^ UChicago is a great school. I merely pointed out its position on the graph. I expected to see Stanford high but it’s in the middle. BTW I don’t think statistics applies to a particular individual student, so I don’t read too much into it.
@eiholi & @illinoisx3: Note that the U of C takes a greater percentage of low income kids than Ivy Plus peers and also that the US has intergenerational socioeconomic mobility that is more comparable to third world countries than OECD peers these days.
For our D’s college search, we found the Forbes magazine college rankings the most useful. Unlike most other rankings, it also provides an assessment of the financial health of the colleges and universities. In our opinion, a college that is financially sound and highly rated for its financial health is much more likely to offer more generous financial aid than a college that is struggling financially to meet its operating expenses.
Stanford has several features going for it that may be influencing current perceptions. First, it’s one of very few top private research universities west of the Mississippi. Second, it has strong engineering and CS departments at a time when they are increasingly popular due to the innovation (and salary potential) associated with those fields. Third, it has stronger athletic programs than many other “elite” colleges. For these reasons, it’s understandable that it would place even higher in public perceptions than it does in data-driven rankings.
At any rate, we’re quibbling over a difference between #1 and #5. I can’t think of too many cases where I’d look at a USNWR ranking and consider it WAY off (like, 20 positions or more). Reed College (#87 LAC) is one exception. Some CC posters seem to think a few of the public Ivies (like Michigan) are under-rated by 10 positions or more. Others argue that rankings are completely meaningless, for example because universities are too complex to be assigned a single overall rank, or because personal effort (or choice of major) matters much more to your outcomes than your college brand.
My tiers of ivy-equivalents here: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/1893105-ivy-equivalents-ranking-based-on-alumni-outcomes-take-2-1-p1.html
Agree that Reed is extremely undervalued. Also NCF.
IMO, quibbling over 10 or even 20 places in USNews (outside the top 10 or so) is, IMO, fairly silly. Nobody in the real world looks at schools that way (besides lawyers, who seem rankings/prestige-obsessed).
USNWR ranks New College of Florida #90 among National Liberal Arts Colleges.
Other colleges near the tail of the top 100 (in either the LAC or university list) include:
Hendrix
Spelman
Allegheny
College of the Atlantic
St. John’s (SF)
Bennington
Ursinus
Minnesota (TC)
American
Clark
UMass (Amherst)
Virginia Tech
Colorado Mines
Iowa
Indiana
UDenver
One can find excellent departments, or interesting general education programs, at just about all these schools.
Iowa for a writing major, Minnesota or CO Mines for engineering, American for IR, Indiana for business, CotA for environmental studies, Clark for psychology: all could be better choices (for the right student) than schools ranked much higher.
Building on @tk21769 with a specific (and close to home) example: DD wants to study public policy. She also wants to study Russian and keep up with her violin. Indiana, with USNWR’s #1 public policy program, a top Russian studies center (one of 16 Title VI centers, one of three 2016 Carnegie $1MM grant recipients and the 7th ranked program according to Russia Direct magazine), and the world-class Jacobs School of Music (where Joshua Bell is a faculty member), certainly offers more to her than its #86 rank in USNWR (#113 in USNWR World) would indicate.
@Mastadon said it best: “The most reliable rankings are the ones you build for yourself using the raw data from the generic rankings and other relevant sources.”