<p>Most of those are just measure of “student quality” and family income or highly correlated with that. What about the quality of the SCHOOL you are paying for??</p>
<p>To many here on CC student quality is more important than department quality. They feel top notch students really educate themselves more in their peer environments than they do in the classroom. I guess USNWR thinks that way as well. How else can you explain such a discrepency in PA scores with actual rankings?</p>
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<p>I believe some people prioritize “school quality” way too much. As undergraduates, no one is going to read the bajillion copies of books in Harvard’s library, and no one is going study (or even meet) with every accomplished professor at Yale. As undergraduates, no one is going to do every internship available at JHU and no one is going to use every single equipment in Berkeley’s science lab. There probably are special opportunities that Harvard can provide that few other schools can provide, but that goes for almost all of the top-tier schools in the US.</p>
<p>Remember, a top school is NOTHING without a strong student body. Would Harvard really be Harvard 100 years later if it consistently receives a pool of C-students who can’t handle the rigorous workload?</p>
<p>The main job of an undergraduate school is:
- to get a strong and capable student body.
- to provide (academically, financially, and socially) for the students in every way possible so that they leave school satisfied with their time (happiness correlates with performance). This is the key to providing a strong and loyal ALUMNI NETWORK.
- to be able to land the students good jobs with high pay and/or placement into good graduate/professional schools.</p>
<p>Oh I see, so most all of the other schools in the top 200 or so have students who matriculate with C averages. I think your # 2 should be ranked ahead of your #1. A school is nothing without a strong student body? Wow, lots of nothings in this country.</p>
<p>" It’s like red sox fans and yankees fans trying to persuade each other that their team is better."</p>
<p>Not really. At least in sports you can play games and there are objective winners and losers…and it’s not a huge step to say that if one team wins a lot more of these games than the other, that it’s “better.”</p>
<p>The college rankings are more like the Maxim Hot 100 or some “sexiest women in the world” list. Women, like colleges, are way too complex and their “value” is too subjective to give a precise ranking like that. It all has to do with what someone is looking for. I’m sure some people think Maxim’s #100 is hotter than their #1…and how are you going to quantitatively disprove them? Waist size? Height? Length of hair? Number of times on the cover of People Magazine? I’m sure to some people Centre College is the “best” for them…better than Dartmouth. And for some people West Point is “better” than Princeton. But some people seem so eager to get some clarity in their lives that they cling to the US News rankings and can’t handle an alternate view, using alternate criteria that yield alternate results. They want to burn such a list, use it as toilet paper, & shut down the thread.</p>
<p>^agree with your last two posts vinnyli. However, no college ranking can encompass those things. US News tries to with arguably solid numbers (SAT scores are a bit more clear cut than ratemyprofessor) and Forbes completely botched trying to do it with very shaky numbers.</p>
<p>I think what most of the critics here agree on (and what several of the supporters fail to realize) is that the reason this Forbes list is so bad is NOT because X college is rated higher than Y university, or Z university is ranked so much lower than it is on US News, although those can be (biased) indicators of the flawed ranking. The REAL reason this list is flawed is its methodology and horribly heavy reliance on highly subjective, biased, meaningless sources, and questionable consideration of meaningful sources. 25% of the ranking is based on Rate My Prof, which is unused by many top colleges, is only used by a limited and unrepresentative number of students, and is notorious for negative reviews by failing students in revenge for bad grades they earned. Significant percentages of the rankings are also based on Who’s Who listings, largely regarded by many as a pointless money-making scam, and the undisclosed ‘national recognitions’ earned by students and faculty, which we can’t judge on worth because we don’t know what they are. Another large percentage of ranking is dedicated to information from Pay Scale, a self-reported income ranking with stats from limited numbers of alumni that are largely unrepresentative of the full student population of any given school. And of course a good percentage of the ranking is given to the amount of debt students leave school with, without regard for the fact that some students are wealthier than others, receive more financial aid than others, or are willing to burden themselves with more debt to get an education at what they perceive to be a better school. Of course no ranking can be perfect, but any methodology that gives significant weight to these stats is severely flawed.
