<p>I want to let the realm of College Confidential understand what happens...outside this place. I'm not taking a stance in anything. I'm merely being a bridge, if that's what you want to call it.
Please take a look:
America's</a> Best Colleges on Shine</p>
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To answer these questions, the staff at CCAP gathers data from a variety of sources. They use 11 factors in compiling these rankings, each of which falls into one of five general categories. First, they measure how much graduates succeed in their chosen professions after they leave school, evaluating the average salaries of graduates reported by Payscale.com (30%), the number of alumni listed in a Forbes/CCAP list of corporate officers (5%), and enrollment-adjusted entries in Who's Who in America (10%).</p>
<p>Next they measure how satisfied students are with their college experience, examining freshman-to-sophomore retention rates (5%) and student evaluations of classes on the websites RateMyProfessors.com (17.5%) and MyPlan.com (5%). They look at how much debt students rack up over their college careers, considering the four-year debt load for a typical student borrower (12.5%), and the overall student loan default rate (5%). They evaluate how many students actually finish their degrees in four years, considering both the actual graduation rate (8.75%) and the gap between the average rate and a predicted rate, based on characteristics of the school (8.75%).</p>
<p>And finally, the last component is based on the number of students or faculty, adjusted for enrollment, who have won nationally competitive awards (7.5%), like Rhodes Scholarships or Nobel Prizes. (Click here for a complete methodology.)</p>
<p>CCAP also compiles a best-value ranking comparing school quality to cost. This year it's dominated by the U.S. military's service academies. The top nonmilitary school? New York's Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, which awards full-tuition scholarships to undergraduates (valued at $34,600 for the 2009-2010 school year). Public schools also fare well on this ranking, as they typically cost less. (See "America's Best College Buys.")</p>
<p>Some readers may disagree with the way we construct our rankings or the weights we apply to the data. Or they may want to consider other variables, such as campus crime rates or SAT scores. So we also offer a do-it-yourself ranking that customizes the process, allowing users to construct their own list according to personal tastes and preferences. (Click here to create your own college ranking.)</p>
<p>You can only learn so much from ranking schools; it's important to match the individual student to the place. A student who thrives at Williams might do terribly at Florida State, and of course it's possible to get an Ivy League-quality education at a big state school. But with tuition and fees up significantly in the last decade, college has become one of the biggest financial decisions families make. They deserve all the information they can get.</p>
<p>America's Top 10 Colleges</p>
<ol> <li><p>Williams College</p></li> <li><p>Princeton University</p></li> <li><p>Amherst College</p></li> <li><p>United States Military Academy</p></li> <li><p>Massachusetts Institute of Technology</p></li> <li><p>Stanford University</p></li> <li><p>Swarthmore College</p></li> <li><p>Harvard University</p></li> <li><p>Claremont McKenna</p></li> <li><p>Yale University
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<p>Responses: </p>
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I looked at the entire list for the country. It's a pretty lame list. I went to a small university; the same one that my daughters now attend. The education that we received there was so much better than our state's university that is on this list. I was fortunate to be in classes with very small numbers of students, with professors that actually care about and got to know the students. My state's university has 200-300 students per class taught mostly by graduate students. It's also one of the top 10 party schools in the US. Sorry, but this list isn't the greatest.
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Who cares? College is the biggest rackeetering sham in history next to Wall Street gaming and its associated parasitic professions. Most of the smartest people I know avoided college or attended grudgingly (or just partied and scored with babes).
It is, however, a great intro to the world of debt slavery. Hey parents, you're getting cheated. There's a sucker born every, umm, 10 seconds -- welcome to the club. I'm not a member and I have no kids, but thanks for asking.
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For my first two years at a Community College I paid 10,000 (including book; business major). I received a good education. People think throwing the name of a great school on your resume is the only way to get a successful job. Nope, not the only way. Being persistent, outgoing and being a natural innovator are big ways to land that 6 figure job with a diploma earned from a low cost college/university.
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First of all, Forbes says this list is based on the "students' point-of-view", when it's clearly not. The formula they use includes information as trivial as ratemyprofessor ratings, and assumes that # of nobel laureates is indicative of a good school.
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Somehow West Virginia University, the state university of West Virginia, is ranked higher than Rutgers. Rutgers is the state University of New Jersey. That is flat out impossible. WVU has an acceptance rate of about 90% I would be embarrassed to have released this article and list. There is absolutely no logic that could have come up with that.
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i looked through the whole list.. not a single great american school of music: not juilliard, or curtis, or usc, or new england conservatory, or cleveland institute.. I don't mean a music program (no no, programs like yale don't count.. as of yet).. I mean a major american force in the music world.. please flesh out your research team a bit more on your next try.
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I find it interesting that none of the criteria included career opportunties AFTER college with degrees earned at these institutions.
How can you possibly measure the success of a college education without including the career success rates these colleges purportedly train for? I'm not saying it is the only factor, but it certainly should be one of them.
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Wo...this is a stunningly, risibly stupid list. Claremont McKenna and Pomona College make the list and Johns Hopkins doesn't? I would bet all the money I'll ever make in my life that there aren't more than eight or ten colleges on this list whose graduates have achieved more than those of JHU. I can guarantee you the graduates of Pomona, Claremont McKenna, Williams, and all of the other marginal second-tier colleges on this list don't come close in achievement to JHU grads. There's bias, and then there's this article, which gives the term journalism a bad name. This list is moronic.
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<p>Now these are very interesting responses I took randomly from the click of my mouse. I'm surprised and amused by the lot of them I must say. I believe they can be representative of what the "real world" thinks of college rankings. What do you say?</p>