I got an email today from Niche and thought I would share info about their services, since they offer college rankings, including UA at #92 nationally. I always enjoy reading through what actual students have to say: https://colleges.niche.com/university-of-alabama/
Niche is a relatively new site which gives parents (and students) information on choosing K-12 school districts, colleges, and scholarships. https://niche.com/about/company/ I have found their scholarship search engines to be particularly useful.
One thing that will be interesting to see over the next few years is to see how the high enrollment of oos effects retention rates. I like to go through Niche sometimes to see what people have to say about Bama. What caught me was some people pointing out that the distance, the area, and the high oos enrollment is causing some of their peers to transfer closer to home. Even one California student said that the presidential scholarship was not able to keep him past the first semester and that he ultimately planned to transfer closer to home. I am hoping Alabama continues its positive recruiting practices to keep students from far away at ease.
Niche is a great resource. There are loads of rankings for colleges, based on ‘prestige’ or ‘academics’, but DS’s priorities were different. He doesn’t care a whit about prestige, and wanted academics to be challenging but not overwhelming. He also wanted a great overall experience.
We used Niche to create a first-cut list, and was genuinely surprised at how well Alabama did. The high overall rating, and the number of glowing student testimonials were a major factor in DS actually deciding that Alabama was worth looking into.
Cappex, FWIW, was the 2nd resource that DS used in parallel with Niche to focus on candidate schools.
The data in the Niche Profile seems to be from about three years ago. FYI. Look at the lower freshman enrollment number and the lower ACT top percentile number. Might explain the huge drop in the ranking for 2015. Strange that it would use such outdated info.