<p>There is no school produce the best graduates - the success depends on individuals. Better schools only open more doors. But one has to be qualify to get into the door.</p>
<p>Until there is mendatory employer reporting system to record every first job of college graduates, and the results show year after year that the ranking is the same/similar then one can say which schools produce the best graduates. (even so, all colleges are still with different numbers of graduates in different majors/concentrations, and it is hard to compare all fields.)</p>
<p>“I could solicit applicants and even pay them to apply. Say I can get 100 kids to apply for a $100 gift card. My admission requirements could be very rigorous and I would have a high yield, because I would give my student a completely full ride. Using admissions logic, it would be the most prestigious school ever.”</p>
<p>This can not last for long (full-ride for all students). Besides, if you pay attention, state schools provide full rides more often to recruite these best students but many still didn’t take the full ride.</p>
<p>"You have no idea how much of your information is publically available. We could easily determine what % of graduates in a given program either 1) take a job in the field or 2) get admitted to a grad school. "</p>
<p>And you realize how many people are not truthful on public forums, correct? Even on CC, I found a lot of students saying different things about which schools they go to or where they were admitted. Only official records should count. I agree that graduate/professional schools should have the record but they are not public and are not mandatory for reporting. And when combining ‘success’ as jobs+grad/professional schools+other, if one factor is not correct the whole thing is not correct.</p>
<p>"Their reputations that are usually based on (shallow) values. The name. "</p>
<p>If there is only the name and no strong result to back it up, it would fade. Those big names that stay for a long time did have outstanding results to back themselves up. i.e. Harvard graduates may not have the highest average paying jobs or the highest percentage of grad/prof school admissions but they have the most ex-presidents. Stanford produced many innovators. MIT is the pioneer in all kinds of theories for modern technologies…</p>
<p>Yes, it’s true that class size could be an indicator, and you should not trust imperfect data fully, but if you have some real world experience, you would realize that in some cases, a certain set of incomplete imperfect data may be more useful than precise and accurate but useless data. I’m aware of the shortcomings in the Payscale data, and I do not rely on the Forbes rankings fully, but in as much as it moves people away from the USN rankings, I’m all for that. I have my own tiers based on my work experience in 2 different industries, but when I hear people say they may decide to attend school A instead of a wildly different school B because one is ranked #32 and the other is ranked #45, I just shake my head, because in the real world, those 2 schools will have stronger and weaker networks and brands in different industries and locales and the schools are so different that someone can not feel the same amount of fit at both schools.</p>
<p>I worked 20 years in the States in a university town and two years before I came as a student.</p>
<p>"when I hear people say they may decide to attend school A instead of a wildly different school B because one is ranked #32 and the other is ranked #45, I just shake my head, "</p>
<p>Yep, you should shake your head. As my daughter is interested in STEM she will not apply to Harvard even when it is a number one school in humanities.</p>
<p>According to the US News graduate peer assessments, Harvard appears to be about as much a powerhouse in basic science and mathematics (if not in engineering and technology) as it is in humanities. According to NSF data on webcaspar.com, from 2008-2012, Harvard College alumni earned 534 PhDs in Physical Sciences, Geosciences, Math and Computer Sciences, and Life Sciences combined. That is almost the same number of PhDs as MIT alumni, and about 24% more than Stanford alumni earned in the same fields in the same years.</p>
<p>So if Harvard has a reputation in some circles for being relatively weak in STEM, then unless one really only means engineering/technology, that reputation may not jibe too well either with the judgements of professional academics or with the objective achievements of its alumni.</p>
<p>While liberal arts colleges may give a great education they are not the reservoirs of the most presitgious faculty and research opportunities. The members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, the former cabinet members and the Nobel ,Pulitzer , and MacArthur prize winners are simply not on their faculties in any kind of quantity when compared to the top 20 universities. Also, when one looks at the concentration of where these superstars teach and do research, it becomes clear that anyone not going to the top universities will quickly discover how fast “Broadway becomes Bridgeport” to use an analogy from the show business.</p>
