Perhaps the time has come for US News to rank private and public separately, as the latest set of tweaks has devalued much of the criteria people are relying on when choosing private colleges.
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See also William & Mary and Tulane. And really, to some extent Dartmouth. Or Georgetown and ND, or UVA. It is basically a sliding scale in terms of how much focus is put on undergrad versus grad at these universities.
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The weird thing about this is that, for the most part, the top public universities are affordable and accessible to only the people who live in state. The top UCs, UVA, MI, UNC are near impossible for oos admissions, and those admitted will be paying private school tuitions to attend.
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You can already get that result by sorting for public or private in their rank.
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I’m actually fascinated by its location. I haven’t been to Merced proper, but have been in nearby areas and, while a bit out in the boonies, I kind of like that. I know there are shuttles from Merced that go to Yosemite which is hands down one of the most amazing places in California, and the agricultural land means so many fresh fruit and vegetables. And the education at UC Merced is solid - so you could really make the most of it without all the distractions of a busier area like LA or Berkeley. You could just completely immerse yourself.
Certainly not for everyone, but I could see some students really vibing with Merced, but many don’t even give it a chance. Maybe at least now some will give it serious consideration, which I think it deserves. You just have be into that kind of lifestyle - some are, some aren’t.
I’m suggesting the criteria should differ.
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This is a propos to the constant changes of the USnews ranking silliness. Be sure to keep refreshing it to enjoy its full meaning 
College Ranking Service, A Peerless Evaluation of Colleges, rankyourcollege.com
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It’s very interesting. George Soros’s concept of “reflexivity” on full display here!
Click on (or search for) an individual school, such as Dartmouth College:
Click on “See All Rankings”:
You can then see Dartmouth’s “Overall Score” of 88 within its category.
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So “HYPSM” are all among the top few research universities in the world, and of course the United States. Whether that means they offer the top 5 colleges in the United States is a very different question, but I think that standing as top global universities underpins that observed robustness.
And that does MOSTLY continue for a bit. Caltech, Chicago, Columbia, Penn, Cornell, Hopkins, and Northwestern are all way up there as global research universities too. So of course are Berkeley, Michigan, and UCLA, and while the US News has gone back and forth what to do about that, it is usually reflected in their rankings of publics.
But some issues start appearing. Like, Duke is still a very good global research university, but generally its college has been better ranked by US News than that would justify. Brown, Rice, Dartmouth, Vanderbilt, Notre Dame, and Georgetown are also such outliers. NYU has the opposite problem–better global university than its US News rankings typically reflect. Washington and Texas should really be higher if this is the underlying criteria. UNC and UVA lower. And so on.
What is happening is the perceived college quality dimension is starting to override the global research university dimension.
OK, so what are HYPSM? Where there is a clean intersection of global research university excellence and perceived college quality. But that latter is something US News is creating as much as reflecting.
And what about actual college quality? Not really any sort of robustness check of that at all.
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Right, from a practical perspective, actual cost of attendance is a huge personal ranking factor for most families, and for publics that obviously means their value proposition is typically very different for in-state versus OOS–except some publics aggressively give aid to try to close or indeed reverse that gap.
But no generic ranking can capture that because it all depends on the individual family.
Which is why generic rankings basically make no sense for guiding college choice.
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A few people have suggested this in the past.
Interestingly, it was because public schools (that have to meet state issued requirements) were being disfavored. Now that USNWR tried to level the field, a different group of people are unhappy.
My view is: people should make their own rankings based on the factors that matter to them. Why should it matter (other than for bragging rights) if one’s favorite school is rank X vs Y on someone else’s ranking?
There’s going to be no external ranking that’s seems fair to everyone - and that’s natural because everyone values different things.
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I believe Chicago is being punished for the hubris of having originated the practice of sending t-shirts, posters, paperbacks, gold chains, gym memberships and savings bonds to anybody who expressed even the slightest interest in the school, and probably to those who didn’t at all, regardless of their academic record. This, they did, to satiate their thirst to match Stanford’s acceptance rate, which I believe they finally achieved. In this one, narrow, respect, the rankings services are doing the Lord’s work.
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Will Cal or UCLA now see 200,000 apps this year? Those poor admissions officers.
Where did High Point end up?
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#1 in the South same as last year I believe
I don’t think that Jersey kids think of it as a bad school, it just has a reputation of being large, impersonal and a second choice for in state kids. So not the place they want to go, but have to go. When I was a teen we thought the same way about SUNYS (and I went to Binghamton,ha!)
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Maybe this is a business idea.
Create a database of 10 or 30 or however many things.
People pick and choose however many they want and assign a weighting of their choosing.
And it spits out a list…
Maybe it exists - like in the US News database they sell…
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Now that you pointed me to these different sections, there is a fair amount of interesting information. Like “bibliometric” rank – a statistitical analysis of the impact of faculty research. Does anyone know if that’s a measure USN created or if it took it from somewhere? The top UC schools do very well in that measure.
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Didn’t the NYTimes do this a few months ago? It was pretty cool.
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