<p>Green Mountain College is in now? Cool.</p>
<p>May I ask a silly question? I see tier i, tier 3 and tier 4 schools listed on US News. How do I find tier 2 schools? The tiers are not mentioned in Princeton Review, are they? Thanks.</p>
<p>My guess: It’s 100% of the colleges they cover, which varies from year to year but is more likely to expand than to shrink.</p>
<p>bsw-- PR and USD News are separate entities, so their lists and organizational structures are not going to match up. USNews does tiers, whereas PR does not…US News probably covers more schools. PR ‘rankings’ are category-by-category (happiness, access to profs, etc) and are based on surveys, whereas, US News compares schools within school types (National U’s, Liberal Arts, etc) and derives an overall ranking (within each school type) based upon a statistical weighting of numerous, somewhat ‘objective’ numerical criteria like SAT scores & acceptance rates.</p>
<p>Beware of all rankings, but study them to understand the base data!</p>
<p>USNews doesn’t list Tier 2. I read why once, but can’t remember. So they go from tier 1 to tier 3. Makes about as much sense as anything else about the USNWR rankings.</p>
<p>I have a hard copy of the 1996 US News here in front of me (wow, the expensive schools were ‘only’ ~22k/year then), & at that time they had a Tier 2…basically the second 40 or 50 on the ranking. That is, the first 40 or 50 are 1st Tier. If you notice on the present day rankings, there are now 100-plus in each category’s top ranking…that 100-plus used to be broken up into a 1st & 2nd tier. Can’t remember when then dumped #2 Tier terminology…probably some schools in that tier complaining.</p>