yes, I believe the quality of the students influence teaching and learning and must be considered in rankings.
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People have been studying US News rankings for 30+ years. Many of us do not like them but there is an expectation for reasonable consistency. I am ok with a more innovative look at schools focussed on outputs and I think WSJ was reasonable compared to money magazine and the similar.
Yes, US News described their 5% on SAT (the only “so called” academic criteria since they eliminated class rank (which they had reduced to nothing over the years and was the only way to determine whether colleges were taking good students) as “when usable.” That’s becasue US News decides whether the colleges are being honest enough with their scores. FYI - test optional makes the use of SAT silly in many cases and rank is far better IMO since it incorprorates grades and comparison to others.
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You mean how they ensured the top 20 would remain more or less the same each year?
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USNWR had no choice but to disregard class rank, as fewer than 1/3 of HSs still rank (and a large proportion of those HSs are in TX).
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I note my rough sense is local/regional colleges, private or public, skew smaller than their national equivalents. So like local/regional LACs will often have fewer students than most of the national LACs, local/regional publics will often have fewer students than most of the national/flagship publics, and so on.
So I would interpret that statement as really just applying to institutions like that–local/regional privates and publics that are on the smaller side to begin with.
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directionally correct, but then replace with something else academic. they dwindled it down to 2 or 2.5%, i think, and never found another criteria that represented the quality of the student.
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funny and true. on the other hand, nobody is buying Rutgers.
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Unfortunately there aren’t good/available measures of the ‘quality’ of a student. GPA doesn’t work for any number of reasons, including grade inflation (majority of HS grads have an A average), many colleges recalculate HS GPA in their own (often disparate) ways, and similarly, many colleges don’t even try to recalculate HS GPAs (many leave this CDS field blank).
Maybe they could consider proportion of honors/AP/IB courses that students took, but that’s not perfect either because of access issues. Nor are college IR depts looking for additional data points to track/calculate lol.
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I agree that nothing is perfect but neither are the criteria being used simply because they truly do not make one college better than another - nor do people who are selecting the college care about the criteria being used.
US News is choosing “best ice cream” based upon whether the cone has chips. I would use a couple of imperfect criteria and make it approximately 10%.
Which imperfect criteria would you use?
In general I don’t support rankings at all, but pragmatically understand they aren’t going away. Sadly.
I would likely use a GPA, honors/AP, SAT, and admissions rate calculation.
IMO, “one college better than another” should be determined by each applicant.
I agree. As I’ve said upthread, I don’t believe there is a universal criteria that will satisfy everyone. No matter what set of factors you chose there will be a group of people who won’t agree. People need to do their own research, and not treat magazine rankings as gospel.
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People will always believe what they read. I do not disagree but you can’t fix that.
This!
The only ranking that meant anything to our two kids was the ranking they did themselves amongst the colleges they were considering. That is what meant something to them. Not some random magazine or newspaper or whatever who made a list if rankings that were not at all relevant to our two kids.
What do you think about the Payscale ranking Best Universities and Colleges | Payscale
We don’t read rankings in this household. Like I said, they never mattered to us, or our kids.
We only know the current rankings of our kids’ colleges because I ask here just out of curiosity. I will say in all the years I’ve been on this forum, both colleges our kids attended have risen a LOT in the rankings (per report here). Does this make these colleges better colleges? Probably not. Our kids thought they were fine as colleges because they met our kid criteria!
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So, if I were in charge of admissions at a school, I could do this:
- aggressively market my school all across the country
- hand out application fee waivers
- require no supplemental essay
- advise applicants to only submit their SAT score if it’s above our 75th percentile
- favor schools that offer lots of APs and disfavor schools that offer few/none
- offer unrestricted EA
Voila! Now my school is “better” even though nothing else has changed.
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is that true that nothing else has changed? you will get more applicants, so you can be more selective in choosing them, so maybe you can end up with a more academically accomplished entering class?
In addition to those tactics, I would offer a $10K discount for all EA admits (probably go rolling admission too), as well as housing and class registration preferences for EA/rolling admits, and admissions decision before the holidays.
How will that be measured (at least at the majority of schools that are test optional/test blind)?
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