<p>Firstly, if it’s assumed that there is an objective set of criteria with which to rank colleges, it’s still subjective which criteria the particular ranking decides to include or exclude from the ranking. Consider US News which uses high school counselors as part of a measurement of reputation. Does it really matter what these counselors think considering that most prestigious universities in the US are mostly regionally prestigious? Perhaps yes, perhaps no, but whether this is included or excluded is certainly something which will affect the overall rankings of the universities.</p>
<p>Secondly, even if there is a set of objective criteria like reputation, student to faculty ratios, endowment, etc. every single ranking is still inherently subjective due to the fact that every ranking decides how they will weight particular criteria. And that, of course, influences how the universities and ranked within the ranking.</p>
<p>Small fluctuations in ranking from year to year can easily be achieved by small changes in weightings for a particular ranking. This can be done arbitrarily, or through a reduction in weightings of older criteria to compensate for the introduction of new criteria. This doesn’t mean that university A ‘is better’ than university B now because it’s ranked higher. All that it means is that, when measured across a set of subjective criteria, which is arbitrarily weighted, that university A performs better than university B.</p>
<p>While I believe that no particular ranking in general provides any particularly useful information, I am an advocate of aggregating academic rankings. Provided that the methodology is respectable, it might not be bad to find the average and median rankings for US News, Forbes, THE, etc. based on whatever criteria happens to be important to you. But i wouldn’t take any particular ranking individually as providing particularly valuable information.</p>
<p>And that’s just it. There are numerous aspects of colleges that can’t be ranked objectively at all. So, we just push those things to the side and rank them based on things that CAN be ranked objectively? That doesn’t seem like a legitimate system to me. </p>
<p>Even within the criteria that can be approached objectively, I still really don’t see how there’s any objective way to declare “Harvard is better than MIT” or other such pointless statements.</p>
<p>I don’t think it’s even controversial to suggest there are many objective criteria for ranking colleges. For example, endowment per student, admission selectivity, graduation rates, and average class sizes are all measurable, independently verifiable criteria (provided we stick to clear, consistent definitions of what we’re trying to measure).</p>
<p>I agree, as I posted above, that it’s a matter of judgement which ones to choose. However, good judgement should not be completely arbitrary. Some criteria are more clearly related to academic quality than others. If multiple, independent criteria all tend to point to similar sets of top schools, that suggests they do have some rational basis.</p>
<p>The fact that some colleges game the rankings, or that the magazines toss in goofy criteria or data sources, doesn’t make it undesirable to try to set objective, measurable performance standards. You can consult the Common Data Set and other sources directly if you don’t trust any of the rankings or understand how their criteria work. You can do that while also considering location, weather, political atmosphere, the Greek scene, the sports scene, or any other personal “fit” factors that matter to you. Still, the rankings (and the associated data they provide) can be useful discovery tools. Their value isn’t in distinguishing Johns Hopkins from Cornell by a couple places in the T20 pecking order. Their value is in exposing schools you might never have heard of (maybe a Brandeis or a Macalester) and comparing their characteristics to schools you’ve heard of that may be too selective, in the wrong location, or otherwise not suitable for you.</p>
<p>Silly me. I didn’t realize that MIT had slipped from the top 5. So…in other words, it’s a horrible school that no one should ever even consider going to?</p>
<p>We all know that a degree is useless unless it comes from one of the top 3. :p</p>
<p>I can’t even imagine what life will be like for those poor MIT students. I feel for them. </p>
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<p>That’s one of the biggest shortcomings I see with it. Colleges inflate data because they want to boost their ratings, and the ranking organizations come up with criteria that are basically irrelevant. There is some merit in the rankings as far as distinguishing…say, a top 100 school from the rest of the pack, or even a top 50 from within the top 100…but beyond that, it gets ridiculous.</p>
<p>You can’t seriously suggest that there is any validity to the ordering of schools like the top 10 or 20. People take it that way though. I can’t count how many threads I’ve seen on here from people that are freaking out because they only got into 4 of the top 20 schools, but got denied by Harvard and Yale. Therefore, their life is now over because they didn’t get into one of the top 5. Right. Because an education from UChicago, Stanford, Penn, or Caltech is a complete waste of time because they aren’t #1. U Cal Berkeley is number 21!?!? Why would ANYONE want to go there!?</p>
<p>My plans are to transfer to UIUC from my CC. It’s probably a bad idea though, because US News only ranked them at #46. Never mind that they’re one of the very best schools in the country for physics, engineering, and science in general.</p>
<p>I see more merit in ranking by individual programs than I do ranking entire schools.</p>
<p>Who are we kidding? The only sexy thing on that list is endowment per student and one can well imagine the conversation that must have occurred in the first few brainstorming sessions on the occasion of the first US News poll: someone must have said, “Hey, let’s do ranking of the country’s richest colleges!” To which someone else, a little wiser perhaps, must have responded, “Yea, but sooner or later, people are going to want to know what it all means- where is all the money going? What does it buy?” Twenty years later and I’m not convinced we know the answer to that question except that some schools seem to do a better job recruiting students who are already from rich families.</p>
<p>It’s easy to see why someone fixated on ancient private universities would tout endowment per student as a ranking for colleges. Of course it’s always endowment per undergraduate student, because we can’t have our beloved research universities penalized for having gobs of graduate students on campus. And never mind the annual contributions public schools get from the state legislatures that augment their resources in the same way as endowments, or include state aid programs that don’t show up on the publics’ books as an asset either. We must tilt the playing field in favor of the ancient private universities in any way we can. And sure enough, after USNWR tweaks and toggles and fiddles their inputs and their formula until they get the “right” answer, the apologists with an aligned agenda show up to defend them.</p>
