I’m interested in income, so I would like at the college score card data. It suffers from some problems(matriculation vs. graduation, looking six years after matriculation means many people may still be in graduate or professional school, may not capture some types of income well(ex. unrealized capital gains or income in retirement accounts.) Nevertheless, it’s the best data we have for right now.
Penn is not last in the Ivy. That would be Cornell.
@Chrchill, @northwesty’s reference to Penn being “last in the Ivy” was for 1990. See #28
Yup.
Back in 1990 Penn was USNWR #20 if you can believe it.
So Penn was dead last in the Ivy League. And at #20, Penn was also sitting behind lots of non-Ivies too. Oh the shame!!
So then Penn decided to “manage” (some would say manipulate) its rankings data. Penn definitely did a lot of good things and also benefited from significant improvements in its surrounding West Philadelphia neighborhood and the increased appeal of urban living.
But a key measure was Penn pioneering the VERY aggressive use of early decision admissions. ED is a powerful way to improve (some would say inflate) your selectivity stats. By 2006, Penn had zoomed all the way up to #4 in the USNWR rankings. While many will say ratings don’t matter, I think Penn is an example of a school that benefited greatly from an improved ranking. Today, no one remembers that Penn used to be the Ivy safety school.
Penn is still the king of ED (54% of its seats are filled via ED), but other schools took note and copied Penn’s heavy ED and enjoyed similar ratings improvements – WUSTL, Vandy, Northwestern, Duke.
Any measuring stick can be gamed to some extent, since what gets measured gets managed.
It’s hard to sort through most of them. Suppose you are interested in top research opportunities, quality of undergraduate teaching and placement into top tier grad schools? Perhaps not as interested in financial aid, expected starting bachelor degree salaries or graduation rates? It’s tough to filter one from the other in most rankings. It’s worse if you zero in on one particular major, or even a specialty within a major. With the some exceptions like engineering, it’s hard to find any information on the quality of specific undergraduate majors for almost any metric.
Sure, you could look at USNews grad school rankings or the NRC rankings at PhDs.org, or maybe the QS or Shanghai rankings by subject, and assume these rankings apply to undergraduate schools. I have a hunch that for the basics, even a mid-tier small liberal arts college is likely to give as good or better undergrad education as a top-tier state flagship university. Sure, there may not be the same advanced coursework offerings or research opportunities, but those things may not be important to every student as having a small class size with an excellent educator focused on teaching, rather than bringing in research dollars?
If you’re lazy, and just want a quick meta-rating to get an idea of prestige, perhaps this is as good as any, if just for bragging rights:
Just for grins, I took a look at some rankings of Physics programs in the USA. I have a high school senior who applied to the University of Illinois, Vanderbilt and Washington University, among other schools. UIUC ranks #13 by QS, #9 by USNews and #9 by NRC. The Physics department’s undergraduate Engineering Physics major was ranked #2 nationwide by USNews. Vanderbilt? Not even in the top 50 in any of these rankings for Physics. WUSTL is similar, breaking the top 50 only in USNews at #44. Does anyone really think WashU’s or Vanderbilt’s undergraduate Physics program is significantly inferior in terms of the quality of education or opportunities for grad school? I don’t. I’d be happy to see him go to any of these, despite these rankings. Like many rankings, they don’t tell the whole story, or even a good part of it, if they apply at all. But you know, it’s still nice to be in the top 10 when you’re bragging online!
I think there is no doubt that “all in” (graduate departments, professional graduate schools, undergraduate prestige, global reputation and breadth of academic offerings and graduate schools) the two top US universities are Harvard and Stanford. Second band is UChicago, Princeton, Yale and MIT. Third band is Columbia, Berkeley., and Cal Tech. Followed by UMichigan and UCLA.
The other Ivy’s have little or no global brand.
Cornell can’t be ignored for IB.
What is IB ? Cornell suffers from not having elite graduate schools. But I agree that certain of its graduates departments (e.g, physics) are top notch, but it is not consistent. Undergraduate is good, but not top.
Investment Banking. And the recruiting done at Cornell in this field is from global companies…and very highly regarded ones.
The USNWR or Forbes or what have you rankings I don’t find terribly useful. The data that I’ve found helpful are things that are buried pretty deep in each college’s Common Data Set. What is a college’s 4 year graduation rate? What is the average class size? The problem with many of the college rankings is that they fail to account for the different mission or focus of various types of colleges and, as a result, many very strong flagship public universities are not rated high enough becuase by definition they have a more inclusive student body. College rankings can help you identify good colleges you might not otherwise have been aware of but the criteria are often not “fair” to some colleges
The most accurate and useful ranking is the one that places my alma mater and my kids’ colleges the highest.
The ranking that places YOUR college higher is clearly garbage.
@ThankYouforHelp You nailed it! LOL
Choosing the best college for our kids is always difficult. It’s easier to determine which colleges are strong or have very good reputations. But we never focused strictly on rankings. And we never chose a college list strictly according to rankings. However, among the strong colleges we looked very carefully at the stats of admitted students as well as the acceptance rates.
