USNews at least has variables related to the quality of academics.
To use outcomes correctly, you’d almost have to do it by major, while taking into account cost of living where everyone works/lives (which affects salary).
Then, you might be able to say, “If you want to be an engineer, A is probably better than B.”
I agree with prezbucky. Forbes isn’t really measuring “outcomes.” As far as I can tell, its formula mostly measures how many students choose to go into immediate money making majors and jobs like business consulting and engineering, and it penalizes schools where more people go on to higher levels of academia or public interest jobs that pay less (even though they are hard to get).
There are no good ranking systems, but some are more obviously flawed than others. The worst I have seen is the Economist ranking. The methodology was hilariously bad. This made me sad because I’m a huge fan of the Economist magazine.
@ThankYouforHelp: Forbes takes in to account PhD production and their “American Leaders” subcategory counts a ton of politicians of different kinds and non-profit leaders as well as corporate leaders.
If you want to strip out the salary part of Forbes, then look at my tiers (mostly based on Forbes data but with no salary stuff): http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/1893105-ivy-equivalents-ranking-based-on-alumni-outcomes-take-2-1-p1.html
@prezbucky: Outcomes tell you if the academic quality is worthwhile. If the academic quality is high, then PhD production, prestigious awards won, elite grad school entry, and general success of grads should be high. If they aren’t, then of what use was “academic quality”?
Maybe the WSJ/THE rankings do a better job for outcomes? Salaries are still a part of outcomes, far from the only part of course of course, but still they should be considered along with the other things you mention.
If a kid has a BA from Yale in English and makes $35k at a newspaper, that will reflect poorly on Yale’s outcome score, even though the kid got a world-class education.
Outcomes tell you:
Salary outcomes metrics favor schools where most students major in STEM subjects, especially Engineering and CS, or other pre-professional areas like Business.
PhDs are also largely self-selected: some kids go after them while others don’t. Maybe a school can instill a love of academia in kids, and that might be worth something, but still, they choose whether to follow that path.
To level the salary playing field between heavy STEM/pre-pro schools and more intellectual schools, maybe they could do something like this:
Outcome Score = Average Salary + [(Average Salary)(% of intellectual majors)], where “intellectual majors” are all non-Business/Engineering/CS majors.
That might alleviate some of the outcome bias toward schools with a high percentage of CS, Engineering and Business majors. It’s far from perfect, but at least it moves the bias needle a bit. (and maybe too much the other way…)
It still would not alleviate the cost of living bias toward East Coast and West Coast schools, but at least it would do something to boost schools with relatively more Humanities and soft science majors than Engineering, CS or Business majors.
There may not be a perfect way to measure academic quality, but I think any formula should include class sizes, % of lecturers with terminal degree, prof awards (some do teach), a prof publishing metric (they don’t just teach it; they innovate it) and maybe an academic satisfaction survey to catch the qualitative side of things.
I see a little bit of merit in the “academic rep” thing where college deans rate other schools on academic rep, because it is their job to know; but there’s also potential bias there.
Those are just some thoughts. There’s no perfect way to rank schools; at least, we haven’t found one yet.
“Interesting” is subjective, I guess.
@prezbucky i dont disagree with you, but it also shows which careers a certain school has a long tradition of sending kids into, or whether a school has a strong department that traditionally means higher salaries after graduation. And yes schools that have a strong tradition of sending kids to lucrative careers, and are strong in STEM and business will benefit , as i think they should. But that is not the only metric. I feel all the other metrics do balance that bias of salaries out. It is just another measuring stick and of course it should be used in conjunction with many others that benefit schools with different strengths, so in the end things balance out a bit.
Fair enough. I’ll just weight it less than others might.
Absurd. Cal tech below Rice and NU. penn ahead of Columbia and UChicago. Emory and tufts ahead of JHU.
Why not just throw blind darts at a board ?
^ Well, now we know who heavily emphasizes research rankings at the exclusion of all else (actually, we knew that before).
@Chrchill oh please Penn being ahead of Columbia and Chicago is far from absurd…in fact it was ahead for many years on USNews and also it is currently on most other college rankings apart from USNews.
On the other hand USNews putting Chicago as a top 3 college, along with Yale and above Stanford, now that is rather absurd.
Btw, you did read that this captures a variety of metrics right? These are also valid metrics that many care about.
JHU and Caltech rightfully lose points, student life is far from great, and outcomes for JHU are obviously great but not amazing enough to overcome the issues it has with campus/student life. Makes perfect sense to me.
@Penn95 hate to break it to you, but the ranking that matters is USNWR. Why don’t we start ranking quality of donuts served on campus and add that to the mix and average it ? USNWR just put Wharton back on top with Harvard B School and Booth as Third. USNWR also has Penn medical school way way ahead of Chicago’s. I am happy to accept that. Chicago is ahead of Penn only in law in professional schools. For the sake of consistency, why don’t you challenge these as well then? Fact is that except for Wharton undergrad Uchicago and Columbia are more prestigious and academically more rigorous and more selective. That also applies to the vast majority of graduate school academic subjects (math, physics, history , English etc) I will grant you that PENN is more of a social party scene.
