Legitimate Rankings?

College Majors Engineering Majors
1

<p>Just out of curiosity, how much would you guys be willing to pay for some legitimate rankings? </p>

<p>I have been running over an idea in my head… For instance, I think that most students would like to know things about a college program in a more practical sense. Why not research the salaries of graduates 5, 10, 15, 20 years out of each of the top 30 programs. Then list the positions that the students(previous students) now hold in the those same time frames, the industries they work in, etc. Perhaps data about the percentage of the undergraduate students that went to grad schools, and which grad schools they went to, and what grad degree they received. Have some definition for distinguished alumni, and count how many have come from each school...The list could go on...</p>

<p>Understandably, that would be a ton of data gathering and quite a tedious process. I believe it would only be a viable option to release the rankings every five years or so, but still - it would be a hell of a lot better than going off of these qualitative BS rankings that they run now, which are primarily a publicity stunt. You would also have to regulate the stuff considerably better than US NEWS does now in order to ever turn a profit - but it might be possible… So, please feel free to partake in my research here and let me know how much you would be willing to pay for such information?</p>

<p>I know when I was choosing a school, I was really interested in the doors it would open for me in the future, not much else.</p>

2

<p>Rankings are useless. If anything, you’d publish statistics, qualify them and let the end-user interpret the results.</p>

<p>Here are my comments:

  • Salaries vary greatly depending on field and location.
  • Not everybody wants to go to grad school. You can’t assume going to grad school is necessarily better than not going to grad school.
  • Data gathering would have to be through voluntary surveys with no way of verifying data.</p>

<p>Rankings force your own ideas of the ideal school on to others, who may disagree with your methodology. Statistics are less biased.</p>

3

<p>Good Points. I better clarify that… What I meant was to publish actual statistics in a very readable format. Perhaps for some of the categories you could list the schools in order according to how they rank on specific categories - such as salaries 5 years out, ect., but it would NOT be an overall ranking such as US NEWS. As far as the grad school thing, it would not have any weight in any ranking, I am talking about publishing the data for individuals - if you want to go to a specific grad school, or type of grad program - you could look to see where many people who did the same thing went to school… so on and so forth - no rankings, I’m talking about actual practical information.</p>

<p>As far as collecting the data, I have a few ideas so far - it would be a task of large proportion, but it MIGHT be feasible to get some reliable information.</p>

4

<p>Any ranking is legit if you care about the same factors that they care about.</p>

<p>I think that this could be useful if you then allowed people to create their own customized rankings - if you let them rate a bunch of factors on how much they care about them, and then return a ranking using their criteria. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this done for PhD programs somewhere on the web.</p>

5

<p>Remember, correlation doesn’t equal causation. A terrible school can have great graduates if great students attend.</p>