Is US NEWS college ranking good?

College Search & Selection
1

<p>US NEWS College ranking is weird. I think the best colleges should generally have best faculty members with very high academic reputation. One good method to measure the faculty reputation is to count how many members of the national academy of science (NAS) a university has in its current staff. Among the top 25 colleges ranked by US NEWS, some have really very few<br>
NAS memebers. I think they are clearly over ranked.</p>

<p>I will list the top ranked universities and their NAS memberships as below:</p>

<h1>1. Harvard (158 NAS members, deserved the rank)</h1>

<h1>1. Princeton (70 NAS members)</h1>

<h1>3. Yale (64 NAS members)</h1>

<h1>4. U Penn (35 NAS, ranked too high)</h1>

<h1>5. Duke (16 NAS, ranked too high)</h1>

<h1>5. Stanford (125 NAS, under rated)</h1>

<h1>5. MIT (104 NAS, under rated)</h1>

<h1>8. Caltech (68 NAS)</h1>

<h1>9. Columbia (38 NAS)</h1>

<h1>10. DArtmouth (2 NAS, too high)</h1>

<h1>11. Northwestern (18 NAS)</h1>

<h1>12. Washington University (16 NAS)</h1>

<h1>13. Brown (10 NAS, too high)</h1>

<h1>14. Cornell (39 NAS)</h1>

<h1>14. JHU (20 NAS)</h1>

<h1>16. U of Chicago (40 NAS)</h1>

<h1>17. Rice (4 NAS, too high)</h1>

<h1>18. U of Notre-Dame (0 NAS, too high)</h1>

<h1>19. Vanderbilt (4 NAS, too high)</h1>

<h1>20. Emory (1 NAS, too high)</h1>

<h1>21. Berkeley (130 NAS. UNFAIRLY RANKED)</h1>

<h1>22. CMU (7 NAS)</h1>

<h1>23. U of Michigan (23 NAS, too low)</h1>

<h1>24. U of Virginia (2 NAS, too high)</h1>

2

<p>Ranking by SAT Average is good National and LACs combined:</p>

<p>Caltech 1520<br>
Harvard 1495
MIT 1485<br>
Yale 1480
Princeton 1465
Columbia 1460
Pomona 1455
Harvey Mudd 1460
Stanford 1450
Swarthmore 1435
Middlebury 1430
Amherst 1430
Rice 1430
Dartmouth 1430
Duke 1425
Penn 1420
Williams 1410
Chicago 1405
Brown 1400
Wash U 1400
Claremont 1395
Northwestern
Johns Hopkins 1380
Emory 1380
Carnegie Mellon 1380
Cornell 1375
Georgetown 1375
......</p>

3

<p>Sigh... I know this is oft- repeated on CC... but ranking the "best" colleges is like trying to rank the "best" people; it's not possible, because everyone's criteria for what is "good" and what is "bad" in a school is completely different. And how do you really quantify happiness, campus atmposphere, and quality of teaching? You can't. Some of those Nobel Laureates are probably terrible teachers. Each person will find fulfillment in a college experience in different type of environment. A college is a collection of people, and part of the beauty of people is that you can't pigeonhole or numerically assess them. There. My rant against the USNews rankings =)</p>

4

<p>those ranges aren't that accurate. For example, Northwestern released this year that its average SAT of enrolled students was a 1403. That range you are referring to is 2 years old. The one published from last year if you check Princeton Review or Collegeboard.com, is 1320-1500, which would be around a 1410. Therefore, this year, Northwestern will probably have it at like 1340-1510, which would be 1425. Therefore, 1425-1403 is 22 pts of error. Therefore, I would look at these ranges with a grain of salt. Also, the schools are the ones that release this info, and it can be manipulated very, VERY easily.</p>

5

<p>I don't think SAT score is as important as NAS membership, not even close. If you are fairly smart and you learn from the best professors, you have a chance to go very very far. On the other hand, even if you are very smart, it's very hard for you to succeed if you don't have a chance to meet the best professors.</p>

6

<p>Figures are from US News 2004. Some colleges have released new numbers for 2005 but they are not published yet. Northwestern in 2004 has a range of 1310-1480, average 1395.
Princeton review: average SAT 1389
Northwestern 2004: 4,684 admits for 1,915 class 40.9% yield</p>

7

<p>Ranking by NAS membership is stupid. Some colleges are bigger than others, and some are more liberal arts focused than others, and some excel more as far as professional schools go.</p>

8

<p>actually, Northwestern last 2004 was 1320-1500, look at Princeton Review and Collegeboard. 1310-1480 was 2003 buddy.</p>

9

<p>question... do the NAS professors even teach undergrads? if they do, do they do a good job teaching?</p>

10

<p>It would be flawed to assume that all NAS professors are excellent teachers. I am sure the group is composed of excellent and terrible teachers. You are bound to have those more student-oriented, while others are more research-oriented. Many students will tell you "my professor is a brilliant individual but a horrible teacher." The same statement most likely applies to members of the NAS.</p>

11

<p>The order in which the school are ranked always has to be subjective. If you like warm weather, Emory is ranked higher than Harvard. The rankings would be different for biology majors than it would be for history majors. If somebody wants to rank by the number of NAS professors, then that is important to them and let them rank that way. From what I've seen, USNWR rankings are based more on level of selectivity and the SAT ranges more than other factors.</p>

<p>The USNWR rankings are not meaningless because they tell you which are the hardest schools to be accepted to. They certainly don't indicate what would be the best college for you or what college has the best program for you. </p>

<p>I really think that people who care about too much about the USNWR are just overly competitive and have to have a standard to measure themselves against.</p>

12

<p>well, ranking schools by tiers is more accurate. like, say, harvard, yale, mit, caltech, stanford and yale can be in the highest tier. chicago, NWU, columbia and a few other prestigious schools which aren't that famous worldwide can probably be in the 2nd tier and so on.</p>

<p>But its dumb to rank a University wholesale. The rankings are more credible when they're broken down into different faculties. For instance, Chicago's econs ranks right up there with MIT and Stanford's even though, arguably, UoC is a grade below the creme de la creme of US universities. Same goes for Wharton and Cornell's architecture department---programmes that are amongst the tops even though the schools they belong to aren't necessarily world beaters.</p>

13

<p>I think that the USNWR ranking can be useful. However, my only problem with it is that some people only just use that ranking when evaluating colleges, and don't look at other college guides because their schools may be ranked or rated lower than on US News or something like that.</p>

14

<p>I think that the USNWR ranking primarily measure the difficulty of being accepted into the school, and they are useful for that. Also, you might see some names that you would not ordinarily think of.</p>

15

<p>I've never heard of what that National Academicy is, but i guess the more the merrier</p>

<p>anyways, its attempting to rank the college as a whole, you know? like, combination of SAT's, NAS (not the rapper), admissions rate, etc.</p>