<p>Perhaps it doesn’t comment on the quality of the school, but these are factors that many people are interested in which are associated with particular schools. And many people pay larges amounts of money for themselves or their children to go to these schools for those reasons; They believe that their schools will get them ‘the good job’ or put them on a path to do so (e.g. get into a good professional/grad. school.) And to some degree, schools do have an influence on this. LACs, for example, produce PHD-bound students at a higher rate than universities if memory serves. </p>
<p>Starting salary level would be important too, if undergraduates are taking on large amounts of debts to fund their education. Is there a difference between starting salary at State School S and Ivy I? If not, the latter might be wholly rejected by an applicant in virtue of the former.</p>
<p>Alumni giving is actually a factor/criteria in some foundation grants- I’ve heard, not the amount per alum or totals, but the number of givers- as a measure of alum satisfaction, including happy memories. Which ties back, then, to why quality of life on campus is a concern of many colleges. </p>
<p>And, when employers look at reputation, I’m afraid many don’t even get to USNews- I’m afraid more know the sports powerhouses (or, at least, teams) and then assume.</p>
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<li>about PhDs and starting salary- Yale says it’s looking for future leaders, then defines that broadly- not just the obvious CEOs and politicians, etc. Some influential, highly educated people out there are not on the same treaadmill. If you want grad school or, eg, high finance, a top business career, sure, the track records of grads matter. What if you don’t?</li>
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<p>I certainly disagree strongly with that. Reach-safety-match is a function of (1) does the school have the program I want, (2) what are my admission chances, and (3) can I afford the school? Consulting rankings is useless or nearly useless for all of these factors. Worse, it immediately sends messages to families that schools that might be well-suited are “bad” (not in the “top X”) and schools that are entirely ill-suited are desirable only because a stupid formula says so.</p>
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<p>Well, we agree on one thing!</p>
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<p>OK, what are the significant differences in quality between Penn State and Clemson?</p>
<p>Right. And when somebody is running a business that is “harmful and misleading” to the public then government reform of the situation usually follows. “Harmful and misleading” are serious adjectives usually applied to things such as predatory lending, peddling dangerous quack cures, and ponzi schemes, not a college ranking exercise in a news magazine.</p>
<p>If the rankings are so bad as to actually be harming and misleading people, then what is your proposed solution to this terrible scourge? How are you going to get rid of the USNews rankings? My solution is to chuckle over them and maybe engage in a few lightweight arguments about them, because I don’t consider them to be especially misleading and certainly not harmful. Or at least no more harmful or misleading that a college football ranking poll.</p>
<p>There are MANY students, everywhere, who are choosing schools for reasons other than rankings from a flawed, for-profit publication that makes a killing both in print and online with its “best” editions of everything from colleges to places to live. There was just a post the other day from a woman whose daughter turned down three Ivies for Knox College in Illinois. I just read a post on the “colleges your child crossed off the list after visiting” from a parent whose child really disliked Dartmouth for its seeming anti-intellectual “bro” culture. Students from my kids’ school routinely get, and turn down, offers from Stanford and other “top” schools, or attend them for one year only to drop out and return to our state flagship.</p>
<p>"We don’t live in an ideal world, though. When USNWR releases a list of rankings and calls it “The top 100 best colleges!” or whatever, people aren’t going to immediately go digging around in the stats to see how those rankings actually work. They will just take them at face value. This includes teachers, employers, etc. In the end, it just continues to perpetuate this idea that “best” is heavily influenced by things like “reputation” and prestige. "</p>
<p>I think it’s a very small subset of hs seniors who pick based on USNWR. The vast majority of hs seniors look for price /affordability, a specific major, and not too far from home. The “problem” of overanxious parents in Short Hills misusing the rankings is the firstest of first-world problems and nothing that I think anyone really needs to worry about.</p>
<p>They are rather like Consumer Reports, in a sense. Use the info if you find it useful; if not, don’t use it and move on with your day. Maybe there are people who don’t make any major purchase unless it’s ranked at the top by CR; oh well, their problem, not mine. Same with USNWR.</p>
<p>And another thing: when people say “oh, they only chose Mediocre College over Fancy College because Mediocre gave them a better financial package than Fancy,” remember that these are people who, in many cases, would have been willing to pay for Fancy if they had thought it would be worth the investment. Smart parents do a cost-benefit analysis and aren’t blinded by the aura of “prestige” and its dubious advantages. With the exception of a few fields (such as investment banking) where going to the “right” college can lead to a significant difference in pay after graduation, most job markets are local and not everyone sees the value of spending vast sums of money for an undergraduate education.</p>
<p>USNWR Rankings are nothing like Consumer Reports. CR rigorously tests each product and evaluates against the criteria for that particular product. They look at important qualities: does the product work as it is supposed to? Is it well built? What is the historical reliability of the brand?</p>
<p>It would be nice if there were something similar for colleges, but USNWR is not even close.</p>
