradually changed their methodology, each year getting the top rankings more HYPSM like. The current rankings are the first ones for which the top 5 were HYPSM.

2018 Washington Monthly Rankings

  1. Harvard
  2. Stanford
  3. MIT
  4. Princeton
  5. Yale

You mentioned income soon after graduation. Forbes uses Payscale salary as a component of their rankings. Payscale lists the following top 10 for income soon after graduation. Obviously looking at income soon after graduation is biased in favor of colleges that have a large percentage in majors associated with a higher salary, and Payscale self reported is non-ideal, but the point is it’s not the expected list of colleges at the top.

Early Career Salary with Bachelor’s (Payscale)

  1. Samual Meritt (Nursing)
  2. Harvey Mudd
  3. MIT
  4. Caltech
  5. Charles Drew Medicine
  6. Olin
  7. USMMA
  8. Albany Pharmacy
  9. Webb
  10. USNA
    …
  11. Yale
  12. Brown
  13. University of Chicago

Similarly, if you look at the colleges with the highest graduation rate as listed in IPEDS, which corresponds to a criteria used in both rankings, it’s also not the usual list of colleges, as summarized below. You only get the usual list of colleges if you weight these components and others in a specific way…

**IGraduation Rate (IPEDS) **
…
39. Stanford
49. University of Chicago
83. Caltech

You get a ranking far more similar to USNWR/Forbes/new Washington Monthly/… if you instead look at measures more directly correlated with selectivity or wealth of the college. For example:

Largest Endowment

  1. Harvard
  2. Yale
  3. Stanford
  4. Princeton
  5. MIT

Lowest Admit Rate (Among Academic Colleges)

  1. Stanford
  2. Harvard
  3. Princeton
  4. Columbia
  5. Yale
    6, MIT