<p>Can someone post the USNews national universities rankings of the previous years? That would be really interesting and helpful.</p>
<p>bumppppppp</p>
<p><a href="http://thecenter.ufl.edu/usnewsranking.xls%5B/url%5D">http://thecenter.ufl.edu/usnewsranking.xls</a></p>
<p>thanks, Kemet.</p>
<p>I have been looking for this too! Thanks.</p>
<p>Edit: Wow...after looking through this, from 1991 to 2001, I find the rankings a little hard to believe.</p>
<p>If you carefully look at it, the rankings make little sense. Berkeley goes from #13 in 1991 tying with U Penn, to #27 in 1997, below UVa, U of Mich, and UNC (huh??), to #20 again in 2000, suddenly above all these schools 3 years later.</p>
<p>Washington University in St. Louis jumps from #24 in 1991 to #18 in 1992, and then stays around that spot for the next 9 years. They must have done something really right in 1991!</p>
<p>And this I find most unbelievable: CalTech, after ranked #9 for 3 years in a row from 1997 - 1999, suddenly becomes the #1 University in the nation in 2000! And then drops to #4 the year after. I guess it just got really good for that one year hmm? Or maybe 8 colleges just decided to provide a lackluster education for one year.</p>
<p>I can only conclude that while it may help put a school into a range, ultimately the obsessing over the top 15 - 30 colleges (mostly according to US News) is pretty pointless. There are probably some people who would pick the college they are attending based on which one is ranked a few spots higher. I really see how this is a very very poor way of deciding where to attend college.</p>
<p>I would agree. I think the rankings are good for providing general ranges and info and nothing more than that. It seems to me that people still did a good, maybe even more informed, job of picking schools before the mid-1980's when there were no rankings.</p>
<p>any idea where to find this for LACs?</p>
<p>vicissitudes:</p>
<p>In the early years, US News changed the formular fairly substantially from year to year. The very earliest ranking (in the 80s, I believe) were only peer review rankings.</p>
<p>More recently, the formula has changed little, so there has tended to be more stability in the rankings.</p>
<p>As much as I agree that US News rankings are very sporadic, the reason Caltech jumped to #1 that one year was that a new person who changed the stat model was put in charge (and the person was dismissed, I believe).</p>
<p>I believe they abstracted the discrepancy between caltech's 'predicted' and actual grad. rates (which are due to its intense curriculum), which is what surpresses caltech in USNEWs rankings.</p>
<p>Has anyone ever seen a compilation of rankings for LACs, I am looking for them for a stats project.</p>
<p>brassmonkey is correct, as I recall.</p>
<p>
Specifically, they tweaked how they recorded institute dollars spent per student. Before 2000 (and after 2001!), only the relative rank of the schools mattered and not the actual dollar amount.</p>
<p>For instance say the following schools spend so much money per student per annum:</p>
<p>Caltech: 40,000
Harvard: 20,000
Yale: 19,000
(and the rest are all lower).</p>
<p>Caltech would be ranked 1st, Harvard 2nd, and Yale 3rd. Points would be assigned only based on this rank - i.e. the difference between Caltech and Harvard spending was the same as Harvard and Yale spending, even though the actual differential was a factor of 20 different! The people at USNEWS decided (for whatever reason) that this was not fair, and changed it so schools were credited for the dollar differential in spending (which seems more fair to me, but the USNEWS rankings have very little to do with fairness). As a result, because Caltech vastly spends more per student than any other school, they skyrocketed to the top.</p>
<p>For whatever other reason (<em>cough</em> HYP alumni getting annoyed and complaining to USNEWS editors <em>cough</em>), the formula was quickly reverted to the old version the next year. </p>
<p>In conclusion, USNEWS essentially chooses what the top 5-10 institutions are and so its ridiculous to try to extract relative quality using their formula.</p>
<p>edit: One confirming source is <a href="http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2000/0009.thompson.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2000/0009.thompson.html</a> for anyone who thinks I'm capable of making such a thing up. Look under the section "we're number one".</p>
<p>use us news to check out several school and to look up possibilities but rankings cannot possibly even come close to help one make the final decision</p>