<p>Using a 5% annual spending rule for endowments, including the annual state funding of $500M as an equivalent additional $10B endowment would move UCB from a rather pedestrian $120K/undergrad endowment to top 20ish $520K/undergrad endowment. But no, we can’t use metrics that fairly evaluate public schools serving the unwashed masses against our ancient private schools teeming with blue bloods.</p>
<p>On tablet ATM, so I’m going to have to put this in a bare bones fashion:</p>
<p>Academic quality is subjective in itself. Trying to make sense of which objective criteria to weight is also very subjective. This conversation was about whether rankings are subjective, not whether they are based on objective criteria. Some unknown state school will be a better fit than Harvard for most people.</p>
<p>Rankings can be very valuable if you ignore the bit where schools are being ranked.</p>
<p>This conversation is (or was) about whether Vanderbilt is a “Top 20” school. It quickly became a conversation about whether it even makes sense to ask that question. If you believe college rankings are completely arbitrary, then you would not find them a useful tool for comparing colleges. The data behind the rankings may or may not be useful to you, depending what you care about comparing.</p>
<p>The OP didn’t indicate what s/he cared about comparing. My point about endowment per student is that it is a metric that gets reflected in many other metrics. So whether you care about financial aid, small classes, nice dorms, or state-of-the-art research facilities, a rich school is likely to have more of all that than a not-so-rich school. Vanderbilt is a rich school. There’s nothing very subjective about that statement.</p>
<p>Vanderbilt’s financial resources influence its #17 ranking by USNWR (national universities) and its #13 ranking by Kiplinger’s (“best values” in private universities). It’s certainly possible that these rankings aren’t appropriately counting the financial resources available to public universities. If you’d like to see public universities get more respect, have a look at the Washington Monthly rankings (which reward schools that promote social mobility and spend heavily on research.) Or have a look at some of the rankings driven by bibliometric data, or at that data itself (on the volume & influence of faculty publications). </p>
<p>Or … if you really think the data is all bunk, just go back to asking your Aunt Betty (or the kids at your lunch table) what’s a good school.</p>
<p>I don’t think you’re getting Teskeyben’s point. No one enjoys a peek at someone else’s investment success (or lack thereof) than I do. In fact, it seems to me NACUBO does a good job of doing just that on a yearly basis. People who want to draw the further conclusion that it’s a proxy for the the “best” college in the country are free to do so.</p>
<p>The fact that USNews evidently feels it necessary to gild the lily speaks volumes about school wealth as a road map. So, the first thing that usually happens is that the LACs get separated into their own ghetto. That in itself is a subjective decision that requires a fair amount of explaining and educating. Not exactly a magazine poll’s strong point.</p>
<p>Next, you have to choose redundant proxies for the very thing you set out to measure in the first place: quality - yet another subjective process and again magazine polls are a particularly ill-suited venue for explaining any of them.</p>
<p>In the end, every ranking system has to fall back on conventional wisdom as its ultimate justification when conventional wisdom was the very thing the poll was created to substitute!</p>
<p>I do not want to draw that conclusion.
EPS is a reasonable proxy for (or common factor behind) a bunch of other things that many people who rank colleges (or read college rankings) seem to care about. It’s a less-strong proxy for (but not irrelevant to) some of the things I most value in a college (such as academic focus on the liberal arts & sciences and a high level of engagement between undergraduates and faculty, since small classes and the best professors usually cost money). </p>
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<p>I think it speaks more about USNWR’s need to sell its product than about the power or limitations of school wealth as a quality indicator.</p>
<p>We’ve been over this in other threads.<br>
Much (not all) of their ranking results can be predicted from a few simple metrics. SAT scores and graduation rates alone will generate a similar set. These two measures are components of their system. The rest could be said to be gilding the lily (to create an impression of rigor), although without them perhaps some schools would fall behind, which would offend some readers. Endowment per student alone will generate a fairly similar set. I don’t know if EPS is exactly the same as their 10% “financial resources per student” metric or not. </p>
<p>The desire to flout conventional wisdom is fine, but I think the burden is on the non-conformist to propose a better standard and better techniques for measuring it.</p>
<p>“Conventional wisdom” has nothing to do with my opinion. My opinion of the rankings has to do with the fact that it makes a good chunk of college bound students feel like they’re a failure because they couldn’t get into a “top” school. It can mislead people into going to a school that is NOT a good match for them, but since it’s one of the “top” schools, they go anyway…because then they can say they went to one of the top 5, 10 etc. </p>
<p>Why do we need to rank them? I’m all for a database that actually lets you compare the data that is in the rankings. Fact is, the vast majority of the people looking at those rankings probably don’t even know what criteria is being used to rank them. They just see “school x is number one, school y is number 2, therefore school x is better than school y,” even though the differentiating criteria is so statistically insignificant that there shouldn’t even be a difference.</p>
<p>I see no real reason that we need to rank entire schools.</p>
<p>As I’ve said, I do see some merit in ranking the individual programs within a school, because that is something that can realistically be ranked. Ranking a schools physics or chemistry department, for instance, can be largely based on the variety of courses, quality of lab equipment, research and internship opportunities, the credentials of the professors, and numerous other criteria.</p>
<p>If I’m a physics major though…why should I really be interested in criteria that involves every other aspect of the school?</p>