<p>A lot of professors I talked to at colleges like Stanford and UCLA and Duke have told me that rankings are "meaningless."</p>
<p>Its ultimately picking a university and excelling at whatever they teach...or something along those lines.</p>
<p>So are the rankings just a way for the magazines to sell and make money?</p>
<p>Don’t choose a school solely based on the rankings, choose a school that you like but is still prestigious. Rankings are pretty meaningless, why don’t you google what the rankings are based on?</p>
<p>It’s quite meaningless, though I’m not saying 100% meangningless. At least some information can be provided.</p>
<p>But never make decision based on the rank, you’ll regret if you do it</p>
<p>What they mean is rankings are just a generalization. So many factors go into ranking. For example, everyone knows ivy leagues rank high but just because one year a specific ivy league drops a few ranks doesn’t mean it became a worse school. It just means for that specific year, the factors in determining rank dropped a bit. It doesn’t necessarily have to be academic, it could have been they got less endowments.</p>
<p>I’d say you need to look at the rankings in general terms and not try and be over precise.
For example, it might be debatable that a school ranked #8 may or may not be better than a school ranked #12, but I think it’s a pretty safe bet that a school ranked #35 is better than a school ranked #75. Again, this is a very general guideline. When comparing specific programs the picture might change quite a bit.</p>
<p>The rankings are not truly meaningful.</p>
<p>What is meaningful for you as a potential student are the specific similarities and differences between the institutions that you are looking at. In other words, there are factors that contribute to the scores used to determine the rankings that may or may not be particularly important for you. It does not matter if USNWR ranks College X as #1 if you want to major in a subject area that College X doesn’t offer. It also doesn’t matter if USNWR ranks University Y as number #4000 if it offers the optimal combination of price, climate, geographic location, major, etc. for your goals.</p>
<p>The rankings mean a lot but only because there are so many high school students (and others, including lots of parents) who believe they mean that one school is better than another because of rank. You see that mentality come out on these boards often; it is amazing how many times you see posts debating such things as how much worse a no. 11 school is than a no. 9 school or fretting because their chosen school dropped a place in the rankings. In other words, as long as the masses believe, rightly or wrongly, that the rankings are important, they are. And college administrators are fibbing when they say they are meaningless because they know a fall in the rankings can lead to: (a) students who are firm believers in the rankings deciding not to attend; (b) parents who are firm believers in the rankings deciding to discourage their children from attending, and (c) alumni who are firm believers in the rankings writing nasty letters to college officials demanding explanations for the fall in rankings and threatening to cease contributing money. </p>
<p>As far as actually measuring quality of education at any institution, they do virtually nothing.</p>
<p>Extremely reliable.</p>