As someone who isn’t living in the US at the moment, US News isn’t really used by students here and most students would probably be unaware that it even exists.
People either use QS or Times Higher Education for their rankings. QS though is by far the most cited one outside of the US.
But in the US, US News is the only ranking system that really matters.
QS and THE suffer from the exact same issues that USNews does - it’s all a beauty contest.
Because it focuses on American colleges and high schools.
Despite the USA being the #1 destination for international students (the USA has the largest number of non-USA citizens in its universities), these are just 5% of the students in American 4 year colleges.
According a 2019 student, rankings had a smallish but important effect on the decisions that students made as to which college to attend.
Evidently this is shifting, because a large reason why the rankings were used was not because even that amount was based on prestige, but because rankings were an easy tool to tell students which colleges were “good”. Now there are better online tools which allow personalized “rankings”, which are far more informative to students than USANews type rankings.
True, which can be frustrating for US counselors (like me) who think a student should learn about liberal arts colleges, but the student and/or parents refuse because those colleges don’t show up on international rankings.
I’m not sure the world rankings are even that helpful for that either. Just scroll through the list and this point will be obvious.
Right, but whatever those other criteria are, research activity and output seems to dominate the algorithm. If that’s what you want then that’s what you want. For selecting an undergraduate institution, I don’t see the relevance. Or maybe I should rethink whether Dartmouth is a vastly inferior place to study as compared to Arizona State. Note, I’m not trying to slam any other comparator school, but I don’t think I know anyone who has any insight into higher ed who would say Dartmouth lags behind ASU as a place to go to college, and in fact 99% of them would say it’s the other way around. I realize that this is a variation on the “I don’t like rankings that don’t rank my school high enough,” but at some point when one is familiar with the comparator group and the ranking spits out ostensibly odd results, you have to question the ranking.
Better. But even that … law school is mostly about the country in which you’re going to practice. Hard for me to understand why I want to look at a list that purports to compare UNSW Sydney with Michigan. But then again maybe I am underappreciating the number of people who attend law school elsewhere and practice in the US. But I’m still practicing and I don’t ever run into anybody who did LS outside of the country with a few exceptions of people who studied in England.
The full article without Paywall is at https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2023/03/wsj-the-unraveling-of-the-us-news-rankings.html . I think the quote below is more relevant to the specific percentage weightings that were selected:
At a January presentation to law schools, Robert Morse, U.S. News’s chief data strategist, disclosed that he didn’t commit to a particular mathematical model until after receiving schools’ data, according to Ian Ayres, an economist and Yale Law School professor who attended the event. Once that information was in hand, Dr. Ayres said, the team ran simulations giving various factors different weights to see the potential outcomes before deciding on a final method.
Dr. Ayres said that approach violates fundamental social-science research standards in which the methodology is specified ahead of time to prevent anyone from reverse-engineering a preferred result. .
I’m not sure the world rankings are even that helpful for that either. Just scroll through the list and this point will be obvious.
To be fair, outside of maybe a few universities, most people internationally (I’m talking about your average person, not someone seeking to apply to a prestigious school) won’t have ever heard of the universities that people go crazy about here. There’s only a handful of schools that actually have worldwide prestige.
A school like UPenn or Dartmouth isn’t well-known internationally or prestigious among ordinary people. I have a friend who went to UPenn and his biggest complaint was that nobody seemed to really be impressed by it outside of the US.
Even Yale and Princeton probably aren’t household names but they have cachet among ‘elite’ circles. Stanford is increasing in cachet among the general public but I wouldn’t call it a household name either.
You can bet your house that my grandmother in rural Asia has heard of Harvard though. She’s also heard of Oxford and that’s probably it. A school like Amherst I could bet you my entire life savings that she’d have no idea about.
And law school rankings are meaningless if you really want to talk about prestige. People would rather go to Princeton to become a lawyer as opposed to Penn (when Princeton Law School doesn’t even exist). The prestige of law schools usually comes from their brand names to most people as opposed to the actual quality of the school.
Yale Law School is arguably the most prestigious law school in America to ‘elite lawyers’ but if you ask your average person, they’re going to say Harvard Law School without a question.
Heck, most people in the US hear “Penn” and they want to start talking about their football team.
Many kids outside the U.S. probably only heard of Texas, New York and California.
Mention Pennsylvania, and they think Count Dracula.
“Mention Pen nsylvania, and they think Count Dracula.”
That’s Transylvania University in Kentucky.
My wife is from Taiwan and she says people there know about California schools like Cal, UCLA, USC, Stanford. The only east coast school a lot of them would be familiar with was Harvard.
My wife is from Taiwan and she says people there know about California schools like Cal, UCLA, USC, Stanford. The only east coast school a lot of them would be familiar with was Harvard.
It’s slightly funny/ironic but I think schools like Cal and UCLA have more prestige among ordinary people outside the US compared with among ‘elite’ employers who would favor Yale/Princeton any day of the week.
This is why I think this entire prestige debate is so pointless*
*Having said that, my firm disproportionately hires from elite schools so I can understand why people get so worked up about it. It absolutely matters to a lot of people and companies.
