<p>"University leaders in Florida have initiated national public relations and advertising campaigns to convince consumers of higher education their institutions fare better than the rankings published in recent college guide books.</p>
<p>Only 64 of the universities ranked in the top 124 of the new America's best colleges 2007, by U. S. News & World Report, are publicly supported.</p>
<p>Of those 64, the only Florida public universities to appear are the University of Florida (47th overall and 17th among public universities) and Florida State University (110th overall and 53rd among publics.)....</p>
<p>Parents and students selecting a college or university would be wise to do their own research through site visits and review of real data. It is not wise to use rankings motivated by business profits as a serious effort to select a college or university.</p>
<p>University administrators and trustees would also be well advised to highlight other measures of accomplishment when comparing their institutions of higher education with competing colleges and universities."</p>
<p>By most "real data" the Florida schools are ranked where they belong. Look at numbers of NAS members, major awards winners, research funding, etc and it works. The SJTU international rankings have UF at 42 in the USA and FSU 78-100.</p>
<p>The SJTU rankings may be the more accurate of those rankings out there. I find that the USNews rankings are perhaps too influenced by inter-university politics - as mentioned in the article. Notice how Florida State in the 2006 SJTU is 70-87 overall in the US compared to 110 in USNews.</p>
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The SJTU rankings may be the more accurate of those rankings out there. I find that the USNews rankings are perhaps too influenced by inter-university politics
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<p>I could not disagree with you more strongly. These rankings are, for the most part, numerical counts of publication and citations of faculty. There is a small adjustment for faculty size, but not nearly enough.</p>
<p>The rankings badly double count. A school that publishes a great deal of work is a school with a large faculty. The more publication, the more citations. Both are counted. It also counts Nobel Prize winners, which one is more likely to find at large, research-oriented schools. In addition, publication outside the hard sciences barely registers, so a school with the finest English Lit. Department in the world gets no points for that.</p>
<p>The rankings also pay no attention to students. None. Nada. Zilch. If the average class size at a school is 150, so what? If the average student has a SAT score of 1000 and the school graduates 25% of its student body, so what? </p>
<p>This ranking is simply this: A ranking of what are often a few professors in a few departments in large schools in the hard sciences. </p>
<p>That's why the University of Utah can be ranked higher than Darmouth.</p>
<p>Um, no, barrons. Just no. Not saying Michigan State is a bad school or anything, but, I think the USNews ranking is a much better assessment of its worth than this piece of junk.</p>
<p>Sounds like the Gourman Report on steroids...</p>
<p>What I am saying is MSU offers far more choices than Emory. Engineering, plant and ag related sciences, hotel admin--MSU has everything and some of it very good.</p>
<p>I don't think it's anymore junk than any other rating service. It appears to be less political than US News. It is perhaps more objective due to the presumed distance the raters have from the subjects of the rating.</p>
<p>Of course, if its your ox being gored then it may seem less worthy.</p>
<p>The College edition of the USNWR accounts for more than 25% of the magazine's total annual revenues. The USNWR is a weekly mind you...they release over 50 issues annually. To make matters worse, the magazine's primary market is the East Coast. Profits are definitely part of the USNWR college rankings equation...I'd say an even bigger part of the equation than the peer assessment score!</p>
<p>Berkeley, UCLA, UVA, and Michigan are fine schools, but their USNews rankings are very appropriate, at 21, 26, 24, and 24 respectively. By the way, being ranked 21 through 26 is not "bad" by any stretch of the imagination.</p>
<p>Cal should be ranked between #6 and #10. Michigan between #8 and #15. UVA and UCLA should also be ranked in the top 20. All four of those schools get shafted by the USNWR. Luckily, most educated people know their worth.</p>
<p>I find the London Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) ranking of world universities far more reliable than the SJTU ranking. As of 2006, the top 20 universities in the US and Canada according to THES are: </p>
<p>1) Harvard
2) MIT
3) Yale
4) Stanford
5) Caltech
6) UC Berkeley
7) Princeton
8) Univ of Chicago
9) Columbia
10) Duke
11) Cornell
12) McGill
13) Johns Hopkins
14) UPenn
15) Univ of Toronto
16) Univ Of Michigan
17) UCLA
18) Univ Of Texas Austin
19) Carnegie Mellon
20) Northwestern</p>