To develop a lists of prospective colleges for my kids, I started first by trying to learn about my kids’ academic skills, interests, and tastes – and their career ambitions. Based on his own interests, my son thought that becoming a college professor was a plausible outcome. Later, after his first college year, he decided that being an academic would be boring – to which I say now “Thanks a lot, son!” But his expressed interest while in high school meant that I looked for undergraduate programs that were strong in core disciplines related to his interests but also strong in general studies.
Based on her interests, my daughter was unlikely to be looking toward graduate school. She wanted to attend a stand-alone art school, preferably in a “real city,” and preferably in the east. The college search was easy: find the best art school she could get into. Make sure her portfolio was strong, something that was helped by her attending a pre-college summer art program.
Guess how our understanding and expectations regarding their careers played out? My son never went to graduate school (barely considered law school, and took the LSAT), worked for a few years in business consulting with a major firm, but then turned his undergraduate training at UofC in economics (and all-but-a-minor in political science) into a career as statistician-journalist. Would he have accomplished the same if he hadn’t attended UofC? Probably at the same level, but perhaps with a different focus. Many random factors, including who one meets along the way, play into early career choices and development. He was not climbing any well defined career ladder. Instead he was heading up a climbing wall toward a not-well-defined destination; sometimes he went up, sometimes sideways, sometimes even got off the wall (quit his job). But through that process he has established a public persona and has had a successful career.
My daughter, who never thought she’d go to graduate school, was very happy to attend RISD, even though Providence barely qualified as a “real city” (but was only 1 hr. from Boston and 2 hrs. from NYC). But after 4 years trying to make her way into a stable job and and income the economy crashed. At the same time what had been a definite interest of hers when studying industrial design at RISD matured into her wanting to focus more on environmental design and business. So like her brother, she dropped out of the economy and off the climbing wall as an artist, and decided to go to business school! Having not used much math since high school, she enrolled in a college course in statistics, took a Princeton Review GMAT prep course (self-directed), got an excellent score, and headed to a top 10 business school for her MBA, earning as well an MS in environmental studies.
I am sure that their undergraduate degrees – including the reputations of the schools – have helped both kids in their careers, providing both skills and credentials. But not in the way anybody predicted, least of all their parents.
This is by FAR the best ranking system. Be sure to refresh it several times to appreciate it http://www.rankyourcollege.com/jggtcmethod.html
Now that you you have all mentioned UPenn, it is time for @Penn95 to weigh in…wait for it… /
Seriously, though, where is he?
@Chrchill “I think there is no doubt that “all in” (graduate departments, professional graduate schools, undergraduate prestige, global reputation and breadth of academic offerings and graduate schools) the two top US universities are Harvard and Stanford. Second band is UChicago, Princeton, Yale and MIT. Third band is Columbia, Berkeley., and Cal Tech. Followed by UMichigan and UCLA.”
In my opinion, Columbia and Penn, would replace Chicago and Princeton in your second tier when you look at undergrad and grad programs “all in.”
All four schools have top 10 undergrad programs. Princeton is primarily an undergrad institution with limited grad programs. Chicago has broader scope in grad programs but not the overall quality and breadth of Columbia or Penn. For example, Penn has one of the world’s best Research Hospitals on campus, and I don’t think Chicago’s is as strong. Penn has an excellent Education College, and a strong engineering school. Chicago does not offer these at all. Chicago may be slightly stronger at law, and the MBA programs at Booth and Wharton are about equal in my mind.
jmho
“The USNWR or Forbes or what have you rankings I don’t find terribly useful. The data that I’ve found helpful are things that are buried pretty deep in each college’s Common Data Set. What is a college’s 4 year graduation rate? What is the average class size?”
I find USNWR pretty helpful as a shopping tool because USNWR in large part is based on the CDS numbers. Not so much for the overall rankings, but as a compilation of all the CDS data. After all, the CDS was pretty much created for the purpose of providing standardized data to USNWR and the other ranking services.
It is way easier to read USNWR than go to 100 college websites to find the same info.
FYI, grad rates are one of the main components of the USNWR ranking formula. So the top ranked USNWR schools are basically the schools with the best grad rate performance.
I think the Money magazine rankings are the best. They are value rankings based on outcomes and tuition costs.
http://new.money.com/money/best-colleges/rankings/best-colleges/
The big flaw in the Money rankings is the 1/3 of the formula that is attributed to affordability. Which is pretty useless, since no one pays the “average” price. You only pay the price you get charged. What is affordable to you can be ultra-expensive to me.
If you are in-state, then Michigan or UVa is a deal. But if you are out of state, very expensive.
If you qualify for need-based aid, then Harvard and Yale are dirt cheap. But if you are a donut holer, they are super-expensive as compared to schools where you’d get a big merit scholarship.
It has been my understanding that the most trustworthy rankings are those by Hunt.
The most recent, I think, is posted in #488 here:
http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/978040-ranking-colleges-by-prestigiosity-p33.html
Hope that helps.