A good example of this is UChicago and Northwestern. In the current rankings, UChicago is 3 while Northwestern is 12. Given these rankings, one would assume a large preference for Hyde Park compared to Evanston. However, at least in our suburban Chicago school, they tend to attract very different kids, and Northwestern is definitely the more popular school even if UChicago is more selective.
wow you have some strong and interesting opinions. I’ve seen you say that Princeton is not a real university because it doesn’t have graduate professional schools like law and business. Now UChicago should get its “comeuppance” because it is a “nerd academy” and somehow is cheating to rise in the rankings.
So, because I’m bored, I did a quick search. You also say:
MIT must be terrible because the MD who gave you your admissions interview was a sole-practioner.
Penn is pathetically rankings-obsessed, and Dartmouth should be dropped from the Ivy League.
Women’s colleges are awful because of all of that “girl drama.”
Jews are overrepresented at top schools because they make a lot of financial donations.
Sports are the best EC because all of those millions of Chinese, Korean and Indian students don’t know a lacrosse stick from a broomstick.
USC needs to admit more Rockefellers and DuPonts from boarding schools, and cut back on the “cliched admissions of yet more Korean violinists and minorities with sob stories.”
Transgender people are neither “he” or “she”, but should be referred to as “thing.”
Most of all, tons of posts about which prep boarding high schools are the most elite.
I have a very interesting picture of you in my mind right now. 
@makennacompton wrote, “The USNEWS love for UChicago (at #3!) has gotten very much out of hand, with the school consistently crawling its way from essentially nowhere to top 5 in a matter of a few years.”
Yours is a profoundly ahistorical assessment. The University of Chicago has been a intellectual powerhouse almost from the moment of its founding. Major American trends in sociology, literary theory, political philosophy, and economics had emerged from UChicago decades before the US News ranking appeared on the scene. Its university press has long been a stalwart on the academic publishing scene.
The fact that the current admissions strategy at UChicago involves a concerted push to raise the school’s US News ranking (in particular, by saturation mailings intended to increase the number applications . . . and thereby decrease the rate of admissions) in no detracts from the institution’s record of achievement.
@MrSamford2014 you forgot physics, chemistry, medicine, religion and mathematics. UChicago didn’t get those 89 Nobel Prizes by being overrated.
UChicago’s problems with rankings were always that it was academically difficult, lacked social cachet, and treated undergrads exactly the same as grad students. 18 year olds need more support and community than 25 year old PhD candidates. The top academic quality of UChicago was never in question.
In addition, the lack of NCAA sports kept it off of the radar of most high school students, as did the lack of an interesting name. I wonder what the brand awareness would have been if the founders had chosen to name it John D. Rockefeller University or Hyde Park University, instead of the University of Chicago. After all, there’s a reason that Princeton changed its name from the College of New Jersey to Princeton.
Anyhow, UChicago has put a ton of effort into improving undergraduate student life in recent years and it is paying off. The students are much happier and better balanced. Moreover, the outreach and mailings that UChicago has done to increase applications mostly just equalizes the awareness game with their peer universities in the Ivy League or places like Stanford, Duke and Georgetown that get a lot of attention from having sports teams on TV all the time.
Hey – a U of Chicago player (Jay Berwanger) won the first Heisman trophy, Amos Alonzo Stagg and the squash courts. Hyde Park was an athletic factory – just like Michigan, Yale and Harvard.
Not sure if I should post this here but has anyone seen the USA Today rankings that came out a while back.IMG9014.jpegIMG9014.jpeg
@ThankYouforHelp, one of the biggest problems UChicago had in drawing undergrads 20-30 years was crime in its neighborhood. The decrease in urban crime has also really helped other urban universities like UPenn (30+ years ago had a higher admit rate than rural Cornell), Columbia (almost went bankrupt in the 70’s), NYU & USC (both seen as schools for rich kids who couldn’t get in to in-state publics decades ago) rise in the rankings.
The biggest obstacle for UChi back in the day was its “Uncommon App.” Switching to Common App had a huge effect on the number of applicants, even though UChi’s supplement is still one of the most involved.
Any undergraduate ranking that has Princeton and Harvard outside the top five and UChicago outside the top ten has a screw loose.
I suspect the main culprit here is the measuring of outcomes, particularly when weight is placed upon average post-grad salary. Why is this a problem?
- Salaries are largely self-selective: students choose their majors, and some majors tend to lead to jobs that pay more than others. This has zero to do with the quality of teaching.
- Regional differences in the cost/standard of living dictate that the same job will pay different amounts in different areas of the country. An engineering job, for instance -- all else equal -- is very likely going to pay more on the coasts than it is in the Midwest.