The tierings I see above is unnecessarily layered and hierarchical. As an alumnus of Cornell and Michigan, I see absolutely no distinction between those two universities, and I should know. I also do not see how Northwestern or Penn or Duke, or Notre Dame or Rice are any better then Cal, Cornell or Michigan. And why are so many leaving JHU out of the top tiers?
At any rate, tiers of 3-4 universities do not make sense. There are thousands of universities. Hundreds within each peer group. Logically, there is no way that tiers can contain only 3-4 universities, unless you are looking at an artificially narrow and highly specific group of criteria. However, that is not how one goes about determining overall institutional quality. There are dozens of equally important and imposing criteria that must be considered. All the reliable sources I have seen seem to lump universities in fairly well defined groups, and those have remained unchanged for the last 15 years or so.
Of course, individual students will have different groupings according to their academic interests and personal preferences. But if we are to group universities according to overall excellence, I do not see how narrow tiers work.
GROUP 1
Harvard University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Princeton University
Stanford University
Yale University
GROUP 2
Brown University
California Institute of Technology
Columbia University
Cornell University
Dartmouth College
Duke University
Johns Hopkins University
Northwestern University
University of California-Berkeley
University of Chicago
University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
University of Pennsylvania
GROUP 3
Carnegie Mellon University
Emory University
Georgetown University
Rice University
University of California-Los Angeles
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
University of Notre Dame
University of Southern California
University of Virginia
Vanderbilt University
Washington University-St Louis
GROUP 4
Boston College
Brandeis University
Case Western Reserve University
College of William and Mary
Georgia Institute of Technology
New York University
Tufts University
University of California-San Diego
University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign
University of Rochester
University of Texas-Austin
University of Wisconsin-Madison
etc…
There are small variances within tiers, naturally, and the gap from one tier to the next is insignificant, but it makes better sense than ranking universities…or placing them in tiers of 3-4 universities.
Your group 2 is way too broad. cal tech, chicago and columbia are a clear cut above the others in the group.
I’m never sure what these rankings really mean. Is it for undergraduate, graduate, research, or an amalgamation of those? If it is an amalgamation, how is that useful for someone attending in a specific role and area? Dartmouth shows up in Group 2, but it is not not really as strong across the board in graduate studies and research as ones in lower tiers. Caltech is in Group 2, but for undergraduate study and specific graduate areas, it is one of the most respected and selective institutions. Is it really Group 2 or does it just show up there rather than Group 1 because it is small? Likewise, there are ones in Groups 3 and 4 that I consider better undergraduate institutions than ones listed in Group 2.
I think you are right that ratings should be by group/tier rather than try to split hairs, but I think it should be more specific for undergraduate, graduate, and research.
all rankings are flawed so not sure what good there is in adding a bunch of bad rankings to get something worse. The parchment rankings where they use the method that chess uses is probably the best around. US News at least provides some rankings in majors to give some balance.
@Alexandre I agree with you on your larger tiers however if we’re just considering undergraduate quality and prestige. How can you put UCBerkeley and Umichagan above Rice Emory Vandy and Georgetown. Even of you only consider sat scores(which I’m not) Berkeley and Mich are not on those 4 level. I would also say USC and Chapel Hill are tier 4 schools. I would also create a purgatory if need be between tier 2 and 3, and 3 and 4.
Tier1
HYP
Stanford
MIT
UChiago
Tier2
Brown
CIT
Columbia
Dartmouth
Duke
Johns Hopkins
North Western
UPenn
Purgatory tier 2
Cornell
Tier 3
CMU
Emory
Georgetown
Rice
Vandy
WUSTL
Notre Dame
UCBERKELEY
Purgatory tier 3
Umich
UVA
UCLA
JHU absolutely belongs among the top tiers. I have not studied the school in-depth, nor attended, but they have at least three world-class programs in Biomed (or Bioeng, whatever the correct term is), English and IR. I imagine they have quality academics in other areas too. Their academic rep and admit profiles point to a top-tier placement with the likes of Dartmouth, Cornell and Northwestern. JHU spends more on research than any school in the US, providing ample research opportunities.
When you stop putting academics first in a ranking, you get all sorts of odd results.
As for UChicago being ahead of Stanford and MIT in the USNews undergrad ranking, it’s an undergrad ranking – not a grad/PhD/international rep ranking.
Regarding Penn, I have them on an academic tier with Columbia, Chicago and Caltech. I think Wharton is great and the rest of Penn is very good too.
Tiers are kind of silly at this level – the teaching at the top 30ish schools (maybe more…) is going to be very good at all of them. There may be differences in class sizes and the amount of prof interaction, which should not be discounted, and which may support us splitting these hairs, just a bit… but the kids are all learning the same things. Fit and cost are more important in most cases than academic rep, probably, unless you can verify how that rep has been earned and whether it applies to an undergraduate.
@prezbucky agree re JHU and made similar point above. In fact, they deserve to be and would much more popular had it not been for their location. I made the pint to PENN dude @Penn95 that you cannot accept USNWR for grad schools and dismiss it for undergrad rankings. There is a need for intellectual consistency. Or perhaps they don’t teach that at Penn ?