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Rugg’s Recommendations would be more helpful, I think, as it provides suggestions of colleges for each major. Fiske is an extremely useful college guide, but it focuses on providing a broad overview of its colleges.</p>
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Carolyn, a very knowledgeable former poster, came up with a rather excellent set of guidelines many years ago for doing this.</p>
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Carolyn:
I think you really have to do your own research and due dilligence to evaluate most undergraduate programs, even those where rankings exist.</p>
<p>Some things I look for are:
<p>Another piece of advice that I also find helpful came from the Philosophical Gourmet site, which ranks Philosophy graduate programs but also has a section discussing how to evaluate undergrad programs, is to (1) find the rankings for top graduate level programs (these are usually more readily available) and then (2) look at the faculty bio’s and see how many received their doctorates from the top grad programs. Of course, at large universities, you’ll also need to find out how many of those faculty actually teach undergraduates. </p>
<p>There are, of course, many other things to look at when comparing undergrad departments, and I’m sure others will add to these suggestions.</p>
<p>I’d rather do this kind of research on my own than rely solely on rankings, which usually only look at a few key elements, not the broad picture of what an undergraduate’s experience is actually likely to be.
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