<p>so, why are there rankings? "US News," "Times Higher Education Top 200 Universities In The World", etc. </p>
<p>how accurate are rankings on how good a particular school is? what does it mean when UC Berkeley ranks higher than, say, U of Chicago? if ranking isn't everything, why are there rankings at all? what purpose? if ranking IS everything, then does it follow that universities at the bottom of the list are mediocre?</p>
<p>i'm not taking any sides. i'm just looking for intelligent inputs from CCers. :)</p>
<p>Before USNWR began ranking colleges, there was no real way of knowing how good a college was. There was Barron's, but it was based entirely on prestige without any meat behind it. One effect of the USNWR rankings has been to get a few more names into the game. The rankings are only approximate. They don't indicate the relative strengths of different programs within the college, and they don't indicate how one college might be a better "fit" for a student than another college. Having said that, anyone who picks colleges based solely on the USNWR rankings is a fool (IMO).</p>
<p>Universities at the bottom of the list are mediocre.</p>
<p>Usnews has separate rankings for diff fields. For example, though NYU is in the 30's, no one can deny the power of Stern.</p>
<p>Usnews is not perfect but it passes the common sense test as well as uses reasonable methods.</p>
<p>Rankings so far are pretty accurate though there are overranked colleges such as WUSTL.</p>
<p>You should not pick colleges soley on Usnews rankings. Make sure you know what FIELD and MAJOR you want as well as tuition/financial aid packages. After this, then you may use Usnews with a margin of error of about 5 to pick some prestigious colleges. For example if I wanted business I'd take the top 5 of usnews, compare where I got in with pricing, then finally pick overall college ranking instead.</p>
<p>The question is not whether the rankings have merit for judging the quality of schools, but rather, what is their resolution for ranking them?</p>
<p>Clearly there is a difference between a school ranked 1st and 101st, but is there really a difference between say 1st and 10th? What about 1st and 5th? 1st and 2nd? Where do you draw the line of being able to say that school X is 'better' than school Y.</p>
<p>One good way is to look at a school's spread over the last five years or so, because (most) schools don't change significantly in quality or prestige over such a small timescale. The rankings do, though, because US News likes to vary their grading criteria (or else they would stay mostly the same, and why would people buy an issue every year?). </p>
<p>I personally think the standard deviation is probably around 4-5 places up or down for an individual college, but that's a pretty fuzzy number. </p>
<p>Also, what exactly makes one school 'better' than another? Luckily, the US News people answer try to answer that question implicitely by their choice of criteria. I assume that everyone agrees that things like peer assessment, student to faculty ratio, endowment, etc., are all important towards a school's quality, so the only disagreement is on the weighting of these qualities. This disagreement limits the usefullness of the rankings a bit.</p>
<p>Anyway, as the previous poster pointed out, in order to assess where you personally can get the best education, a lot more things go into a decision besides rankings. Just remember that the rankings are only another piece of information to help one decide where to go.</p>
<p>
It's certainly possible to get a good education at a great many colleges and universities; however, by defintion, compared to the top schools, the far lower down schools are mediocre - at least in prestige and overall opportunities. Again, for clarity, you can get a good education at an average college, but it might take more work to do so.</p>
<p>Almost all of the published rankings are irrelevant. They are based on statistical artefacts, not anything relevant to prestige or quality. Prestige depends on who you ask. If you ask the average guy on the street, McDonald's is more prestigious than Nobu. But if you are dealing with the world elite, obviously Nobu is better. Same goes for quality. The average person thinks UConn is better than Hamilton College because they've heard of it. And UConn does better in most of the rankings. But the quality of education at UConn doesn't compare with that at Hamilton College. Similiarly, if you look at Caltech, it doesn't always rank very high in the sciences. But that's because it's small and lower-profile than Berkeley or Harvard, not because it is weaker. In fact, it's easily one of the best.</p>
<p>That said, the best colleges for undergraduate education are Caltech, Yale and Princeton, and they all tend to rank in the top 10 or 20 in most rankings. So, the rankings can give you a rough idea, but they are often off by a lot.</p>
<p>They are not irrelevant. Anyone that thinks so is quite misguided. First of all, the avg guy is not hiring your butt to Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley. </p>
<p>The rankings are not perfect but give more than a rough idea.</p>
<p>How? Rank the colleges ONLY BY peer assessment and you end up with more or less the same list. Rank the colleges ONLY by selectivity and you end up with more or less the same list again (though Umich gets screwed here).</p>
<p>Saying rankings are "irrelevant" is just as idiotic as saying Devry Institute > Harvard.</p>
<p>maybe "irrelevant" isnt the right word. may be they are "not comprehensive", "accurate," or "full evaluation/representation"</p>
<p>since each college/university has its own unique char. to it, assigning numerical values would be difficult.</p>
<p>while peer assessment may provide some insight, it is still subjective and restricted to/based on past assessments. (mainly based on name recognition?)</p>
<p>Actually in 2000 Caltech was rated number one by US News - thanks to Caltech's very generous spending dollars / student (or was it total endowment per student?). The next year the formula was changed to weigh that less and Caltech fell back to fourth.</p>
<p>Conspiracy theorists (like myself...) tend to blame this on HYP alums being angry that, for once, a school besides Harvard, Yale, or Princeton came out on top and there are quite a few powerful HYP alums. And really, do you think that the owners/staff of US News are more likely to be alumni of Caltech or of HYP? I dont mean that completely seriously, but hey, it may have some effect.</p>
<p>so the general consensus is that rankings are not entirely accurate, right? i agree. if that's the case, would you say that ranking is hurting good insitutions that are great but, perhpas due to low score in several areas, are at the bottom of the list (just to take an example menitoned - caltech)? and subsequently suffer from lack of applicants due to perceived 'lower quality' in terms of ranking (this probably doesn't apply to caltech, but you get my point)?</p>
<p>
[quote]
do you think that the owners/staff of US News are more likely to be alumni of Caltech or of HYP?