- Some schools are known for having relatively more students who go on to grad/professional or PhD programs than going straight into the work force.. These students should highlight the quality of their schools but instead, since they're probably not making much money while they're in grad school, they hurt their schools' average salary figure.
Also, inputs should count for something – GPA, test scores, etc.
I agree with that, @prezbucky , but I’d also add (as I’ve mentioned a few times here and elsewhere) that the salary data is irremediably flawed: It only includes students who took federal financial aid and it doesn’t reflect the schools from which the graduated–it just reflects any school they took federal aid to attend.
The salary data also assumes everyone is chasing money once they graduate from school.
…and that money is the most important result of education…
(That said, money, it turns out, has like a million uses. Really comes in handy.)
re #41, while starting to look at outcomes is a big improvement over US news, I would quibble with WSJ’s approach:
graduation rate: sounds fine but they use 6 year graduation rate rather than 4. 4 is a much better indicator IMHO.
see for example kiplingers http://www.kiplinger.com/tool/college/T014-S001-kiplinger-s-best-values-in-private-colleges/index.php?table=all
academic reputation: Agree with #44 - what? how is that an outcome?
I think the 6 year graduation rate is more meaningful than the 4 year rate. Many students at top schools spend a year studying abroad, do a dual major, or engage in other valuable learning experiences. It is not like they are hanging out at the mall or going surfing for a year.
@statsnerd , my D2 is a Junior at GTech studying MechE. She has a 3.8+ GPA. She is going to start on a co-op next year that will extend her undergrad school life and will not let her graduate in 4 years. She does not need to do so as financially she is all set. But who in their right minds can turn down offers from the likes of NASA or SpaceX? Lots of her classmates are doing likewise. Why should the school get penalized for this?
The problem with 6yr graduation rate is that it can mask real issues like not being able to get the courses you need to graduate or not getting proper advising.
Given the high cost of a college education these days, if a school has a low 4 year graduation rate, I would want to know about it and I would want an explanation. An extra year (never mind 2) of school can be a back-breaker if you are on financial aid and the opportunity cost of starting work 2 years later (while loans are accruing interest) is high.
Study abroad typically does not extra time because you get course credit for doing it.
Double Majors can be achieved with little or no credit overload.
A coop program is a good reason for not graduating in 4 years, but GTech has a 40% 4 yr graduation rate- I would want to see more of an explanation than “some kids” are taking coops.
I am curious why Harvard has about a 10% difference between 4yr and 6yr graduation rates. It used to be true that Harvard would require you to take time off to study abroad, but they did away with that practice when they discovered that there was a whole world outside of Harvard Yard.
As best I can tell, graduation rates appear to count transfers as not graduating
The real problem stems from attaching meaning to small differences in graduation rate and attempting to use graduation rate as a generic ranking mechanism rather than as a data point to be evaluated within the context of a specific school
@Mastadon @i012575 @googledrone
I agree with #75. I also can see that engineering may be different and for that sort of degree 5 years may be more typical.
Here is an interesting article that suggests I’m not the only one concerned about the issue.
http://business.time.com/2013/01/10/the-myth-of-the-4-year-college-degree/
@Much2learn Your composite ranking of USNews-WSJ makes the most sense out of all I have seen out there. I think the ordering you get for the top 10 pretty much reflects the most commonly held perception, like you have HYPSM for top 5 (and Stanford, MIT, Harvard the top 3 of HYPSM) and Columbia, Penn, Chicago, Duke for the next tier within the top 10. Prob most would say that Caltech should be in the top 10 instead of Hopkins, but no ranking is completely accurate.
This leads me to believe that the inclusion of both inputs and outcomes will probably lead to the most accurate results.
@Penn95 “This leads me to believe that the inclusion of both inputs and outcomes will probably lead to the most accurate results.”
That makes sense to me.
Both of the individual lists have specific issues that I think are cringe worthy. While don’t think the combined list is perfect, but nothing about it is virtually indefensible in my mind.
I agree that I would flip Cal Tech and Hopkins, but if we are down to one spot then it is a pretty great list, one spot should not matter to anyone. Just like you could argue forever about Harvard, Stanford and MIT. To me the order of those three is irrelevant. Each is the best for the right student.
I would also move Penn ahead of Columbia and Brown ahead of WUSTL, but that is just me. Lots of people will have different opinions, especially the Dukies, in my experience. lol You have to admire their school spirit.
Can someone please explain what mathematical theorem they are using when they conclude that adding more inaccurate data improves the accuracy of a calculation?