@TimeUpJunior. One of the better ways is to compare 2018 number with the historic average of 1988 through 2017. ND started at 18 but there were few early years in which they were outside the top 25 (for those years, maybe you can assume 26 if you don’t have the actual number). This way, you are at least considering data from all years instead of just two years.
Vandy’s a great school, but its ranking (to the extent it actually means anything) has hardly budged in past years. Very unlikely to change much in future years. Like pretty much every other top 20-ish school. If the under/over is set at #10, I’d wager on Vandy being over for the rest of my lifetime.
Over the years, Vandy’s ranking has nudged up 13 times. It has gone down or gone sideways 15 times. Very likely, much of that movement is due to USNWR tweeking their formula time and time again. It doesn’t help sell magazines if every school is in the exact same place every year. Since the schools change very very slowly (if at all), USNWR keeps it interesting by changing the formula almost every year. But the schools comprising the top 10/15/20/25 hardly vary.
USNWR takes extremely stable data and works to make it noisier than it is.
Beyond USNWR, let’s consider Princeton Review rankings showing Vandy number 1 in FA and in the top 4 for happiest students, college town, town/school relations, quality of life and most beautiful campus. These factors are arguably more important than rank in USNWR but PR is less well known.
https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2018/08/07/vanderbilt-ranks-no-1-for-great-financial-aid/
@Sam-I-Am: Those are nice, but the happiness ranking is dangerous in some ways and technically the others are aligned with “happiness” so that is weird. I don’t like too many rankings. Maybe just couple some of PR and also hope that VU continues to perform well and even better in terms of outcomes. I do get queasy when students are pre-dominantly worried about qol (basically the schools being “nice”) over the academics and empowerment. Strong rankings either bad or good for PR represent student values/what they feel strongly about. For example, my alma mater is ranked well in all but 2 of those, but I did prefer it when its libraries and laboratories received a high ranking because it indicated that the surveyed cohorts cared about those a lot more than one would think considering how much goes into selling the “niceness” of a school. We also need to be careful with FA because it doesn’t necessarily result in increasing “access” of certain SES demographics to a school. Schools must admit them first and some clearly don’t want to likely because of the strain it puts on the FA resources AND the tug-of-war between maintaining and boosting income stats to look more prestigious and increasing access. For an elite school, this looks like a dilemma and I don’t know how I feel.
@cornelldad10 : I know right. It must be a horrible place now! Just terrible lol. Though there actually is some debate about certain tiers of LACs
@northwesty : It appears VU is trying to change some post all this admissions growth (it should not have waited in my opinion), so could literally change academically and perhaps in some other ways. The problem with rankings is that they still may not reflect important changes and of course many other schools have be/have been doing the same ones, and if such changes are more visible, “louder”, and more high impact than others, then those places are more likely to benefit assuming that momentum in the other metrics (like admissions and such) is maintained or grows. It is a race to change in a visible and high impact way while also doing the beauty pageant aspect of looking prestigious through incoming stats, yield, etc. And again, you can’t control how other schools will behave. Dartmouth’s president is trying to change it for example, and Duke which is already kind of insane is/was considering major changes for undergraduate education.
All ranking systems are subjective and limited by their methodology. While there is little difference between the top undergraduate U’s it is fun to follow. USNWR tends to overweigh reputation and wealth most of which were generated 100+ years ago. This favors the wealthy top privates. Money magazine uses educational quality, affordability, and alumni success which gives the state universities an opportunity to rank high. The elite 10 universities that score in the top 20 in both of these ranking systems:
Princeton
MIT
Harvard
Yale
Rice
UPENN
CalTech
UCLA
Stanford
Vanderbilt
The Princeton Review is unique in that it allows current students to share their experiences in a variety of different areas. Current students know their schools better than high school counselors, research directors, or administrators of other universities. When you see U’s scoring well or poorly in these students surveys there is usually a valid reason.
