Your son was the one kid who got it RD!
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we all can pretend the rankings are meaningless and we don’t care, yet here we are. objectively, logically, intellectually, our brains tell us to ignore them, but our hearts don;t always follow that lead.
my daughter chose a good but not highly ranked school- she chose it over some pretty elite options (not HYP level, but UCLA for example). finances played a role but it was mostly her fit and comfort level. so far, so good there, and I was over the elitism, but I have to confess I was waiting for these rankings and secretly hoping for a big jump for her school (UGA), which alas stayed about the same and did see a few peers move up (like Ohio State, Rutgers…).
I don’t really have a pont to make here. Or if I did I forgot what it was.
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Sometimes I think the people here are in such an elitist bubble that they forget that in the real world, the college process is a struggle for people. It’s something many have no history with, no real understanding of and it can be difficult to get guidance. If these people rely of rankings and such, they don’t “get what they deserve” if things don’t work out.
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D22 always sorted through Niche to read the three star reviews first. She believed those were the reviews which would be most likely to reveal some of the flaws of a particular school but not be reflective of one student’s individual beef or poor fit. Or be unrealistically rah rah.
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However, if there are three colleges, two with 2,000 students and one with 15,062 students, that gives the 6,354 average college size, but 79% of the students attend the large college.
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I read those sites in the aggregate. That is, the general rating (of course paying attention to the number of reviews). If most students were positive – or negative – i think that’s good information.
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Exactly. None of us are “normal” college consumers. If we were, we wouldn’t be here. There are many cohorts of college consumers and people here aren’t even within 2 standard deviations from the norm. Most people don’t even bother skimming US News directly. Many just go or send their kids to the nearest community or state college and never researched at all.
The reason the colleges care is because the USN ranking ends up informally in the conversation. The next cohort up from the just go to the nearest public college hear college X is “well ranked” or simply that it “has a good reputation” and often that is three degrees of telephone from someone citing the rankings. A lot of people can through around terms like Tx {with x = 5, 10, 20, etc.} and have no context for where it came from. Then there are the minority who do read it but take it at face value. They don’t read or understand (or even care) about the methodology, they have no context of its history or controversies. They just consume it as if it is objective information.
By the time you get to the independent researchers, let alone those engaged enough to be posting here, you are above the clouds on the horizon of college consumers.
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I’ve been trying (very anecdotally) to figure out what caused some big publics to move up. I’m sure many things, but I was looking at dropping class size as a criterion. The two you mentioned (Rutgers and Ohio State) have a fair number more large classes (40-42% under 20) vs UGa at 49%.
For the top 25 publics – UMich 56% under 20 kids/class, Berkeley, UCLA, and Uva are 49-50%. UNC is an outlier among big publics schools that moved up/stayed high - meaning in the top 25 (44%), but its price is much lower (almost as low as UF’s – those two big publics have the really low tuition, even OOS is lower, esp at UF).
In publics rank 25-30, UF at 53% under 20 kids/class, UCSD 45%, UCD at 0% (this must be an error?); clearly other factors at play for the UC schools here and, in the other direction, for UF.
Publics 30-35, UWis is at 44% under 20 kids/class, UT 39%, GT 30%… and then I stopped looking. It seems like it probably had an effect in some cases, but many confounding factors.
But if Rutgers and Ohio State have more big classes and that no longer dings them, they will move up more than Uga. Maybe?
Then do your own research. I have seen numerous articles about that topic. We have 3 small LACS in my small city. All are in very tough financial condition. Meanwhile the state flagships are over-enrolled. Over-Enrolled, Virginia Tech Offers Gap Year Stipend, Free Community College : NPR
Tulane’s official statement indicates that their results might have been skewed by combining data from Newcomb Tulane College (all undergraduates) and the School of Professional Advancement (non traditional students, frequently working full time and attending school part time).
“ We also believe U.S. News made a serious and consequential error in measuring the financial success of our students and the graduation rates of our students who are first-generation, a new ranking criterion. U.S. News based those indicators on publicly available data that only included undergraduates who took out federal student loans, which is a minority of Tulane students. Additionally, these data combine information about full-time students enrolled in Newcomb-Tulane College (NTC) with data about our students enrolled in the School of Professional Advancement (SOPA), a separate undergraduate school for part-time students who are often working adults. All of Tulane’s other student-based indicators used in the rankings, however, are based solely on NTC data. It is also worth noting that this data relates to students who graduated as long as a decade ago. We have reached out to U.S. News regarding this huge discrepancy and are awaiting their response.”
