<p>Recently, I was tired of sifting through rankings upon rankings (seriously, I have 20348203985 web links for college rankings). So I decided that instead of poring over their rankings, I'd to make my own.</p>
<p>It was sorta complex, just choosing what to put. I picked out the qualities I felt mattered, and then ranked the qualities in order of importance, and then weighted them differently, finally getting to the actual information (which I'd used the net to hunt down). Once I'd figured out one university and then another (Berkeley and Harvard), I didn't feel they were accurate. (Berkeley was 150 points ahead of Harvard @_@). So I tweaked them a bit, and tried different weightings and changed the qualities, etc.</p>
<p>Then I realized that, really, it's too difficult to do that. Changing the weightings and adding and removing different qualities ... it's simply too difficult. After that, I came to appreciate exactly why all those damned rankings--from US News to THES--are all useless. There's simply NO formula and universities are too different.</p>
<p>Anyway, I encourage those who really pay attention to rankings to try this. I no longer feel a little jealous that Stanford (#4 on US News) beats Berkeley (#21). The results are interesting. =)</p>
<p>It's all about fit. And, it is personal. It helped me clarify what I wanted from a college. The rankings were what some CCer's would consider unbelievable.</p>
<p>Most of my LACs scored better than the Ivies. Unfortunately, I ended up at one of the latter schools due to financial considerations.</p>
<p>Creating your own rankings is a great idea. It can be done successfully. I have done it. Like you, I decided what qualities mattered and then assigned weights. The trick is to get all the factors on the same scale first before you assign the weights. SATs range up to 2100, distance from home can range from 0 to 3000 miles, student-faculty ratio is on the order of 20-50, enrollment can range from 2000 to 35,000, and so on. Convert them all to 100-point scales. For public versus private you can weight them directly depending on your preference, such as 70 for private and 30 for public.</p>
<p>It's a great way to look at schools directly. You can even quantify your subjective impression from your visit on a 100 point scale.</p>
<p>I don't like rankings, I would rather tier schools. Also, You have to separate some of the schools. There are LACs and universities, but then there are small universities that are more undergraduate focused such as Dartmouth and Wake Forest. You can't compare Michigan and Wake, it just isn't fair. So you have bigger more research orientated universities, smaller undergraduate focused universities, and lacs. Then you make tiers. You could argue for a very long time about how to rank Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Princeton, but there is a case for them all, so just make them on the same tier.</p>