Another ranking is not a step in the right direction, and adding bad data with more bad data is not going to give good data.
Oh goodie- another ranking list!! Her is my all time favorite ranking list. Be sure to keep refreshing the “classic” list to truly appreciate it http://www.rankyourcollege.com/ddmethod.html Actually- pick the classic or the fairness option and keep refreshing.
I agree that this is another silly ranking system, although perhaps no sillier than US News.
The silliness of numerical ranking aside, I feel compelled to respond to @ProfessorPlum168’s comment.
Whether people have heard of a school is, IMHO, a terrible way to judge educational quality. Sure, most people can tell you where the University of Arizona is located (Arizona, right?) and that Alabama has a good football team, but ask them about the quality of the English or Chemistry department and you’ll get a blank stare.
Ask most people which school is better, Olin College or UCLA and the vast majority will choose ULCA, never having heard of Olin, despite the fact that Olin’s average SAT scores are much higher than UCLA’s and the admit rate at Olin substantially lower. Just because a place is small doesn’t mean it can’t be excellent.
This list seems like it was done someone who loves 538, averaging polls to find a stable consensus. But there’s a big difference between averaging polls so that the outliers are less outlier-ly and averaging a bunch of rankings, which are quite shaky to begin with.
Publisher rankings are mixed with student rankings. Okay. But there’s still that nagging issue that always bothers me. So many data points except the one that is most important: what actually happens in the classroom. It’s like ranking restaurants using a dozen data points except, you know, whether or not the food is any good.
Yawn.
This new “poll” strikes me more as a notable exercise in entrepreneurship on the part of its compiler(s) than as a source of useful information for prospective college applicants.
These guys didn’t put tons of effort into their work. I noticed this ranking because they had Trinity ranked as the top university in Texas, ahead of Rice (which Trinity quickly put on their website). I’m a big Trinity fan, but it seemed curious. I just glanced at it, but it appeared as though they just blindly averaged scores from other lists. For example, for USNews, Rice scored lower for being #14 on the national universities list than Trinity who was #1 for regional universities. Likewise, if you were ranked upper fifth on - say - the Shanghai list, that might have been worse than being completely unranked, because then it wasn’t factored into your average at all. All these lists are suspect, but this one looked to be more than most.
If the ranking helps them learn something about highly desirable schools that were previously unfamiliar to them, then it will have served a purpose.
However
This certainly could create a mess.
Oh my. Thanks for sharing that @allerretour. Shows they are lazy and/or dumb. All validity out the window.
Don’t you bet admissions staff pull their hair out over stupid stuff like this? Of course, then when they rank high they flaunt it to the world, lol. My kid just started at Davidson and they have a college ranking section on their website that describes (generally) how they rank and provides their take on the validity of methodology. Not all rankings but the most well known. I’m sure they love getting this info off their chest, though I wonder how many folks find and read this. Anyway, I found it refreshing.
Here’s link in case anyone’s interested . Maybe other colleges do this too?
https://www.davidson.edu/offices/institutional-research/college-rankings
I love my LAC (Bates) and IMO it’s underrated, but I can’t quite figure out how it ended up at #16 on the “Best Colleges and Universities” ranking, ahead of U Chicago, Columbia, Brown, Swarthmore, Cornell, UPenn, Dartmouth, Duke… I guess being ranked unreasonably high is better than being ranked unreasonably low. 8-|