<p>Actually, a portion of the Consumer’s Report ranking is based on input from those who subscribe to their publication (but they never seem to widely communicate that). Since you don’t have to even own the item being tested, people who have an ax to grind with specific manufacturers tend to rate those products lower. Some manufacturers even encourage their people to do this in an effort to increase the rating of their brand.</p>
<p>Someone who had one bad experience with a certain brand of washing machine, could write terrible reviews about them in an effort to skew the ratings.</p>
<p>As someone mentioned above, you should use this as one data point and not the end-all/be-all rankings that some assume they are.</p>
<p>Yes. There are numerous threads right now full of outrage that some universities moved up while others have moved down. There is even a rather pointless thread that has been live for months on PREDICTING the 2013 USNWR rankings. Really??</p>
<p>I don’t know how else you can rate things like customer service for a cell phone company without consumer surveys. CR also lists all the factors that go into each rating in a simple table, in contrast to the ridiculous unquantified rankings of USNWR, so if you think all the survey-based portions are lies, you can ignore them and just look at the lab testing portions.</p>
<p>on the % of graduates that give back not the amount of $ given so how does the criterion favor elite, well-off schools? As counter-examples, just look at Centre College in Kentucky, Thomas Aquinas in California, and Judson in Alabama, which all have high alum giving rates.</p>
<p>It’s a useful measure because it gives one an idea of how the people who got their educations from the place feel about their experiences.</p>
<p>Whether a school has the program you want can be an essential consideration. However, for many students this really is not a distinguishing factor, because they seek a general education in the arts & sciences. Not every school has a program in chemical engineering, pharmacy, or nursing. However, virtually every state flagship, LAC, and private university has programs in English, History, Biology, Physics, and Economics. Even if a student thinks s/he knows which of these fields s/he wants as a major, the reality is that most of them eventually will switch. Therefore, it can make sense to choose a college (rather than a department). In that case, the USNWR criteria (faculty resources, student selectivity, etc) do make some sense (provided you don’t put too much stock in small ranking differences).</p>
<p>As for admission chances, in general the higher the rank, the more selective the school. So if you can identify one school that is a good “match”, chances are the schools that surround it in the rankings will also “match” (more or less). This is a convenient way to get exposure to schools you may not have considered.</p>
<p>Ditto for financial aid. Typically, the more selective (and higher ranked) the school, the better the need-based aid. There are exceptions, but almost all of America’s ~50 full-need, need-blind colleges are highly ranked, selective private schools. If you are a good student who needs merit aid (i.e. you cannot afford your EFC), then the top 100 or so schools, minus most of the top 20, are fertile territory. Most schools ranked in the top 20 don’t offer it (they don’t need to to attract students); many schools ranked below the top 100 don’t have the institutional wealth to afford generous offers.</p>
<p>But I think the usefulness of the USNWR rankings is primarily for very good students who have a lot of choices. For an average student whose family cannot afford its EFC, or for students who for whatever reason are shopping only in their local area, it may not be very helpful.</p>
<p>Suppose you wanted to invest in a product before it was even available for sale. Would you be helpless to predict eventual product quality? No. You could inspect the factory floor. Is it crowded, dirty and full of safety violations? Are the supervisors well qualified? Are they using high quality components or the cheapest available junk? This is analogous to the approach US News follows. It focuses on inputs, based on an assumption that these have predictive value for the outputs.</p>
<p>Unfortunately there is no comprehensive test to measure how much knowledge each college imparts over 4 years. Some rankings have attempted to survey the “consumer”. Forbes, for example, uses “rate my professor” surveys. The problems with that approach have been discussed on CC.</p>
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<p>Pretty much the same thing is available to support the USNWR rankings. It’s called the Common Data Set. If you want to compare the “Peer Assessment” scores with objective measurements of admit rates, graduation rates, student activities, class sizes, aid, or degrees conferred, then you can do that for most schools. US News summarizes this information on its web site (with extra detail for premium edition subscribers).</p>
<p>^^^ LOL, I was thinking the same thing. Attempting to rank colleges is at best an arbitrary process. It is far more useful for those in h.s. and their parents to evaluate college options based on the criteria that means the most to them. Things like: 1) How much can you afford to spend?, 2) What are you interested in majoring in?, 3) Do you prefer a small/large campus, 4) Does it matter how far from home the college is? or 5) Do you plan to play sports and/or attempt to get scholarship money based on your abilitiies (and what level D1/2/3???)</p>
<p>Selecting a college is not a one-size-fits-all proposition.</p>
<p>The US News rankings always turn out to be a prestige ranking, and that’s why people seem to disparage them so much. However, prestige is important. Do you think top companies would rather recruit students to work for them at a top 10 US News school or a top 100 school? There are undeniably better opportunities at the better ranked schools.</p>
<p>Plenty of “top companies” pick the schools they recruit at on other factors -historical ties, alums in top positions in the company, school located nearby so won’t have to pay relocation costs, and just convenience. When Company A decides to focus recruiting on colleges B, C, D, and E, they are not making some grand statement or pronouncement that colleges F, G, H and I aren’t anywhere near as good. they are just narrowing the field because logistically they have to focus. Unsophisticated high school seniors don’t get that.</p>