<p>Ranked Yale or Stanford out of the top 10 and at 11 and 12 respectivley would you follow and take their judgement or would you brush aside their rankings? seeing as most people follow US news ranks religously i would guess the former. Lets say this were to happen maybe two years from now. What do you think?</p>
<p>I feel like this forum would throw a collective “W T F” if one of the top five schools was not in the top 10. It would cause a huge uproar in the first week, but after that people would brush off this year as an outlier. If say Yale were to be ranked #11 for the next three years in a row, people would find some reason that US News hates Yale (not filling out some random form correctly or not “gaming” the system like WashU) because to most people Yale is truly one of the best places to go for undergrad and it’ll be tough to take a ranking seriously if arguably the best undergraduate institution isn’t considered top 10 or 15.</p>
<p>There are allowed to be years with wacky results. Thats what sells magazines and has people going to the website. However, if the results get too wacky, then no one will take them seriously.</p>
<p>I’d think that Stanford got so much worse during the time I was there and try to transfer out. But really, I actually think it would be good since people would put a lot less importance on USNWR.</p>
<p>It depends on whether this occurred due to a change in methodology (at which point I would judge the accuracy based on how well-designed I interpret the methodology to be) or whether this occurred by sticking to today’s methodology.</p>
<p>Lets say that the methodology remains the same and nothing drastic happens. It just so happens that other schools are “percieved” to be getting better than Yale or Stanford ranking wise and i think 11th/12th is a bit over dramatic. Lets say 8th and 9th for a consistent 3 years in a row. The point of this thread is if this were to happen could they eventually change the perception of well regarded schools such as Yale and Stanford or for that matter HYPSM?</p>
<p>I mean, HPY was HPY before US News and before CC. US News isn’t going to change that. In fact, they redid their formula after Caltech and no HPY school was #1 one year just to keep their rankings “valid” to the general public.</p>
<p>US News is great because it helps expose high school students to many great colleges out there. The point of it is not to make a blanket statement that Harvard is better than Yale. It’s gives an idea of how colleges are perceived in relation to eachother in terms of prestige and strength of student body. I strongly doubt that there are too many people who take the ranking to be truth. Sure, there are people who only want to get into a top ranked school, but without US News they’d still go to the college that they thought was more prestigious based on something else. Personally, without US News I would have never really looked too deeply into WashU or Rice. Seeing them ranked around the same spot as Northwestern and Hopkins made me want to examine those schools more closely because they were of a similar calibur academically.</p>
<p>^no i think most take US News too seriously and look at it as the bible for comparing schools to one another.</p>
<p>^There are probably a few bad apples and random ■■■■■■ on CC who take it too seriously. There are also people who have huge chips on their shoulders and are upset because their college is #16 instead of #14. However, I’d say most rational people don’t believe because of US News that Harvard >>> Yale or Columbia >>> Dartmouth. There are people who believed this already and US News gave them justification for it, but I believe that without US News people’s beliefs about college prestige wouldn’t change and they’d just find another way to validate their college choice or to decide if X is “better” than Y.</p>
<p>Like Churchill said about democracy
“It has been said that US News is the worst form of college rankings except all the others that have been tried.”</p>
<p>^^Lol on the Churchill switch.</p>
<p>US News is clearly more useful for the general areas than for the universities themselves.</p>
<p>It is a flawed ranking, but it does seem to be a bit closer to popular perception than Forbes et al.</p>
<p>“There are allowed to be years with wacky results. Thats what sells magazines and has people going to the website. However, if the results get too wacky, then no one will take them seriously.”</p>
<p><em>cough</em> Forbes <em>cough</em></p>