<p>
Dude…only people with no lives talk smack or belligerently praise their profs in ratemyprofessors.com. For all I know, no one BOTHERS going to such tripe websites.</p>
<p>Maybe they’re not making a new list. There is absolutely no news about a release date</p>
<p>One could always hope the smart people at Forbes realized how the “data” produced by those pseudo-scientists from Center for College Affordability and Productivity looked.</p>
<p>After all, they could not be THAT dumb to continue lending their name to such garbage. And, even if the publishers never read what Vedder produced, they know how to read the comments left by readers.</p>
<p>In stats we learned about something like the “negative bias” where people will always be more inclined to respond to a voluntary survey if they have a negative opinion. Posters on RateMyProfessors.com probably aren’t representative of undergrads as a whole, or even teachers as a whole; in general, they’ll be skewed towards the negative. So I think that it probably isn’t the greatest way to rank colleges. That being said, it does use more data points than US News, which is a very small point in its favor. In addition, while it’s an interesting methodology, I don’t really understand why they rank LACs and research universities together. To me, they’re so different that they really can’t be compared; the type of undergrad experience is too significantly different.</p>
<p>To be honest, I know that people value the US News rankings, but I think that for the most part they’re complete and utter crap. Ever since they came out they’ve basically become a self-feeding cycle: Selective colleges are highly ranked, more students apply to them because of their rank, and their selectivity increases even more, ensuring their place on the list. I honestly think that the actual quality of education in any top 25, probably top 50 school is similar, but because the ranking system is based heavily on selectivity (and by extension, the quality of the undergrad applicants/acceptees), the quality of the student body as a whole may not be the same. Like I said, it’s a self-feeding cycle and I don’t understand why people make the US News into the be-all and end-all of college admissions.</p>
<p>(On a side note…nothingto, why do you insist that Dartmouth would be #1 in undergrad experience? To be honest, I think a lot of people would argue in favor of their own school, but it’s always been my perception that schools like UVa, Duke, Stanford, Williams, etc. are all excellent places for the undergrad experience).</p>