<p>Should you really take the rankings of websites such as U.S News/Princeton Review/Forbes/etc seriously?
For example, if a college is somewhere in the 80, 90's of Us News, does it make it significantly better than a college ranked in the 110's? Furthermore, some colleges are ranked pretty high in one ranking, but much lower in another ranking.</p>
<p>I think rank 80 and 105 are basically the same. However, rank 1 and rank 26 seem different.</p>
<p>At the very good and very average schools, its hard to tell. However, they do give general categories.</p>
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<p>That is because the rankings include different criteria.</p>
<p>The only ranking that matters is a ranking based on your preferences in what you want in a school. It may or may not be similar to existing published rankings, depending on whether your criteria are similar to those published rankings.</p>
<p>Check out the website “do it yourself ranking” - you can rank schools based on your criteria.</p>
<p>In addition, I’d say you can make groups of about 20 or 25 schools and assume they’re roughly the same academic quality. “fit” may be different though (religious or not, conservative or liberal, rah-rah or quiet, intellectual or not…)</p>
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<p>“Same academic quality” will not necessarily apply to all subjects. “Fit” includes academic fit based on your academic interests. For example, in the USNWR rankings, Emory, Georgetown, and Berkeley are all ranked #20 (tied). But they are very different schools in terms of what their academic strengths are.</p>
<p>The rankings are useful in that they give you an idea of schools that are similar according to whatever criteria were used to produce the rankings. Too many people are obsessed about having to attend HYPS because they are so highly ranked, but in reality, there are a dozen or more schools in the general vicinity of those schools in the rankings that are virtually indistinguishable in terms of overall academic quality, yet are very distinct in their feel and quality of their individual academic programs. Which one is #1 for you is a very different question than which one is #1 in the rankings.</p>
<p>Where the rankings really prove useful is in grouping less well known schools. This is especially true of the LACs, which are generally unknown by the general public, prospective students, and their parents. Insiders can tell them apart, but ask your average HS sophomore to tell you the difference between Bennington and Middlebury and you’re likely to get a puzzled look. Both are very good with Bennington at #100 and Middlebury at #4, but that much difference in the rankings tells you they are on different levels of very good and difficulty to get into. A prospective student will likely not be interested in both, unless their top concern is going to college in Vermont, which is perfectly plausible, but then you wouldn’t be using the USNWR rankings to find schools.</p>
<p>In short, the rankings are guidebooks and should be a starting point to looking at schools, not a final decision guide that tells you should go to the highest one you get in.</p>
<p>However, LACs and other small schools can have very large variations in strength of departments and other academic and non-academic emphasis.</p>
<p>For example, the three #17 ranked LACs here are very different from each other, and other schools ranked from #12 to #20:
[National</a> Liberal Arts College Rankings | Top Liberal Arts Colleges | US News Best Colleges](<a href=“http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-liberal-arts-colleges]National”>http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-liberal-arts-colleges)</p>
<p>That’s an interesting set of schools, and no one would be happy with all of them, but it is possible to arrange them into groups. I’ve only visited a few, the rest I know only through reading about them, but I would say you could group them like this:</p>
<h1>12 Naval Academy</h1>
<h1>17 West Point</h1>
<p>An obvious pairing.</p>
<h1>13 Vassar</h1>
<h1>17 Wesleyen</h1>
<h1>20 Smith</h1>
<p>For the left-leaning politically active student, in three different flavors, co-ed, former women’s college, and women’s college.</p>
<h1>14 Hamilton</h1>
<h1>17 Grinnell</h1>
<p>The Eastern and Midwestern version of your no-Greek LAC</p>
<h1>14 Washinton & Lee</h1>
<h1>20 Colgate</h1>
<p>The Southern and Northern version of the Greek-dominated LAC.</p>
<h1>16 Harvey Mudd</h1>
<p>In a world of it’s own.</p>
<p>Obviously everybody could group them differently, and I might even agree with you, but few would ever come up with all these schools to even look at as a group were it not for such things as the USNWR Rankings. For that reason alone, the rankings are invaluable.</p>
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<p>Let me you ask this then: Would you rather get a pizza from the highest ranked restaurant in town, or the highest ranked pizza place in town?</p>
<p>You are presupposing I want to eat pizza. Perhaps I just want to get a great meal, need to check how much money is in my pocket, decide what I’m hungry for, and then I’ll decide which of the top rated restaurants to pick off the list.</p>
<p>FWIW, I think Hot Doug’s and Joel Robuchon are both great places to eat and I’ve had each of their versions of fois gras. And a meal for two at one will cost 40x what it costs at the other one. They’re both great at what they do, they’ll both feed you, but they serve different purposes.</p>
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<p>You’ve already decided what you’re hungry for though, so why not choose the restaurant that specializes in what you’re hungry for? The highest ranked restaurant will surely not have the best of everything, but you can bet that the highest ranked fois gras place will have the best fois gras!</p>
<p>It’s a common opinion that the rankings are mostly based on kind of ridiculous and silly factors, and that schools cannot really be numerically “ranked”. But, it does serve as a great list and has schools from almost everywhere that you can look at.</p>
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<p>But you don’t always know what you want. Say I have the means, and decide to get a great meal at the best restaurant in town. Spago also happens to serve a great pizza. Doesn’t mean a slice at any pizzeria in Brooklyn is any better or worse, but I’m much more likely to be “seen” by the people who matter at Spago.</p>
<p>Sometimes, it’s not about the pizza, but where you eat the pizza.</p>
<p>Just did a booth at a large college fair with over 300 schools. Faid number os parents had crib sheet of uS News ranking either overall or in the major school–Engineering, Biz etc. Not so much by dept. Internationals of which there were MANY–nearly all Asian–used Int or US News rankings too.</p>
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<p>A great list would be based on factors that were neither ridiculous nor silly.</p>
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<p>You’ve pretty much just stated that prestige trumps all else with this comment. </p>
<p>This is exactly why the rankings lists should be titled “Most Prestigious Colleges”, rather than “Best Colleges”.</p>
<p>Or perhaps we could have a list simply titled “Most Practical Colleges”. It’s possible for both to be useful. Why buy a Lexus when it’s just a jazzed up Toyota? After all, they both get you where you need to go. Does anyone REALLY need a Lexus? Let alone a Ferrari?</p>
<p>Prestige doesn’t always triumph, there are times when utilitarian will do. But don’t believe for a minute that prestige never is a factor.</p>
<p>If you value driving over just getting from A>B you might just need a Ferrari</p>
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You vastly overrate the importance of academic interests in this and many other threads. Between the ~20% of students who apply undecided and the 50-60% of students who change their majors, at least 70% of students will wind up majoring in something unexpected. </p>
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<p>It’s generally a good idea to check to ensure that a college offers your intended major – you probably don’t want a college without engineering if you want to be an engineer – but focusing so much on the strength of one’s intended major is typically a very ineffective way to pick colleges, to my mind. As a factor, it should be used to trim a list already formulated based on other criteria (size, affordability, location, etc.).</p>
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<p>For the undecided student, finding a school with good academic fit is more constraining, because the school needs to have strong in all of the possible majors that the student may consider, not just a smaller set of majors that a student who has well defined interests can consider.</p>
<p>As a practical matter, many undecided students are only undecided within a set of possible majors (e.g. “physical science or math”, “social studies”, etc.). Such students do not need a school that is strong in everything, but just strong in the subjects within their sets of possible majors, which is less of a constraint on school selection than needing to be strong in everything.</p>