I think forbes is better, academic reputation of high school counselors seems like a stupid metric. So does faculty pay.
(USNWR finally got rid of rejection rate, which clearly encouraged college marketing departments to drive up applicant number)
Forbes https://www.forbes.com/top-colleges/#3d5035ea1987
USNWR methodology https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/how-us-news-calculated-the-rankings
Does it really matter? These rankings just give you a general idea how the colleges rank in relation to each other.
Does it matter if a school is 27th or 42nd? No.
But 27nd vs 400th matters.
In my humble estimation, most people who have gone through the experience of gently guiding their child through the admissions process, and then through the actual college experience, would say that the rank is less important than the fit for each child. In the end, if your child is in the wrong school, he or she will thrive less well than if he or she is in the right school. “Right school” is different for each/most children. If it weren’t there wouldn’t be so many different types of schools!
Narrowing down all schools into a single point, as sharp as a needle, labeled the A-Number-1, Top School, is ridiculous, because it assumes that this school is, on average, best for all students.
There’s someone on these boards who suggested to think about the right school as a Venn diagram. You want one circle for finances; one for academic offerings; one for geography; and then other circles for things that are important for that child (size of school, type of activity, urban vs. rural, Greek vs. non, etc).
Where the circles all overlap, those schools are your child’s “right fit” schools.
The rank is one of the circles in the Venn, for those who find rank important. But it’s just one of the circles.
“Does it really matter?” - only in the sense that rankings affect society or vice versa. Only a few years ago USWNR weighed “selectivity” as 15% of the total! Basically after years of shaming from all sorts they have now supposedly dropped this metric (which encouraged massive marketing by college admissions offices to students who would never get in solely to increase reject #s). (Elite colleges already reject 50% of applicants with perfect test scores and grades.) The next stupid thing on USNWR is “expert opinion”; hopefully more public shaming will eventually lead USNWR to drop this too, since the way this data is collected is useless.
It does matter in the sense that when schools do things to game the rankings without increasing education quality and increase costs for future college students it’s bad. Without joking if a college gave every faculty member a 10% raise it should raise the USNWR ranking of that school. So some of the things I’d suggest are 'bad" since they have effects and do matter.
MODERATOR’S NOTE:
3 posts in and it’s already a debate (as I knew it would be). Closing thread. Per ToS, College Confidential is not a debate society.