How many of you believe in college rankings?

Colleges and Universities A-Z Boston University
1

<p>I recently got accepted by BU, and I’d love to go there after browsing through different threads posted in CC and BU website. I found that BU is so much glamourous than some other colleges ranked before it. The USNEWS ranked BU 56, and Business week ranked BU 37 i believe. Why does BU have a relative low ranking than do other colleges? Even in CC’s top university list i can’t see BU there? What specifically do those universities have in special? I don’t understand!</p>

<p>For a moment i thought the rankings were misleading so can not be totally trusted.
Besides the “official methodologies” listed on those ranking institutions, what do u know about how people rank universities? Let’s share them so that every one like me who are confused can get things clear!</p>

<p>Thanks ~~</p>

2

<p>Rankings are garbage designed to sell magazines and feed the need Americans have to rank everything, like my designer jeans are better than yours. If you do take the time to go through what little is released about the data and methods, you see that much relates only marginally to quality while others are clearly manipulable. Note for example that Clemson has admitted altering classes to get more in the under 25 or whatever the scale is. Sounds great - pressure for more sections - but it also means some classes are made bigger because every school has limited resources. USC is one of a number of schools that have been caught listing emeritus faculty to exaggerate teaching numbers. Any school that is remotely honest will tell you they don’t really know what kids make after school and yet that becomes a big part of rankings. It’s hard for schools even to track where kids go. Other factors - like size of endowment and library - seem intended to make sure the old prestige names come out on top. And a number of schools have been found to have downgraded every competitor while over-rating themselves. Clemson, for example, rated every program other than Harvard as inferior to it. It has long been rumored that the first iterations upended traditional, off the cuff or understood rankings and so they changed the methods to match expectations.</p>

<p>I’ve spoken to the Dean at a school which is highly rated. They hate the system. Absolutely hate it. Believe it’s total garbage. There are like 3 people there who fill out forms. Three. He says bluntly that he doesn’t know these other schools and neither do the other two people so they barely fill out the papers. They tried not filling out the papers at all but they were punished in the ratings.</p>

<p>Rankings also conflate graduate schools with undergrad. I went to Michigan law. Very highly ranked grad school, as are many Michigan grad schools. The undergrad, where my brothers went, was a fine school, but not better than BU. Ask yourself: how is it possible for Clemson can be ranked in the top 20 when it takes over 2/3 of its students from South Carolina, a state with schools rated in achievement somewhere in the low 30’s of 50? Michigan takes 2/3 of its students from Michigan. The 1/3 of OOS tend to be higher achieving but is that really different from BU or most any other good quality large school? In my opinion, no.</p>

<p>So for rankings, it depends on your field. Some schools have an expertise, but even then one can’t say Lehigh is great for engineering without looking at which engineering fields you mean. It gets most of its money for civil engineering. BU gets most of its money for biomed. You wouldn’t go to Lehigh for biomed or BU for civil as your first choice. </p>

<p>For most fields it just doesn’t make any difference. It doesn’t really affect graduate school admissions, because you need to do well and score well on the relevant test. Our system is set up to weight tests a lot - too much, IMHO - but it means that kids who get into Yale are more likely to get in because they score well, not because they went to Yale. You can go to Georgia or Iowa or Oregon and if you score well …</p>

<p>Some programs do offer more or different opportunity. COM at BU has more to offer a PR or advertising or journalism student than many programs because it is in Boston. BU’s chem dept is small undergrad but large grad so there is more potential exposure to research. </p>

<p>In that regard, look at research dollars. BU gets something like $350M. BC gets like $35M. Northeastern gets about $40M. Tufts gets about $255M, if I remember correctly. Much of that is related to medicine, but it’s pretty easy to see which schools are research universities. Engineers have access through asee.org to how much each department gets in external funding. </p>

<p>So overall, it makes very little difference because you are what matters. Rankings might make sense if they were good at separating out graduate from undergraduate education and if they made big categories instead of an actual list that statistically is garbage. But even then a top tier school is really more meaningful in terms of where you might get in, not what it means for you once you’re there. It’s more useful as a gauge of how competitive getting in is, but not much at all as a career estimate.</p>

3

<p>Lergnom: I am in general agreement with you re: the ramkings. They should certainly never be the deciding factor in anyone’s decision as to which college to attend. But they do serve a purpose, at least some of the components in the rankings do. In the USNews rankings, the Freshman to Sophomore retention factor is important. Assuming the schools are not fudging the figures, a school with a low retention rate is either admitting unprepared/unqualified students who will flunk out or the students decide that they don’t like the school once they enrol and transfer out, or both. Another ranking component, test scores, can give the applicant an idea of his/her chances for admission and also how comfortable they will be academically if they attend. If your test scores are in the bottom 25% of those enrolled, the school may be a challange. If your scores are in the top 25%, then you may be able to breeze through etc. </p>

<p>An applicant should always take the rankings with a grain of salt and look at the various factors that go into the rankings.</p>

4

<p>Except that low retention rate also reflects money and that means schools which admit kids from lower income families tend to have lower retention rates - and lower 4 year graduation rates. I have no idea how that means the school is worse. In fact, one can argue that caring about such things discourages schools from admitting kids who have trouble paying for school, which is not a social benefit. The main reason kids don’t graduate from college is cash. Even the cheapest state schools are beyond many families.</p>

