<p>I thought the most interesting aspect of it was trying to get at a social mobility index - though whether comparing Pell Grant percentages with graduation rates is a measure of that - who knows?!</p>
<p>Amusingly, son's first choice is on the top of their list. :-)</p>
<p>Horrors ...... how can all those public state schools be so highly ranked?? ;) OMG there are even some 4th tier schools in there.......US news is not the holy grail???????</p>
<p>Actually I may go look for the paper version.. it was interesting.</p>
<p>great to see somebody else take a whack at ratings, while at the same time admitting they might not be especially salient for every prospie (no attempt to rate "academic excellence," for example). Let's support an abundance of diverse rating systems, thereby revealing the joke and thus exposing the whole nonsensical system for what it is -- marketing.</p>
<p>"no attempt to rate "academic excellence," for example"</p>
<p>I don't think it's so much that they aren't rating academic excellence so much as that they are redefining it. It seems to me that a large part of the US News rating of academic excellence is assuming that putting kids with high SAT scores together equals academic excellence without trying to get at whether or not the kids get from A to B, or better A to X or Y or Z. </p>
<p>I'm speaking as someone who went to Harvard after an excellent prep school education. I saw some smart friends of mine really struggle because they'd never had to write a research paper or essay in high school.</p>
<p>mathmom, you're probably right, but I haven't delved into the details of WM's methodology. I made my comment based on their description:
"Academic measures are surely as important as those of research, service, or social mobility in allowing us to judge whether colleges are good for the country. We don't include such measures in our rankings, however, for a simple reason: It is currently impossible to get reliable data on how much learning goes on in America's college classrooms. Until we have good information, we'd rather stay silent than try to go down the path of U.S. News in devising oddball heuristics."</p>
<p>WM did emphasize % of resulting PhDs (in fact, gave it double-weight for LACs), and that's an indicator of academic excellence (we're Reedies around here, and were amused to see Reed jump up in rank). Princeton Review rates academic excellence and quality of teaching (Reed was #1 for both in 2006), but their methods are, I think, anecdotal. I'd agree with WM's statement that objective measurement isn't possible or even desirable -- it's a gestalt kinda' thing, don't you think?</p>
<p>
[quote]
We asked ourselves: What are reasonable indicators of how much a school is benefiting the country? We came up with three: how well it performs as an engine of social mobility (ideally helping the poor to get rich rather than the very rich to get very, very rich), how well it does in fostering scientific and humanistic research, and how well it promotes an ethic of service to country. We then devised a way to measure and quantify these criteria (See "A Note on Methodology"). Finally, we placed the schools into rankings. Rankings, we admit, are never perfect, but they're also indispensable.
[/quote]
[quote]
WM did emphasize % of resulting PhDs (in fact, gave it double-weight for LACs), and that's an indicator of academic excellence (we're Reedies around here, and were amused to see Reed jump up in rank).
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Not sure that having a high proportion of students going on to Ph.D.s is helping the rich get richer. </p>
<p>S went to a a LAC recognized for turning out one of the highest proportions of Ph.D.s (not Reed) but is definitely going to be going from affluent to poorer. Shrug; that's his life, and going from rich to richer was not his main criterion for choosing schools.</p>
<p>
[quote]
ocial mobility (ideally helping the poor to get rich rather than the very rich to get very, very rich
[/quote]
</p>
<p>did I misread this, or did you? I understood the WM methodology to reward poor-to-rich, not rich-to-richer. From that standpoint, taking a Pell-grant recipient and turning out a math professor is upwardly mobile, no?</p>
<p>Ah, GWB... a great subject for CC: three of the most exclusive schools in the land -- Andover, Yale and Harvard -- did not manage to teach this man to speak English as a first language....</p>
<p>hmm marite, thats what i thought at first, but i googled it and couldnt find the bushism, which is odd because thankfully those are usually well-documented :D</p>
<p>Listing Alabama A&M as #24 is just ridiculous.... it is such a very low ranking school. It wouldn't even qualify as a safety for Alabama students.</p>
<p>That's not actually what Bush said, Andrew Sullivan had written a piece some time ago on this urban legend:</p>
<p>Some have claimed that Bush said: "is our children learning?" One Democratic party hack even published an anti-Bush book with that as the title. What Bush actually said was, "Is ... are children learning?" He started to say one thing and then said another. By making 'are' into 'our,' his opponents thought they had located his obvious weakness. By printing only part of the quote, it is easy to deceive others into thinking that he said "our" instead or "are".</p>