@bud123 : Current students can also have perverse incentives to over-rank or under-rank things that they know have been made as marketing material for their schools (I may feel some sub-conscious pressure to rate everything high if I know high ratings in some areas have traditionally made the school look great and be able to market itself or because I am told by a bunch of people that I am supposed to feel a certain way). Also, the problem w/PR is that it makes it impossible to compare across schools. You can find out the values of students and what they pay attention to the most through that, but I would never assume that one student body has the same standards as others or values as others. Like, for example, Stanford and many schools are very nice, but their students may have higher expectations for many categories than students who go elsewhere or have certain values. Likewise, I have my doubts that VU students would be happy at Oklahoma which ranks 1 for happiness. Many of those schools (there are also some highly ranked LACs in happiest and other qol categories) are very different and tend to get student bodies that are looking for completely different type of experiences. I don’t know what to make of that sometimes. Could be more of a measure of how close the school matches the students expectations of the school in certain areas, which must be taken with a grain of salt because students at say…Harvard are often pretty crabby and difficult to please. Things could generally be better off at H than peer schools and other elites yet the students have a culture of critique and asking for more that is palpable. Duke is not as self-congratulatory either (not as much as it used to be. They are now pretty scathingly critical, as are a lot of top 10 student bodies)
I also need not talk about other student survey related things that have tried to rank workload/students who work hard and surveys before college where Americans in particular tend to over-estimate their abilities, and internal evaluations such as student course evaluations which can be useful on some items, but fall so short on others that often positive evaluations for faculty at some levels (especially at the level of survey courses) tend to be irrelevant or negatively correlated with more advanced coursework that builds off of it (added value effects) which suggest that the things that lead to positive evals in many cases are not related to learning outcomes which is scary. Even our own self-evaluation of our own experiences can be “off” or hard to interpret in comparison to other experiences or scenarios.
With PR, I get nervous when a rank stays in the same spot every time (especially at elite schools where students and admins are kind of obsessed with rankings…which is what this thread indicates). It should perhaps fluctuate some and rotate new categories that are rated highly in and out based upon the cohort which should not always be super homogeneous over time.
As for USNWR, Let us keep it real, some of the schools listed have been ranked significantly higher before due to mistakes or metric differences (this is why 2 point movements are not as useful as we may think). Cornell and Emory used to be top 10 for example, HOWEVER, I would argue that both schools are much stronger schools today (in terms of research infrastructure, impact, visibility globally and nationally, undergraduate curricula to some extent, quality of life, etc) than back when they had those rankings, which are now significantly lower. Currently the top 10 schools have certain characteristics that not only make them higher in the metrics that USNWR UG rankings, but in global visibility, impact, “productivity”, post-grad prize access/success, and things like that. They do extremely well and not too many sub top 10s have had that type of clout or even undergraduate programs that have had similar levels of strength to most of those schools. If VU or any of its peers ranked around it made it up there within a decade/very soon and did not “catch up” to those schools in terms of those characteristics, it would make USNWR look less credible and people would interpret such schools as “impostures”. Chicago deserves to be up there based upon those characteristics and it is still catching hell because of how quickly it got there. People want to discredit its position. People would have reasons to discredit a top 10 position for many of the other schools because they haven’t even done the work or made the changes that indicate that their impact and productivity is at a similar level to the other top 10 schools. You want to be the school that has such a credible impact that if you got to top 10 and dropped out of it, even those at other schools would laugh at USNWR. For example, if Stanford dropped out of the top 10, everyone knows it would be stupid. Even if one ignored aspects that are less relevant to undergraduate experience, its undergraduate programs and experience are as or more robust than most of the top 10 schools and a significant step beyond others. They would be dropping out because they didn’t play the “game” as well pandering to various metrics. Meanwhile if any one of those several below 10 schools enter at their current state and level of momentum/trajectory, and then go back out, no one would be surprised or say: “Wow, that is strange”.
*I just don’t think discussions about really any rankings are productive. The schools and students at them should be aiming to get better in a myriad of ways which may a) not be appreciated by current students (for example, does one really think that the level and stress of academics at all the top STEM institutes and some LACs is fully appreciated in the moment of the experience? I bet it affects how they interpret other things about the school such as quality of life metrics and other things but once their education pays off big time and gets them disproportionate access to certain opps versus other larger or similar sized schools, they realize the impact and importance of their experiences and thank the schools later) or b) received as relevant and helpful to any ranking metrics as enough to move the needle, but is nonetheless the right thing to do for long-term institutional growth and impact (enhancing graduation rate is always great as long as it doesn’t mean easing the academic environment too much or making it completely static). I just don’t think chasing any of these rankings is worthwhile once you have a strong rank (really like any top 30 school and especially top 20ish schools) Administrators should know what to do to keep their schools relevant or increase their overall impact and level of success in what is kind of a changing landscape of higher education. Doing this has little to do with things like PR or USNWR I would hope. I
*Also, for those who keep mentioning residential systems and colleges, there is more than one way to “skin a cat”. At Stanford, that type of system was not feasible so they did something else. I would go find their plan, but forgot where it is. It avoided a residential college system but did increase on-campus residence to damned near 100%. Though there are certainly trends, there are other solutions. I actually liked some of the programs they rolled out as they revamped their residential experience. They did a lot to marry academics and the reshall experience where possible and heavily exploited llcs.