And of course Harvard being ranked as slightly below #1 is not a valid reason to completely reject a college ranking method, but a good indicator of how flawed this method of ranking is would be the undeservedly high ranking of certain unknown colleges, compared with the undeservedly low ranking of several prestigious and well-established internationally recognized institutions. Yes, some of the colleges are ranked at approximately the right level, but that certainly does not mean that this listing is even close to fairly accurate. It is clear that the methodology used fails to take into account important, objective factors involved in ranking good colleges, and instead replaces these factors with irrelevant, heavily biased, unrepresentative sources that they give undue weight to, resulting in extremely flawed rankings.</p>
<p>^if the Forbes methodology had yielded rankings similar to US News and popular opinion, then <em>maybe</em> we could examine their methodology and find parts of it valid and useful for choosing a college. When you get a ranking that deviates greatly from popular opinion any value the methodology could have had is thrown out of the window.</p>
<p>Going back to the previous page, I really like vinnyli’s breakdown, except that I would weight those going to grad/professional school as statistically more significant that average starting/mid-career salaries. Great schools contain brilliant kids who want M.D.s, J.D.s, MBAs, and Ph.D.s</p>
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<p>I never said UT graduates “have” to stay in Austin, or that BC grads “have” to stay in Boston. I just said many do tend to stay in the region where they graduate from college. I’ll bet you’ll find far more UT grads than BC grads in Texas, and more BC grads than UT grads in Boston.</p>
<p>But I’ll concede this much: many UT grads do end up in Houston or Dallas, the economic powerhouses and main job centers of Texas. So how does cost-of-living there stack up against Boston? Well, it turns out Houston and Dallas have an even lower cost-of-living than Austin. Boston is on average 49% more expensive than Houston, with Boston housing costing 128% more (that’s more than double, dude!). And Boston is on average 38% more expensive than Dallas, with Boston housing costing 86% more (nearly double). </p>
<p>And of course many BC grads end up in New York (77% more expensive than Dallas, 92% more expensive than Houston) or Washington (79% more expensive than Dallas, 93% more expensive than Houston). OK, admittedly some BC grads end up in less expensive corners of the Northeast like Hartford (2% more expensive than Dallas, 11% more expensive than Houston) or Worcester (8% more expensive than Dallas, 17% more expensive than Houston), but even those comparisons come out unfavorably to the Northeast.</p>
<p>Of course, nothing is stopping individual UT grads from migrating to Boston, New York or Washington, just as nothing is stopping individual BC grads from migrating to Austin, Dalls, or Houston. No doubt some do, in each direction. But payscale.com doesn’t give us starting or mid-career salary levels for UT grads who end up in the Northeast or BC grads who end up in Texas. It’s a pretty safe bet, though, that as a group UT grads who end up in the Northeast have higher salaries than those who remain in Texas, because salary levels in the Northeast are higher generally—because they need to be, given these substantial disparities in cost-of-living between the regions. And by the same token, BC grads who end up in Texas very likely have, in the aggregate, lower salaries than those who remain in the Northeast, simply because they’re casting their lot with a lower-cost, lower-wage part of the country. </p>
<p>The point is, raw salary figures taken out of regional context tell us absolutely nothing about who’s better off financially; the data is pretty much just gibberish. And as a financial publication, Forbes ought to know better than to construct a college ranking system based on junk data like this.</p>
<p>These rankings are worse than a joke and arguing about them just tends to give them a legitimacy that they don’t deserve.</p>
<p>To understand these bizarre rankings, one has to understand the bizarre, embittered retired econ professor who creates them for Forbes. His name is Richard Vedder, and his ultimate goal is the ending of all public higher education in the US–no public universities (other than military academies), no federal or state financial aid and no public funding of university research.</p>
<p>In his perfect world there are private colleges and universities for the wealthy and for-profit trade schools and in-house corporate training centers for the rest of us.</p>
<p>^^lol the logic is right. people pick a school because of the location…and they usually want to stay in that region. Also, recruiters are normally only in that region</p>