[/quote]
I see what you mean about Caltech being science instead of publishing, but most CEO's did not go to elite colleges.</p>
<p>Jay Mathews who works at the Wash Post (and is a Harvard alum) says that the Wash Post editors in descending order of influence graduated from: Ohio State, Occidental, U Wisconsin-Milwaukee, SUNY-Buffalo, Colorado State, Harvard, Michigan, American U, and Florida.</p>
<p>rankings - and which most people view as synonomous with usnews - are all to be taken with a grain of salt. i think that there divisions of tiers is somewhat accurate. I do think you can say that there are about 25 schools that you can say are the creme of the crop - followed by about 25 nearly as good schools - followed by x amount of schools and so on. However, you can't draw a line between 1 and 2...or even 1 and 20. So stanford has more money than say emory. All of a sudden stanford is miles ahead of emory. or harvard's entering class has on average 30 points more (or whatever it is) than cornell's entering class. so all of a sudden 15 spots separate the two. you can't agree that these numbers are absolute. What you really need to do is look at each individual statistic they take, and see how important it is to you. After all, how good can rankings be if they arn't consistant year in and year out. There's no comparison when the criteria for determining "the best" is consistently changing.</p>
<p>If you see a school has a 99% graduation rate - maybe thats important because you know you're guarenteed a degree. Or maybe you think that endowment is important because the school you'll go to will have buildings which are in better shape than schools with lesser endowments. what it comes down to is your decision about what is important to you, and therefore what do you want to focus on. You can get a great undergraduate education at Joe Blow U., just as you can get a crappy undergrad education at Yale - its up to you how much you want to gain out of it.</p>
<p>Editor in Chief Mort Zuckerman
-Harvard College and Yale Law School
-Wrote for both the Harvard Crimson and the Yale Law Journal</p>
<p>U.S. News Editor Brian Duffy
-Couldn't find schooling. Anyone?</p>
<p>Senior Writer Michael Barone
Nation & World Columnist; "The National Interest"
-Graduated from Harvard Law School
-Associate Professor at Harvard Law</p>
<p>Editor at Large David Gergen
Nation & World; Editorial columnist
-Undergrad at Yale
-Graduate at Harvard Law School</p>
<p>Chief White House Correspondent Kenneth T. Walsh
Nation & World
-Couldn't find education. Anyone?</p>
<p>Senior Writer Dr. Bernadine Healy
Health & Medicine
-"A Harvard- and Hopkins-trained physician"</p>
<p>Contributing Editor Gloria Borger
Nation & World Columnist; On Politics
-Went to Colgate</p>
<p>So out of seven people listed of importance, four have strong ties to Harvard or Yale, and I couldn't find information on two of them (only searched briefly to be fair). </p>
<p>I mean I'm not saying that these guys consciously work towards keeping HYP necessarily at the top, but it's hard to claim these people are completely objective either.</p>
<p>None of them were Princetonians yet Princeton was tied with Harvard above Yale. I would say their methods are quite objective. They do not sit down and rank colleges, they rank by taking data and using their formula. </p>
<p>Though the formula may be flawed, like I said you could focus only on peer ratings and get about the same ranking. You could also take endowment only and get about the same ranking. Same goes for selectivity/acceptance rates/yield.</p>
<p>Some colleges who game this system (WUSTL) may be overranked and some colleges are 1-2 spots lower or higher but overall it is a pretty good national ranking.</p>
<p>A lot of people prefer GROUPING instead of numbers so college ******* dot com is a pretty good site for that.</p>
<p>About the Times Higher Education Supplement Rankings...be careful...those are for the university in general, not for undergraduate education. Schools with strong undergraduate programs (i.e. stronger than their grad programs) may not fare too well there.</p>
<p>With regards to the US News Rankings, I also think they try to be objective, but often, especially with regards to colleges, there's no way to be completely objective, thus making such rankings somewhat silly. I also think it'd be better to place these univerisities in groups/blocks. In other words:</p>
<p>Tier I
...</p>
<p>Tier II
...</p>
<p>etc, with each tier having around 5 universities, especially at the higher tiers. </p>
<p>Within the tiers (and within tiers close to each other), it's essentially personal opinion. Between H, Y, and P, it'd be silly to give up on Y if you've researched it, love it, and think it works for you just because H and P are ranked higher.</p>
<p>If you read what I have said earlier in the post, I pretty much agree with what you say about how accurate and meaningful the ratings are.</p>
<p>
