NEW Forbes Ranking

College Search & Selection
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<p>The-Natural - No. If they are ranking UG experience, they should say that, not rankings overall. But assuming it’s overall because they never said it was UG exp, it is total crap. If they were EVEN LEGIT, they would have ranked Dartmouth #1. It has the best UG exp then any other college.</p>

<p>Forbes is officially crap.</p>

<p>Edit: Ratemyprofessor is total crap. Complete and utter crap. The fact that forbes uses that makes Forbes illegimate.</p>

<p>Sorry but Forbes sucks, and there is nothing you can do to fix that. US News is the best.</p>

<p>Notice how many times I said crap :)</p>

22

<p>“Forbes is just as reasonable as any other ranking”</p>

<p>“Forbes is complete crap”</p>

<p>I say both statements are pretty well on.</p>

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<p>A ranking isn’t crap just because it doesn’t reinforce your beliefs.</p>

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<p>nothingto- that’s your perception. you perceive dartmouth to be the best for UG, when in actuality, that isn’t the case. in fact, you should be thanking the good people of forbes magazine for opening your eyes and using evidence and data to help you see through the fog of assumption and perception. as for your disdain for ratemyprofessors, i can only guess that maybe you’re a professor yourself, and perhaps some of your students left you some horrible reviews.</p>

<p>edit- yes schmaltz, exactly.</p>

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<p>I’m actually less concerned about that than I am about using RateMyProfessors.com. And yes, that site is worse than any college ranking. At least college rankings have semi-objective methodologies.</p>

26

<p>I agree with Schmaltz. USNEWS is based off of prestige, and the quality of the GRADUATE school. What makes USNEWS king? Just because one day they decided to create the rankings to sell magazines and they follow society’s guideline for what is and isn’t a crap school? If that is the case there shouldn’t be surveying of schools, just a Who’s Who in prestige ranking.</p>

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<p>The best thing about Forbes is that it attempts to look at how the graduates turn out rahter than how great the students were going in. Not all atudents can take a B student in high school and end up with a CEO or MD. Some of those “whacky” choices are known for doing that.</p>

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<p>MizzBee:</p>

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<p>Other than the top universities in the land, which we already know without a publication informing us of such, there are some universities that do a better job in producing professionals, ie, “successful grads,” even by taking lesser qualified students. </p>

<p>US News is notorious for not having a variable taht measures post-undergrad success - both placement into grad/professional schools and later the success of grads in their professions. </p>

<p>This would be the hardest to measure, certainly, but I think US News if it were to put its name behind it would do a better job in a site like Payscale, which probably has limited staff and research people.</p>

<p>I think as it stands now, US News had and has been too dependent on ‘how great the students were going in.’ I don’t see many changes in this regard.</p>

<p>Consequently, a lot of schools looking to up their rankings in US News, work the numbers/variables in US News’ grand function that spits out these rankings, which includes concentrating on SATs, etc, which really have no bearing, or eventual bearing, on how these grads turn out, esp, since SAT only predicts initial success (I’m not speaking or writing about those with high grades and high scores).</p>

<p>A lot of state universities, which don’t have that need to pitch themselves or work the numbers, and as a consequence are not highly rated in US News, will always turn out productive grads. I’m thinking of places like Wisconsin, Madison; UGa; and some others.</p>

<p>I like Forbes; I like its attempt with a different approach, even if it is flawed.</p>

29

<p>Wow this is getting out of hand with wrong things. US News bases things off of graduate school? Oh that’s right, thats why there is a section called best Undergrad school? If the rankings are based on Prestige I doubt Dartmouth would have been #1, rather then Harvard, or Princeton. Seriously guys.</p>

30

<p>Seems like no one knows when the Forbes rankings will come out? Are they even coming out this year?</p>

31

<p>Agreed that Forbes rankings are crap.</p>

32

<p>Forbes methodology using “Rate My Professor” does not favor Dartmouth, where each undergraduate must extensively evaluate each class and its professor at the end of each term using an in-house system.</p>

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<p>lol its more like no one really cares…</p>

<p>We’re more focused on when the USNEWS Rankings are coming out.</p>

34

<p>^ That is the truth. Everyone is waiting for USNEWS rankings.</p>

35

<p>I wish that US News would have a ranking combining LACs and Universities.</p>

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<p>^But that would be really weird and unfair imo. I personally think LACs and research universities are really different and incomparable.</p>

37

<p>I still remember a few years back when forbes ranked air force academy as #1
But come on, with all the physical training and sexual harassment at air force academy there’s no way that it can be #1 in ug experience >_></p>

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<p>How so? It does not consider student quality of life at all. It’s more like a cost-benefit analysis. How good is the quality of instruction (based on student evaluations and faculty awards)? Will it pay off in graduate success? Will you be able to graduate on time? How much debt will you incur to graduate?</p>

<p>Those would be good things to know about colleges. So the rankings are not total crap. The problem is with the data they use to answer those questions (Who’s Who, RateMyProfessor).</p>

<p>Factors:
number of alumni in Who’s Who in America (25 percent);
student evaluations of professors from Ratemyprofessors.com (25 percent);
four-year graduation rates (16 2/3 percent);
enrollment-adjusted numbers of students and faculty receiving nationally competitive awards (16 2/3 percent);
average four year accumulated student debt of those borrowing money (16 2/3 percent)
([Forbes</a> College Rankings | 2010 | Best College Rankings](<a href=“http://bestcollegerankings.org/popular-rankings/forbes-college-rankings/]Forbes”>http://bestcollegerankings.org/popular-rankings/forbes-college-rankings/))</p>

39

<p>So 50% of it is ranked on total crap! No wonder it is so far off base.</p>

40

<p>^ I’d be more generous. I’d say at least 25% (the Who’s Who part) is mostly crap. Even if a Who’s Who listing represents a significant life accomplishment, and even if the process is pure, to what extent is the listing attributable to college quality? </p>

<p>As for the 25% from ratemyprofessors, that represents 7 million data points. How many peer assements does US News collect? About 1000? No doubt there is a certain amount of bias in either sample but at least rmp has the advantage of volume. And the advantage that student evaluators are intimately familiar with the professors they are rating. </p>

<p>Anyway, what is so wildly off base about the Forbes list? Ordering aside, the set of schools they generate is not all that different from the US News sets (except that they merge LACs and universities). The Forbes top 10: Princeton, Cal Tech, Harvard, Swarthmore, Williams, US Military Academy, Amherst, Wellesley, Yale, Columbia. The only one of those that is very surprising is the Military Academy, but from a cost-benefit perspective, its inclusion makes sense. </p>

<p>People get more exercised, I suspect, when they see Wabash and Centre College in the next 10. I don’t know about Wabash, but again from a cost-benefit perspective, Centre College is a pretty strong school. Its average out-of-pocket costs are much lower than the New England LACs, for a similar educational product.</p>

<p>I think BOTH Forbes and US News are pretty unscientific but in my opinion the Forbes balance of quality factors is more rational. They need different data source(s) than Who’s Who to measure outcomes, and possibly other data sources (or different averaging methods) besides RMP to measure faculty quality. But in principle, I think it makes sense to try to measure instructional quality, outcomes, and costs.</p>