<p>I read recently that a survey of a Harvard graduating class 20 years out showed the vast majority lived in the major cities of the Northeast with smaller groups in the SF area. Only a relative handful (about 20) were in Chicago (afraid of that Big 10 dominance ;-)). We all know about the relative COL in those areas versus Texas or North Carolina.</p>
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That would be fine, but vinnyli is talking about right after undergrad. It is very common these days for students to take a year or two off before going back to grad or professional school (check average age of people starting med school, law school, and biz school, all over 22) so it wouldn’t be representative to weigh all the students who eventually go back. Vinnyli’s criteria gives a school points if all of its graduates are doing something after they get their diplomas rather than going back home and playing video games all day. Technically it weights any job as much as it weighs investment banking or PhD at Harvard, but I’d rather a college grad flip burgers than have 0 job. Hookem, your criteria would also give benefit to schools where the business minded students need to get an MBA to have a great business job compared to a place like Wharton where the advanced degree in the same field is not as necessary.</p>
<p>Actually, Brown did a report about where alumni were ten years out. I think this data would be really useful/interesting if it was standardized.</p>
<p><a href=“Office of Institutional Research | Brown University”>Office of Institutional Research | Brown University;
<p>“I swear, jenx, you’re all right. At least you sound intelligent. Misguided, but intelligent.”</p>
<p><em>GASP</em> Has the great Hookem bestowed a compliment upon me?!? Allow me to fall to my knees and thank the gods for this show of mercy!</p>
<p>the great hookem ahaha good one</p>
<p>Modestmelody, an ad hominem attack is when one attacks the person instead of the person’s idea or product. Like if someone were to say the Forbes ranking sucks because the guy that compiled it cheated on his taxes.</p>
<p>Before USNews’ ranking, about the closest thing there was to a widely known stratification was the Barrons College Guide’s divisions of admissions difficulty: Most Competitive, Highly Competitive, Very Competitive, Competitive, Less Competitive, and Non-Competitive. Some people inferred the “quality” of a college from the difficulty to gain admission. Barrons, to its credit, did not claim any correlation between difficulty to gain entrance (based on gpa, SATs, ACTs, and % accepted) and quality. </p>
<p>What would be rational would be studies that objectively list which schools have the highest alumini % contributing, the highest % of classes under 20, the lowest acceptance %, etc. And let each person pick and choose from such quantitative lists to determine which is best for him/her. It’s when somebody feels compelled to do the picking and choosing for everybody and arrive at “BEST” list that these studies overstep their bounds.</p>
<p>“When you get a ranking that deviates greatly from popular opinion any value the methodology could have had is thrown out of the window.”</p>
<p>Yeah, like when that psycho bonehead claimed the earth revolved around the sun…</p>
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<p>What is hilarious is that I’m critiquing this particular ranking without saying I support any ranking, and, if you read any of my posts, you’ll see me constantly berating all ranking systems as being absurd using the same arguments you do. The fact that you have the ability to critique rankings as a process but don’t have the ability to specifically tease out the flaws in a specific ranking system is baffling. That’s all I, and many others, in this thread have really been doing. Besides a few hissy fits between BC people and others, this has mostly been about how terrible the data they collected is, not because the metrics are bad but because the data collection is severely flawed and doesn’t actually accurately inform across the dimensions they claim to.</p>
<p>Also, “If you attended one of these traditionally highly ranked colleges that got humbled by Forbes and are committing this fallacy, maybe your school really isn’t as good as you think it is.”</p>
<p>Do you not see the embedded ad hominem attack in this (btw, there are multiple ad hominem attacks and while personal attack is a great simple definition, it’s not quite the totality of the range of ad hominem attacks)?</p>
<p>Do you not see where you’re implying that a person’s argument is invalid because they go to a traditionally high ranked college? This is ad hominem circumstantiae, attacking a person’s argument due to the context that they exist in.</p>