<p>Test scores are the kind of info that’s in every college guide. They’re on the websites of each school and high schools ideally have access to Naviance so kids can graph their scores and grades versus other applicants from the school over a period of time, plus how those applications were treated.</p>

5

<p>It matters less whether we, the students and parents, accept the ranking and more whether graduate schools and employers do.</p>

<p>For myself, I have little knowledge from that standpoint, but it seems to me that the ranking is a good place to start employing students. This is a crappy example, but picture yourself as the head of some developing business. Do you take students from BU (rank 56), NYU (rank 32) or University of Wyoming (unranked)? Assuming all their other credentials are on similar levels (which they probably are if they’re applying for the same job), the college rank is a big factor. For someone who has little time to scrutinize the differences between schools, the USNews ranking is a good go-to. </p>

<p>And that is why I referred quite strongly to the USNews ranking for my college decision. What else do I have to go on? If I am looking at this ranking, all of my friends are looking at this ranking, and the people I talk to in the UC San Diego forum are looking at this ranking, what is to stop employers from looking at it?</p>

<p>In fact, I am still somewhat bitter for not making it higher on the list. Won’t stop me from appreciating BU, but its not too great knowing I am going to the same school some bimbo in my year is going to. With classes twice as difficult, considerably higher GPA, and similar extracurriculars, you would think I would come out on top. Well, I digress…</p>

6

<p>GladKen, I completely disagree with you. There is no difference in a degree from NYU versus one from BU, except where programs may be more renowned (i.e. biomedical engineering at BU). When you apply for jobs and have competition from other universities and the credentials are exactly the same, it’s not about the rankings, it’s then about the personality. Take, for example, medical school. The kid who graduated from state school with a 4.0 and a 37 MCAT and tons of extracurriculars, and the kid who graduated from Brown with a 4.0 and a 37 MCAT (just random examples). At that point, the grades and the statistics don’t really matter, it’s the person. If the kid from Brown has zero personality and the interviewer feels that their bedside manner would be horrendous, and the TCNJ person has a great personality and would be competent in a physician-patient setting, guess who is getting admitted. I can tell you, that as a BU I have friends and acquaintances going to Harvard, Stanford, Penn, University of Chicago, BU, GWU, BC, etc. etc. for grad school, and that group also includes me. The only thing I would ever regret about deciding to go to BU would be the money I spent when I could’ve gone elsewhere for free. However, even looking back, my undergraduate experience here was so wonderful and challenging that I wouldn’t change a thing.</p>

7

<p>Well, as a senior with one semester to go. I can say that there are some things that I’m happy with about my education with at BU and others that I am unhappy about. </p>

<p>Honestly, BU accepts quite a large percentage of students (too many) to make the tier as a private school and that is one reason it lower on the list. I think it’s great that CGS gives people a chance to hone their collegiate skills and decide what they want to do, but no one can deny that it brings down the scholastic average of the school and fundamentally creates a second-class of students, so to speak. Also, given the size of the school, alumni giving is very low. My hometown of Houston’s Rice University (tiny school compared to BU) has several BILLION dollars in endowment and BU just barely reaches a billion. Why is that? We have famous people just like Rice, heck, Nina Garcia, Howard Stern and Rosie O’Donnell went here. Maybe it’s just that we got all the people who are famous in pop culture. Hmmm…Nope, wait, MLK!</p>

<p>Not to mention BU’s pretty scandalous when it comes to Senior Week. I guess I should be happy, but all we got is a stinkin’ Jefferson cup for our graduation gift. I want something useable BU! Also, they did not plan the Senior Breakfast very well. They knew there were going to be a lot of people, however there was no arranged seating available for all of us.</p>

<p>I think alumni giving plays very heavily into rankings and at this point, I don’t plan on giving them a penny more than I have to. Students know the school best and it shows. Someone even told me they got a call about alumni contributions just a couple of days ago—Class of 2010 hasn’t even graduated yet!</p>

<p>Sure rankings don’t show a whole picture, but it can show a part of it and it illustrates the content with a BU education.</p>

8

<p>Thanks everyone for sharing.</p>

<p>After reading your posts, I gotta say I’m having a better understanding about these rankings and stuff. But most importantly, I want to know if people, or more specifically employers in the future have this stereotype about rankings.
I assume school rankings are just like GPAs. These numbers gave you a general picture of how this student/ in some cases how this school does in general. However, will employers consider that as mentioned by GladKen?
I know for BU SMG there is a Feld Career center, and I saw the list of companies employing BU students such as Merrill Lynch, Bank of America, Unilever, HSBC, Citi bank, etc. Do these employments say something? </p>

<p>Also, I know MIT and Harvard are just across the river, so the social environment must be awesome. What influence does this geographic advantage have on the bulding of academics in BU?</p>

9

<p>Grad schools don’t really care about rankings. Maybe if the difference is vast but if we’re talking reputable, recognized, good quality schools then not really. </p>

<p>It’s test scores, grades, resume that shows interest in that field (important for medicine, not for law, and I assume important in areas like archeology).</p>