People generally do not take Niche ratings seriously. On the other hand, because of Niche’s web orientation, the rankings are readily available and do actually get used by parents and applicants going through the private school and boarding school selection process.
Does anyone really understand what Niche is measuring and why the rankings lack meaning?
Niche has methodology pages available. At a high level, they are collecting and analyzing comparative data about a bunch of different things, then weighting it to provide an overall rating.
Of course things like this never make sense because these are complex decisions involving many different factors which are rationally more or less relevant for different people. So the best high school for your kid will not be the best high school for a sufficiently different kid. I think sometimes the underlying data can be interesting/useful, but I never take the overall ratings seriously.
But there is a big market for these sorts of products nonetheless, so people have stepped up to answer that market demand.
Relative to other rankings, that may also be somewhat flawed, there seems to be a lack of transparency. Does that contribute to a lack of Niche believability? Also, the majority portion of their rating seems to come from students and parents but I can’t quite figure that out.
I would love to understand too - I think some schools are able to encourage family participation and more participants equal higher ratings. I also don’t like how they do not call out *for profit schools - may just be my personal bias against this model. From talking to K-12 admission directors, they don’t take these ratings seriously - but some parents do - people
like ratings! They also seem to be more popular in certain areas of the country. Again, I don’t really know and just my thoughts. Hope others post their thoughts/knowledge.
I think one of the biggest complaints is that there’s no way to verify that respondents actually have a connection to the school or that they are a reasonable cross-section of the community. If a group of kids gets expelled and want to diss the school and they are the main respondents, it’s hard to know that they are unlikely to be representative in their dislike. It’s hard to know whether the parent respondents are the parents of those kids or someone else, for example. Alternatively, the 10 people who respond may be the only ones who love the school enough to do so.
Most schools conduct pretty thorough surveys, using 3rd party companies who specialize in this, on a regular basis. They usually share findings with the community and take some actions as a result. These findings can be very much at odds with the Niche results, showing how the amplifying of one set of voives can distort. You can probably ask (maybe best at revisits) if a school has done assessments and what they’re focused on as a result.
Ime, things that are issues are pretty well known across the community.
Possibly, but I think that implies a level of sophistication on the part of fans of other popular school rankings that is not always warranted.
Like to be blunt, US News ranks famous colleges and makes sure its rankings don’t vary too much from what a lot of people already believe. I’m not sure all the people who then treat those rankings as believable are doing that because they have carefully studied the methodology, as opposed to US News just doing a good job knowing their market.
I don’t think there is a similar dynamic available for high schools because even the famous ones are not famous in the sense of the most famous colleges. So Niche can’t really get the same effect going for it.
It is what they call self-reported. This is not exactly the gold standard of surveying, but repeat, representative surveys are expensive, and doing that for all schools every year would be enormously expensive.
Their methodology pages sketch out some things they do to try to make sure that data is being used as reliably as possible, but at various points they admit they are looking for “a healthy balance between statistical rigor and practical relevance.” I think a fair interpretation of that is they are often violating normal standards for statistical evidence in order to provide answers to more of the questions that their users are asking.
That sounds bad, but it happens all the time in the context of real world decision-making. Indeed, even really important life decisions are frequently made on the basis of what are more informed best guesses than anything really rigorous, because we don’t have the data, time, or so on to do better than that.
So I don’t think it is inherently wrong for Niche to squeeze more out of self-reported data than a really rigorous standard would allow. But I do think people should understand that is what they are doing, and consider it in their decision-making about schools with that understanding in mind.
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