<p>I too like the availability of objective information that USNWR provides. But I don't think the numerical rankings are necessary and that they can be harmful in the ways identified above.</p>
<p>That said, I believe that eliminating the subjective and heavily weighted peer assessment score is the very least USNWR should do to respond to legitimate complaints about their methodology. </p>
<p>Imagine if numerical class rankings in every high school were decided by a formula that assigns 25% of the governing score to a cumulative "peer assessment" score reflecting the subjective number "grades" that each student gives to each of his/her classmates -- all of whom are necessarily competing with the very students they are grading, by virtue of being included in those same rankings. I cannot imagine that would be considered a good way to decide class rank, so why should we accept the analogous method used by USNWR to determine school rank?</p>
<p>hoedown...
Didn't mean to imply that I didn't believe you. My observation rested on its veracity. This was the first time I saw the size of the survey, and I was mighty impressed!</p>
<p>In regard to alumni giving rate, this <em>could</em> be interpreted as an indication of how financially successful the particular college's graduates are, IMO.</p>
<p>usnews rankings were really really helpfull for me. no other guidbook has a complete list like usnews. and it's all on one page.
if it werent' for usnews some poor kid with a 900 sat score might apply to harvard expecting to get in. </p>
<p>and i dont see whats wrong with the rankings. sure there are grey areas but i dont' see any colleges that are ranked significantly higher or lower than they should be. </p>
<p>and whoever said public schools ranked too low, well ucla, umich berkely are ranked really high. and yea some public schools dont have the money. imo money equals better facilities better research better profs , better education in generall.</p>
<p>hopefully this will compel USNWR to drop the completely biased, flawed and completely unreliable Peer Assessment (read: easy to manipulate with no transparency). USNWR would be wise to stick with transparent data that can be verified.</p>
<p>I hope that more schools defect until this change happens.</p>
<p>The USNWR rankings are screwed up in tons of ways. For example, "peer assessment" is really more a ranking of prestige than anything else. I also hope more schools defect. The USNWR rankings may be useful for a preliminary search for colleges, or to become familiar with general rankings, but once one becomes more familiar with colleges' actual character and how well they would fit one's needs, they become useless.</p>
<p>I created a new thread, but there is an update on this story. I don't know if people want to post the thread I posted, or just read it from here. </p>
<p>or More Colleges Plan to Snub Annual U.S. News Ranking (Update2) </p>
<p>June 19 (Bloomberg) -- A group of U.S. liberal arts colleges plans to stop participating in U.S. News & World Report's higher- education rankings, saying the magazine's yearly survey misleads students.</p>
<p>The decision by the group, which includes colleges such as Williams, Amherst and Swarthmore, compounds the resistance to the system used by U.S. News, which compiled its first rankings in 1983 and began publishing them annually in 1987. The Washington- based magazine is facing criticism for using subjective criteria to evaluate a school's value, particularly a survey asking administrators to pass judgment on other schools' reputations.</p>
<p>
[quote]
The article says it is the "ranking system" itself which is harmful; it is the construction of a one-size-fits-all ranking that is so injurious to students, worsened by institutions flagrantly manipulating data in order to move up in the rankings, disclosed in 1994 by the Wall Street Journal. Of course these schools know they'll fall in the rankings, but they're courageous enough to ignore that likelihood. Reed, the leader in abandoning USNWR, indeed saw its ranking drop from the top tier down to lowest tier, but Reed has thrived surperbly since, and some say because of, its decision.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>vrosson: doesn't your quote above refute your own pov? If Reed has "thrived" w/o USNews, how distoring can USNews actually be?</p>
<p>The change in Reed's ranking from the top to the bottom tier was, IMO, very distorted. What I think you mean is that the effect of the distortion was apparently not damaging to Reed. Not all schools may fare so well.</p>
<p>These insitutions are making a horrible decision, the second any of the teir one schools are knocked off the list - the less applicants they will get, and the worse applicants they will get. Many people in the south and west have not heard of the liberal arts colleges in the NE - I live in Htown and noone knows amherst - these colleges are screwing themselves over</p>
<p>Is there an archive of US News' rankings since 1987 or some other year in the past? I'd be interested to see the changes from year to year, especially among the top 10 National Universities.</p>
<p>
[quote]
These insitutions are making a horrible decision
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</p>
<p>That doesn't make sense to me, unless every school which thinks well of them agrees not to fill out the reputational survey. </p>
<p>If Amherst (for example) decided tomorrow to never fill out the survey, many other LAC presidents would still continue to think well of the place, and presumably still rate it as "distinguished" or whatever the wording is. For all we know, some of these schools have been declining to participate for years. I think that part of the survey has a response rate of around 50% (I can't check because my USNews info is in the office).</p>
<p>I applied to plenty of schools that I had never heard of - i went to USNEWS (NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT) researcehd the top 30 schools (many of which i had never heard of) - and choose 10 to apply to ......without USNEWS i would never have applied to colgate or colby, etc. As I said, most people in my city which is quite big (houston) have never heard of amherst, and if they have its UMASS.....if they havent heard of the most famous liberal arts college (the one in all the papers), they wont have heard of the ones leaving the list. Honetly, how many of you know Millsapps? They are screwing themsleves over, all because they are audacious enoguh to believe tey are on par with amherst and williams - when they arent - and think that the only reason why they donte get teh better applicants is because they are ranked lower on USNEWS - its absurd. There applciants will drop, there school will drop, and when they realize they need to get back on USNEWS they will have dropped nearly 20 places. Look at WASHU, they played the USNEWS game, and now they are considered ivy caliber. Enough said.</p>
<p>I don't have a dog in this race; Wesleyan has been as high as #6 and as low as #14 among national LACs. It doesn't seem to make a huge difference. I'm actually afraid that if Wesleyan were ranked any higher, it would attract the wrong sort of student.</p>
<p>
[quote]
There applciants will drop, there school will drop, and when they realize they need to get back on USNEWS they will have dropped nearly 20 places.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I think this reflects a misunderstanding of what will happen to these schools--which I blame largely on the media, which has not bothered to get the story right.</p>
<p>I would very surprised--shocked, even--if suddenly these schools dropped 20 places. </p>
<p>They're not refusing to be in USNews. They're just refusing to play along with the reputational survey. 42% of the people surveyed last year didn't send it in! If 100 schools boycott, and typically three people on each of those campuses are surveyed, that means there will be 300 people fewer out of the 2300+ who do respond. Will that really make these schools plummet in the rankings?</p>
<p>To piggyback on what hoedown said, the more institutions that decline to complete the survey, the less credible the rankings will be. The methodology already lacks credibility. If a sizable amount of the top LAC's were to spurn the US News rankings, even those who support the rankings would have to concede the fact that the Peer Assessment Score will be meaningless. If 25% of what constitutes a ranking is meaningless, then the US News supporters will run out of ammunition, and US News will be forced to revamp its methodology. </p>
<p>My home institution, New College of Florida, has an educational philosophy contrary to the US News rankings. However, because we are state-funded, the rankings (such as our spot as the #1 public liberal arts college) give us considerable leverage when competing with other Florida colleges for government assistance. </p>
<p>Many people on this thread who support the rankings are neglecting guides like the Princeton Review (which offers a lot of data for free online) and the Fiske guide, which provide just as much (often more) information than US News regarding admissions statistics. </p>
<p>The onus of s/he who supports US News must prove why numerical ranking is helpful and why Peer Assessment Scores are reliable. It is a given that the data is informative, but this data need not result in a misleading tier system accompanied with an oversimplified number (PAS) which is supposed to represent institutional quality.</p>