Misleading rankings for colleges and graduate schools

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Michigan
1

<p>When I purchased the USNEWS rankings of Colleges and Graduate Schools for the first time I never really paid any attention to the ranking factors compiled to produce the “overall” ranking till I noticed that Berkeley was ranked as #20 on the OVERALL top Colleges list. I thought that this ranking is dubious at best as Berkeley is simply one of the very finest schools in the nation and I thought it should be ranked among the top 5 and thus almost instantly I started to doubt the credibility of USNEWS. </p>

<p>Surprisingly, it took me a long time till I finally realized that the USNEWS data could actually be 100% accurate, only the way this data is compiled is simply severely flawed. Specifically, the “academic strength” of a school is but one of 18 factors that determine USNEWS final (overall) score. The notion of a top college implies that it is strong academically so why the other factors come into play to determine the overall score of a top school? But what are these other factors anyway? Examples below.</p>

<p>Freshman retention rate:
The higher the better the overall score! So, if first years students at Berkeley find it very hard to perform and decide to leave then this means that Berkeley sucks and thus its overall ranking should be affected in a negative way! While at smaller schools, Princeton, for example, students are counseled and taken care of and thus are more inclined to stay at Princeton rather than leave out of frustration. Ok. I can see that this factor might be a good piece of information but I fail to see why it is incorporated in the “overall” score for TOP colleges????!!!! </p>

<p>Graduation and retention rank/predicted graduation rate/actual graduation rate:
These are 3 separate indicators although all 3 are basically saying the same thing, i.e. how long does it take a student to graduate. So in a large school like Berkeley, where students receive comparatively small attention, they tend to take longer to graduate and this reflects negatively on the “overall” ranking of Berkeley as a top school?!! Again, I do believe that these factors give us interesting information but they should never be incorporated in the final score!</p>

<p>Percentage of classes under 20/percentage of classes with 50 or more/student per faculty ratio:
All 3 indicators are again saying the same thing: how much attention would a student receive in class…. hardly a good enough reason to affect the overall score reflecting the strength of an academic institution! </p>

<p>So far all of the above (7 factors already) have really nothing to do with the academic prestige of a school and all of them are really nothing but indicators of how “pampered” a student would be at a certain school. </p>

<p>Alumni giving rank/average alumni giving rate:
Now, why do these two factors (both are basically the same) have anything to do with the strength of a school? Of course, money plays a pivotal role in the success of any institution but why does this have to be expressed in terms of alumni giving? Aren’t their numerous ways for a school to raise money? And what percentage does alumni giving contribute to a school’s annual budget anyway???!!!</p>

<p>Selectivity rank/SAT-ACT percentile/Freshmen in top 10% of high school class/acceptance rate
Finally, a few indicators that are related to a school’s academic competitiveness, two of which, however, are very misleading! Example:
Berkeley has selectivity rank/acceptance rate of 14/25% this makes it lower than Yale/Princeton/Upenn/Brown/Duke/Stanford among others. However, percentage of first year students at top 10% of HS class is 99% HIGHER than ANY other school! So, I don’t see why an academic institution accepting mostly excellent students could still be ranked lower in terms of selectivity?? Because of high acceptance rate? But acceptance rate could be a very misleading factor, below are two far more revealing examples.</p>

<p>Michigan—Ann Arbor has acceptance rate of 62% which is higher than schools like Jackson State Univ, NorthEASTERN univ, univ of Tennessee, univ of Delaware, univ of Arkansas, Kansas State Univ, San Diego State Univ, Alabama A&M Univ, Florida International Univ, Stevens Institute of Technology, univ of Pittsburgh, Univ of South Florida, Tennessee State Univ, Univ of Central Florida, Illinois Institute of Technology among many many other schools. Although at Michigan, the percentage of first year students at top 10% of HS class is 90% FAR MUCH HIGHER than all of the aforementioned schools, even higher than Dartmouth/Duke/Stanford/Columbia/Cornell So, how could the acceptance rate be so high? It is rather evident to see that there are 4 main factors that affect the acceptance rate: the number of applications, the size of the school and most importantly, the pool of applicants and the admission criteria. It is no coincidence that Michigan receives much smaller number of applications than many other schools for the simple fact that its tuition is extremely high for a public school that doesn’t pamper its students! In fact, even its in-state tuition is by far the highest of all state schools and its out-of-state tuition is in par with private schools like Stanford and Princeton! So it is no wonder why many applicants think twice about applying to a Public School that charges the same amount of money as a private one while scoring low at the “pampering factors” private schools usually excel at.</p>

<p>Stanford engineering Graduate school has an acceptance rate of 35%, which is higher than schools like Univ of Kentucky, Buffalo, Louisiana State, Univ of Pittsburgh, Univ of Cincinnati, Missouri State, Central Florida, Iowa, Iowa State, Michigan State, and many others. Of course, Stanford has one of the top 3 graduate engineering programs anywhere in the world and as such it attracts far more superior engineering applications than these schools, however, if we are to look naively at the acceptance rate as an indicator of the school’s selectivity then we are to conclude that Michigan State in East Lansing (11% acceptance) is far more competitive in terms of admission than Stanford!!! </p>

<p>A late example of a highly misleading ranking is the so-called TOP 500 World Universities. Coming from an engineering background I noticed that it ranks many schools I never ever heard of as top US schools. This time, I decided to look at the methodology of their ranking rather than jumping into conclusions and I noticed that it heavily favors schools that are strong in both the social and natural sciences (physics/biology etc). The authors even explicitly confess (in the FAQ section) that these rankings have nothing to do with professional schools like Medicine/Law/Engineering/Business etc. So this really explains why a school like Univ of Pittsburgh is ranked higher than Carnegie Mellon Univ!!!! </p>

<p>In the end I have to say that I am not angry at USNEWS or any other rankings anymore…. They provide accurate data, interpret them in their own way and present them to the reader as a so-called “overall” ranking that shows all the factors at play. It is the reader’s duty to interpret the data for himself.</p>

2

<p>Interesting. I agree that one has to be careful in examining these rankings. I only use them to give me a general sense of where a school is. Actually, Michigan's high ranking (at least among publics) was one of the reasons I applied.
I had a really long car ride the other day and I was thinking about a new college ranking system. It would involve a formula that adds up the distances the students' home towns are away from the college and divides it by the number of students. Think about it, a great university like Harvard or Michigan will be able to attract students from all over the world, while a smaller and weaker university like Florida Gulf Coast University or International College (I'm using examples from my home town; sorry, I probably violated CC rules here) will have trouble attracting students outside of my home town. However, this creates obvious problems between public and private colleges. Case in point: UNC caps the number of OOS applicants, so the ranking would be very skewed. However, I think it can be used to compare similar colleges like Michigan and Virginia, or Harvard and Yale.
What do you guys think of this?</p>

3

<p>It seems ripe for manipulation by universities--those which would rather accept a student from India with slightly lower scores than a student from Ohio. I think academic strength and peer assessment should be the vast majority of the score.</p>

4

<p>I would agree with what matthewm said. What does USnews really know about a school's reputation amongst the academic community? Peer assessment is really the best way to gauge a school's overall academic quality.</p>