<p>Boy, was I surprised to find that the first-listed criterion used by Washington Monthly is ROTC enrollee percentage. No wonder the list order looks, um, surprising. Good satire, newchick, you had me going there for a moment! Now I wonder if the magazine means it as satire.</p>
<p>maybe I'm just a sucker who doesn't know what she's talking about but isn't there some sort of happy medium? Why couldn't USNWR put in a full list of every school without ranking them individually but separately (i.e. one list for teacher-to-student ratio, another list for scholarships, etc)? Then people can compare and contrast based on the lists for what they want without doing a single ranking. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm sure HYPSM are GREAT, terrific schools...but they're not for everyone. Not only does it not group everything together, IMO, it forces every student to delve deeper and do more research. A guy with a 2350 SAT and a 4.0 GPA could easily just say, "Hey, I could go to an Ivy League" without thinking about it but this way, if they read every aspect that they think is important, they could make an informed decision. I've seen many a kid who make uninformed decisions about the colleges that they want to go to (I attended a public high school, FWIW- where about 70% of the students all go to one or two schools within the state).</p>
<p>Could this work?</p>
<p>P.S. I personally am anti-rankings by nature but most people do like rankings, categorization, and whatnot, so I thought that this was a possibility.....</p>
<p>I think the best people to assess a college are the students. Have any of you gone to <a href="http://www.campusdirt.com?%5B/url%5D">www.campusdirt.com?</a> It's a very comprehensive site that allows students to rank their institutions. The site also has a great collection of "Top 10" lists....</p>
<p>Amherst && columbia are my top 2 colleges.
Get back at me 4 all those who are applying to those 2 schools</p>
<p>CBS News had a segment on it this evening. The Amherst insignia was featured prominently (not that I think for a moment they will boycott the survey.)</p>
<p>As a rising senior I have to say this reflects negatively on these schools. Whatever the US Rankings are and aren't, the fact is they exist and other rankigns are even worse. Most of these are schools where rich preppy kids go anyway and can "afford" to drop out but I would look upon this negatively.</p>
<p>Does financial resource have anything to do with college ranking?<br>
Do those colleges use their financial resource wisely?
Do those colleges pay attention to their students?
Do those colleges hire real professors to teach undergraduates?
Are these things mentioned on the ranking?</p>
<p>Do alumni given rate matter when it comes to how good a college is?</p>
<p>There is so much rubbish on the ranking that has nothing whatsoever to do with evaluating the true strength of a college.</p>
<p>I'm sorry - the US News ranking correlates so heavily with the THES, Wall Street Journal, results from the National Merit Scholarship program, average SAT scores, major scholarships such as Rhodes, etc. that I think people ignore that the US News does place schools in a somewhat accurate range.</p>
<p>Harvard and Yale won't drop out of U.S. News Rankings. :)</p>
<p>I hate the US news rankings but just like everyone else i am really affected by them....i wish there was a better way to rank</p>
<p>There is no hiding the fact that students admitted to more than one college don't think all colleges are equal. </p>
<p>
[quote]
Harvard and Yale won't drop out of U.S. News Rankings.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Actually, they may already be refusing to fill out the reputational survey. We don't know who responds and who doesn't.</p>
<p>"There is no hiding the fact that students admitted to more than one college don't think all colleges are equal. "</p>
<p>RP doesn't poll kids admitted to more than one college. It polls high school seniors with an average SAT in the low-mid 1300s, which is 120 points or so below the average score of most top schools.</p>
<p>An organization that tracks students with high SAT scores (scores of 700 on either the critical reading or math by age thirteen) is the [Study</a> of Exceptional Talent<a href="SET">/url</a>. That organization does not, as far as I know, track which colleges are preferred by admitted applicants among all colleges that admit each student, but it does collect student reviews of the undergraduate college experience at colleges for which it has a certain number of responses. Those reviews, alas, are on a password-protected part of the SET Web site. As might be expected, students in SET best enjoy the most highly selective research universities. </p>
<p>P.S. The reveal preferences study </p>
<p><a href="http://post.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/hoxby/papers/revealedprefranking.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://post.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/hoxby/papers/revealedprefranking.pdf](<a href="http://cty.jhu.edu/set/index.html%5DStudy">http://cty.jhu.edu/set/index.html)</a> </p>
<p>thus far has looked at a data set from a single high school graduating class, selected largely on the basis of high grade averages at high schools known to send multiple graduates to highly selective colleges. The study's methodology could be refined as it is applied to other, more comprehensive and more recent data sets, and I would like to see that happen.</p>
<p>Why would schools that are consistently ranked in the top 5 drop out?
All the schools that dropped out of the US News survey were schools that were extremely underranked. I have yet to see Tier 1 Top 100 schools drop out. </p>
<p>I Feel US News is an excellent source to help students find a match college.
I just finished college admissiosn this year and I could not have imagined how much more time I would have spent searching for my ultimate match school without a copy of the US News. Sure the rankings did influence my decision somewhat and that may be percieved as misleading by the Underanked LAC as a ranking number influenced my decision but US News provided far more than just a ranking. They listed around 2,000 schools all divided by states. Each school had its profile and that helped tremendously.
I also feel the methodology for US News rankings is not wrong.
They consider endowments, selectivity, graduation rates, Teacher student ratio, and other relevant facts. </p>
<p>I honestly feel that all this moaning and complaining is coming from one direction: fed up, underanked soar losers that just want out and feel that by leaving they will somehow encourage other schools to leave thus aboloshing the rankings. It wont happen just because a few underranked schools want out.</p>
<p>"I have yet to see Tier 1 Top 100 schools drop out."</p>
<p>Barnard, Kenyon, Sarah Lawrence, and Gettysburg are all ranked within the top 50 liberal arts colleges; Reed is just outside of this section.</p>
<p>
[quote]
All the schools that dropped out of the US News survey were schools that were extremely underranked. I have yet to see Tier 1 Top 100 schools drop out.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>For the dozenth time, they are not "dropping out" of USNews' ranking. </p>
<p>This is an excellent example of why you cannot trust the media to tell you everything you need to know to understand an event. The media have been misleading about this; you have to read the stories closely and also understand that USNews has two data-gathering components to its ranking.</p>
<p>The named schools are simply refusing to RATE other schools. They're still supplying the hard data USNews plugs in to the rating. </p>
<p>Furthermore, no one has any basis to claim that other schools (in the Top 5 or top 20 or anywhere on the ranking), definitely ARE participating in the rating of other schools. </p>
<p>40% of the people who get the rating survey never return it. You cannot say with certainty that the people at Harvard were among the 60% who returned it. Or Princeton. Or MIT. Or Northwest Missouri State. You don't know--they could have refused to fill it out on principle, or for other reasons.</p>
<p>If USNews removed the peer assessment survey from the poll, at least as far as the LACs are concerned, the first thing that would happen would be an immediate ten-way tie for first place. They don't want that to happen.</p>
<p>agree with Johnwesley</p>