Penn yes. They have a branding problem because of the wide ranging familiarity of Penn State and both schools using “Penn” in their name. Further confusing the issue is their name taking the the form of US flagships (“University of _________”). I suppose that’s why “Wharton” is so important to Penn. In my travels, that is a pretty well known name.
The other Ivies? Put it this way, anybody who has not heard of Princeton is not likely to have much influence over my life or that of my children. At some point, the awareness (or lack of it) of a Chinese version of someone living in rural West Virginia is not something about which I’m all too concerned. Pretty irrelevant IMO.
I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying here. It seems a bit circular, and why would I care about opinions concerning law schools held by someone who doesn’t even know Princeton doesn’t have one? Once you hear that person say that, I would think everything else they have to say on the subject should be taken with a grain of salt.
Well, my argument is that prestige really doesn’t matter that much. And you make the case for me in your comment.
The other Ivies? Put it this way, anybody who has not heard of Princeton is not likely to have much influence over my life or that of my children. At some point, the awareness (or lack of it) of a Chinese version of someone living in rural West Virginia is not something about which I’m all too concerned. Pretty irrelevant IMO.
But your argument is therefore that prestige doesn’t matter?
Because we’re talking about general prestige.
There’s a big difference between having cachet among the elite classes and having cachet among the average person. And having cachet among even a rural Chinese person as you put it is a big indicator of prestige.
As I said, everyone knows Harvard. Not everyone knows Yale or Princeton when you go outside the US.
And yes, among people who matter, they will know Yale or Princeton. But it doesn’t get you the same reaction as saying you went to Harvard.
I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying here. It seems a bit circular, and why would I care about opinions concerning law schools held by someone who doesn’t even know Princeton doesn’t have one?
Which is my point exactly.
Fame among the general public doesn’t really matter that much .
Here’s a poll that sort of demonstrates this. The UK is a relatively Western, wealthy country with a service-based economy. It’s also English-speaking and even there, only 66% of the population have heard of Princeton (‘fame’).
The numbers aren’t quite accurate and knowledge of UK universities will be overrepresented considering it’s a British poll (and there’s a big difference between ‘awareness’ of and prestige). But if the UK only has 66% awareness, the percentages are going to be lower in other countries that don’t speak English or are further apart culturally than the UK.
But the point I’m making is that you’d be surprised how little the average person knows which is why prestige is overrated.
I’ll try and bring this back to my original point. The world rankings are useless to me in that they don’t provide helpful information for choosing an undergraduate school for my kids in the U.S. ; they appear to be of limited utility for law school rankings as well, but beyond that I’ll punt.
I don’t agree that prestige does not matter and the fact that some Chinese person from wherever has never heard of Yale is no relevance IMO. To the extent prestige matters here, which I think it does, the people who matter have certainly heard of Yale and recognize what attendance there means. And with that in mind, prestige does in fact matter in some contexts, though not at all in many others. Knowing the opportunities to which you could have access by attending Dartmouth over Arizona State is information that is worth knowing for a lot of people. So it’s too simplistic to say it doesn’t really matter, and the fact the someone somewhere in Asia hasn’t heard of it or Princeton is of zero relevance to me and I suspect most people who know and understand what those schools offer and attendance implies. And prestige certainly matters in law school and the legal profession. It’s practically determinative of where you’ll start your legal career. Few professions are as prestige obsessed as the law.
Exactly! That’s why I find a world-wide list useless. How many students are there that can/want to go to any college anywhere in the world just because it shows up on a list?
I have a strong distaste for college rankings of any kind. For colleges in the US, I don’t need some publication(s) to distill the information (some of which may or may not be relevant or important to me) they collect to a single number for me. I can do a better analysis myself, based on the criteria I choose. However, for universities overseas, I can’t really do that for most of them. International rankings based on a relatively objective set of criteria (which they tend to rely more on than USNews does) are somewhat useful to me so I would have some ideas about the persons and/or entities that I’m dealing with.
I’m not sure how you’re disagreeing with me.
You’ve talked about prestige but what you seem to be referring to is prestige among elite employers, not among the general world public.
That’s pretty much what I said. And as someone who does work at a firm that someone would probably say is prestige-obsessed (buyside investing), I never said prestige among ‘those who know’ is not important.
The point I was making is there’s a difference between prestige among the general public and those who know. And what you’ve said supports exactly what I’m saying. I was making the point that prestige among the public is less important than prestige among employers.
The average person worldwide isn’t going to be that familiar with Princeton. But elite employers like Investment Banks and Management Consultancy firms will be.
But let me bring this back to my original point as well. The point is, rankings really aren’t that useful. Employers know what is and isn’t a good school based on their workforce.
Beyond that, I too will punt but the idea that employers will be looking deeply at rankings is slightly laughable. HR will have a few schools that they flag at my firm (Harvard, Yale etc.) but when you get down the list, it really doesn’t make a difference.
And it’s been the case at other firms I’ve worked at too. And my employer isn’t flagging those schools based on ranking but because those are the schools that disproportionately make up our work force already and we’re familiar with them. If Harvard were to rank 10th, it wouldn’t mean we stop flagging Harvard kids.