Yes, it's true that none of them went to Princeton, but I mean it seems pretty obvious to me that Princeton is more similar to Yale and Harvard than say Harvard and Yale are to MIT and Caltech. It's not that they sit down and say "we went to Harvard so let's make sure that one is on top." It's that what makes a good college can be quite subjective, and these people are more likely to have feelings similar to the philosophies of HYP.</p>
<p>Let me give you one example. When choosing a college, is it better to go to a school that's the best in the field you want, or a school that's good (though not the best) in many or all fields? Clearly schools that are great across the board will be higher ranked in the later schemes than specialty schools. Consequently, when you come up with a ratings system, do you rate by the individual programs/majors or do you rate holistically? I think there are arguments for either case, but it's a decision that these editors had to make, and the fact that they went to a school like HYP is going to bias it.</p>
<p>Moreover, you say that it's objective by using their formula. I generally agree that the criteria they list are correlated to the quality of the school, but the numbers seem pretty arbitrary to me. For example, what dictates that freshman retention rate is worth 10 percent (or whatever it is) towards the quality of a school? And it's not that the formula is 'wrong', it's just that there is no right formula, and so the formula is a bit arbitrary - hence why it changes from year to year.</p>
<p>I guess I just am trying to point out there are quite a lot of subjective choices that are made - even for a quantitative determination such as this. I'm not saying they're 'rigged', but I am saying that you should keep in mind that the people are only people, and everyone has their own biases to some degree. This is exactly why diversity is a good thing so people hear different perspectives and are able to recognize their individual biases. </p>
<p>That speculation and then the fact that Caltech dropped from 1st to 4th in one year solely because the formula was changed is where I'm coming from.</p>
<p>Just curious about how a place like WUSTL might "game" the system -- is it because they encourage lots of applications (not uncommon, although probably not to the extent that WUSTL sends out the brochures) or is it some other way? </p>
<p>I know they and Tufts are notorious for, supposedly, waitlisting the really highly qualified applicants that they think might go elsewhere, and people on CC have come up with anecdotal evidence of this. But I don't know if this actually happens at these schools more than any others at this level. It also is difficult to measure complete applications by looking purely at stats.</p>
<p>I don't know if I want this to be true or not. On the one hand, my son attends WUSTL and loves it. On the other, it waitlisted my daughter. They could probably tell from her application that it wasn't her first choice and, well, it wasn't ...</p>
<p>About rankings, I don't think I have much to add. I think it is useful to look at the supporting information. Particular factors might be more or less important to you. You can also see if there are any big differences in the important factors among the schools that interest you. </p>
<p>Of course, there is more to a school beyond what the rankings measure. Academically there is the strength of the particular department one is interested in and the presence or absence of distribution requirements. Beyond this, people can really care about a sport, a particular EC, the size and location of the school, what the students are like (politically, religiously, competitively, etc.), or some other factor. </p>
<p>Heck, my son turned down one school, in part, because it is notorious for wretched food (sorry,AcceptedToCollegeAlready, it is Carnegie Mellon); he went there one summer and had to eat penne with marinara sauce every day, because it was the only vegetarian item they had. Six weeks of mediocre penne with marinara sauce can dampen anyone's enthusiasm. WUSTL, on the other hand, has excellent food.</p>
<p>I think you answered your own question with respects to WUSTL and Tufts.</p>
<ol>
<li>Massive advertisement</li>
<li>Feigned Interest in relatively poor students</li>
<li>Rejections or Waitlisting of over-qualified applicants</li>
<li>Refusal to show certain ED applicant data</li>
<li>Having relatively poor ED students compared to RD students</li>
</ol>
<p>How do we know that WUSTL and Tufts do more in these respects than other schools? Has someone found a way to measure this or is it word-of-mouth, i.e., people talking among themselves about this applicant versus that from their schools and drawing conclusions?</p>
<p>I can only speak for WUSTL that they refuse to release data concerning Waitlisted Applicants. While other schools are transparent and show waitlisted applicants, WUSTL withholds such info. </p>
<p>Also, it withholds info on its marketing budget.</p>
<p>Quote: "Harvard refuses to release info regarding its marketing budget</p>
<p>Some speculate it dwarfs that of WUSTL. As noted earlier, just one brochure order alone numbered 150,000! :</p>
<p>I would say Tufts was the start of the game playing of Usnews, but WUSTL has really perfected it. Check out their yield increase for the past 5 years and you'll see what I mean.</p>