<p>That may be true, but how much should it matter to a college student if those professors don’t even teach undergraduates, or (when they do) only teach lecture classes to hundreds of students (leaving the grading and the questions to inexperienced grad students)? </p>
<p>Now, if you’re interested in name recognition or brand awareness and its alleged door-opening powers, then yes, maybe you also should care about the presence of superstar faculty. A few universities have built brand awareness based on associations with star faculty, the research output of specific programs, or famous alumni. Think of Chicago in economics, Georgetown in International Relations, Johns Hopkins in medicine and life sciences, Carnegie Mellon in computing. Brand-awareness based on strengths in these fields contributes to the overall prestige of each institution. However, most students at these colleges do not major in those fields. Even if they do, chances are, they never study with the professors that helped make them famous. </p>
<p>The sheer size of national universities, and the presence of research programs, does give them opportunities to build name recognition and brand awareness. They can attract star faculty who publish important findings and win prizes. They can more easily sponsor winning sports teams than a small school can. Therefore, from the perspective of institutional prestige, a given ranking number on the USNWR national university scale might be worth, maybe, 10 extra points compared to the same ranking number on the national LAC scale. However, this generally has little to do with the caliber of undergraduate instruction. If anything, some of the factors that drive up institutional prestige may detract from that, for most students. </p>
<p>tk, I agree with your premise here. Often the award winning professors are horrible teachers, they are just good in their field. Good idea to invite them as guest lecturers perhaps, but not always great to have them be your key faculty.</p>
<p>I would disagree with your earlier assessment of Harvard though. USNews is like Coke to me. It is popular as much because of advertising and name recognition a anything else. The methodology in their rankings is seriously flawed if your goal is getting a great education. Reputation is 22.5% of their ranking (source: US News). Student selectivity is another 12.5% which is essentially the same thing taken at a different angle. Reputation drives applications which yields high achieving students. It does not have anything to do with how well those student are instructed once they arrive. They also use salaries for faculty as a factor. That is a useless measurement. If the best faculty worked pro-bono, the school’s ranking would suffer. No wonder costs have gone up. Spending increasing ranking! Finances are another 10% (again, you cannot really use this to judge academic quality) and alumni giving (the richer the families that attend, the more likely to get donations). This gives a decided advantage to schools like Harvard that tend to be legacy schools for prestige and money as much as about academics. In other words, it is not like the alums have money due to the school, many (if not most) of them come from families with great means before they arrive at college.</p>
<p>On top of the major flaws with the US News rankings, you are also focusing on Graduate school info which skews the data as well. </p>
<p>Harvard is great at producing politicians, lawyers and financiers because of the connections made, not because of the rigor or ability to transfer knowledge. It is a place where the poor can aspire to connect with the wealthy (think old money) types that can potentially help lift them out of poverty. This may be its finest virtue, but it, and schools like it, are highly overrated in terms of ability to educate versus their peers at more pedestrian colleges. Note, I am not saying Harvard is bad at teaching it is just one of about a hundred high end colleges. It just holds panache due to its history and political and reputational power. Those of us who are blessed to have worked with graduates soon find that they are mortals like the rest of us with about the same level of success in the real world.</p>
<p>Agree with both tk and torveaux, above. Some of the undergraduate institutions that offer the best research opportunities specifically for undergraduates are LACs, and not always the best-known ones. Wooster, Hendrix, Occidental are a few that come to mind that are well-known for enabling undergrads to do the kinds of research that might only be available to grad students at the “prestige” schools.</p>
<p>Top 20 of which ranking? Because, for instance, UT-Austin has more National Academy of Engineering members than Harvard and Yale combined. The fact is that at the top tier of research universities in this country (AAU members), you’d be able to find plenty of research opportunities. UW-Madison is 6th in the country in terms of pulling in federal search money. UCSD is 5th. UDub is 3rd.</p>
<p>tk, Thanks for the list on page 2. Unfortunately, my daughter has decided on Engineering so Harvard is one that she crossed out from her list. Unless she changes her mind to get back to consider medicine, it is crossed out.</p>