Full statement here:
https://news.tulane.edu/statements
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But the interesting there here is you - like so many of us so not getting on you - but your daughter used ranking big time and that she chose not the most prestigious based on what you were seeing - even bothered you to an extent. I’d have been the same way.
And then you started one of my favorite threads of all - is UGA the Michigan of the South?
You missed one though - is UC Merced the Michigan of the West? Well, now it can be asked after the latest ranking took them up - I want to say 30 but I could be wrong.
Now that you get to look under the hood - if we all did that, we might think - and who cares about that? Or that doesn’t really impact what my kid will do / see / get?
I knew my kid’s schools were low but didn’t understand why. I just knew neither was selective, but both solid brand names and more importantly and like your daughter did, they chose them. But I had no clue what went into why they are rated where they are.
Tinkering with a criteria makes sense but when they make wholesale changes to the point that some shift more than 10-15% or at the top more than 5 spots to me is not a good look.
Edit - I see you acknowledged in a later post. And you’re right -we all use the same and it stinks that a bunch of schools passed. UGA is one I also expect to trend higher - along with UMD which did.
But some kids take longer because they can’t get into the classes they need for their major and then have to pay for an extra semester or more. There are legitimate negatives to some larger institutions that should be reflected in the rankings.
Particularly when graduation rates are separate categories for first Gen and pell grant recipients. They could use six years for these subgroups and four year for the overall numbers.
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Do not worry, Tulane will quickly figure out the new system and will move up again.
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Thinking about graduation rates it seems a bit crazy how much this factor counts. For most schools, graduation rate (15%), graduation rate performance (10), Pell grant graduation rates and performance (6) and first gen graduation rates and performance (5). So, for most schools, six year graduation rates accounted for 31 percent of the score. For the UCs, since they don’t have test scores, they added another 5 percentage points to overall graduation rate, so 36 percent of the UC scores were based on graduation factors .
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Believe it or not we have a bigger problem with it at smaller school. Oldest at GT ALWAYs gets what she needs at registration (sometimes with overide from her department). Youngest at Rhodes did not get it. There classes are small, limited, some are once a year and so far 0 overrides. Nobody cares that there is a schedule conflict and you can’t register for other open class… And schedule is very inflexible. You have to take “fundamental humanities” that are not really prerequisites for STEM classes first. Nobody cares that then you may end up with 3 lab courses in one semester for your major…
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I described as a large school issue because that was how it was described in the post I responded to, but agree that it could be an issue at any size school. When families are paying for extra tuition, it’s a significant burden and it seems that should be accounted for somehow.
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Yes, the 3-star reviews definitely have a lot of value. But my very favorite reviews are 1-star or 2-star reviews that tell you what you want to hear. Like “This school has no social life! Students literally spend Fridays nights playing board games with each other! I’m transferring as soon as I can” or “No school spirit! Nobody cares about sports at all!” or “It’s like every guy here is gay! How is a straight girl like me supposed to date?!”
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If people use rank information blindly - relying on others to make a decision for them based on criteria they’re unwilling to look into - I’m going to agree to disagree with you there.
That’s not a rich/elitist view. It’s about being an informed consumer which has nothing to do with income.
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Possibly - or possibly not - ultimately only care so much as the college maintains a good reputation with employers and alumni so that employment opportunities for DS are good.
Him being there has nothing to do with what their ranking was.
And they’ll only move up again if they’re able to out-pace the adjustments that all the other colleges make to increase their ranking.
The question is if a college needs to do something to increase their ranking that they believe runs counter the mission statement (or financial needs) of the college will they still do it? This is the real concern of the ranking system - USNWR is dictating societal criteria to colleges. “You need to care about XX because it’s now part of the formula we use for a completely arbitrary ranking”.
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Would be great if you could just get the raw data USNWR uses and then assign weight to the various categories based on your own family’s criteria and have it spit out a personalized ranking of schools for you. Maybe you can if you pay for it, but of course doing so just helps perpetuate the profit of the enterprise instead of rendering it obsolete, like many of us would like to see. 
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