<p>"Academic quality" and "quality of life" are both extremely subjective, even if a basis for attempting to quantify such is provided.</p>
<p>Don't disagree! (I think most of the rankings are hokum - but I want to put to rest the notion that HYPS MIT Caltech are "always" considered the "best" schools in the country, even by Princeton Review, when they clearly are not!) (For the record, if it was for me, I think Earlham is the best school in the country.)</p>
<p>But Mini, selectivity DOES matter. It is a function of prestige and determines the strength of the student body. In a way it will determine where a student will go; i.e. the academics and life might be great at Earlham(?) but overall a rare person will chose that school over Princeton. My issue is that the new PR rankings are completely flawed in selectivity. </p>
<p>But when you assign reasonable selectivity numbers things work out differently. I am assigning these based on my opinions, chime in if you disagree.</p>
<p>Selectivity:
Carleton - 96
Smith - 93
Pomona - 98
Middlebury - 95
Haverford - 96
Amherst - 99
Mount Holyoke - 92
Stanford 100
Dartmouth - 99
Princeton - 100
Harvard - 100
Brown 99
Yale - 100</p>
<p>NOW add these up and you get a list like this:</p>
<p>Amherst: 292
Pomona: 292
Stanford: 292
Dartmouth: 291
Carleton: 291
Princeton: 290
Middlebury: 289
Smith: 288
Harvard: 287
Brown: 286
Yale: 286
Mt. Holyoke: 283</p>
<p>The highest ranked LACs and undergrad focused Ivies come to the top, where they should be in a list like this.</p>
<p>For the record I'm with Mini, I think PR has the best method for those trying to understand and get a feel for this or that college: it's largely subective and I like that.</p>
<p>Slipper, </p>
<p>Your revised list looks good to me...although pretty similar to the unrevised list it would probably be found more palatable to most prestige-hounds and keep the dogs at bay.</p>
<p>Use your list and you still pretty much make my point. Of HYPS, MIT, and CalT, only one makes the top 5. Only one Ivy comes in ahead of Carleton, only two ahead of Smith.</p>
<p>So, no matter how you slice it, whether you use this year's numbers or last year's numbers, Princeton Review does NOT view HYPS, MIT, and CalT as the "best schools in the country."</p>
<p>(But, and it really is a minor point - Princeton Review thinks you are wrong about selectivity, at this level, and they explain why very well. All the old numbers do is show the disconnect between selectivity at the top schools and the actual experienced academic quality and quality of life - and that's a BIG statement. Forget the women's colleges, if you like (I don't see why): they understand what a grave disservice their previous rankings did to UChicago and Grinnell. But since we respectfully disagree about selectivity - again, at this level of school - just leave it out and focus on academics and quality of life....)</p>
<p>"Princeton Review does NOT view HYPS, MIT, and CalT as the "best school's in the country."</p>
<p>Isn't it their way to get the majority buy their books? The potential students of the mentioned schools will be unlikely to buy such guide. :p</p>
<p>Selectivity is huge. Before a student can enjoy campus life items, he/she has to know whether or not they have a chance of getting in and the academic caliber of the student residing there.</p>
<p>"Princeton Review does NOT view HYPS, MIT, and CalT as the "best school's in the country"</p>
<p>the author of this statement needs help.</p>
<p>No, you need help.</p>
<p>Slipper, your results above are interesting. Could you spell out the formula?</p>
<p>I just added quality of life + Academic rankings of this year with what I remember to be approximate selectivity from previous years PR (before they warped their selectivity rankings to give every school a 99).</p>
<p>If someone has the real selectivity rankings from last year, go for it. I can't seem to find them.</p>
<p>PR's "Toughest Schools to Get Into" List is based on Selectivity. US. News has selectivity rankings as does Atlantic Monthly.</p>
<p>The PR "toughest to get into" list - styled a "ranking" - is based in part on their silly, non-scientific "surveys."</p>
<p>Translation: Byerly is ****ed off that Harvard is below MIT, Princeton, CalTech, and Yale in the hardest to get into category.</p>
<p>Mini--You left out Williams at 194 there (probably some other schools as well). </p>
<p>The princetonreview's rankings are pure crap. They are based upon student surveys...student surveys not administered by the princetonreview staff, but by students at the schools (often only one student). The recommended methods of surveying are vague and unscientific, and the entire concept is poorly designed (the PR rankings are a comparison of student's conceptions of their school, not of the schools themselves). The survey itself isn't even particularly well-designed--it is tailored to illicit interesting responses for the PR publications more than to actually yield valid comparative results. </p>
<p>The PR website in general is also pretty mediocre for informational purposes. Much of the information included about the schools is incorrect or outdated, and much of it is gathered from students reporting about their school rather than official school data (ie: the most popular majors listed are not the most popular majors as recorded by the schools, but the most popular majors as reported by students filling out the surveys).</p>
<p>Personally I feel that schools such as Amherst, Williams, Carleton, Pomona, many of the women's colleges, etc are better for undergraduate study than HYPS, but the princetonreview rankings are not a valid indicator of anything of the sort.</p>
<p>w&m ahead of uva on atlantic monthly...what?</p>
<p>and i agree that PR is pure bs; it's outdated, doesn't provide much information, and is often outright wrong.</p>
<p>What bothers me about the PR website in particular is that they don't seem to even CARE about the many errors. Over the years I have called scores of errors to their attention, and only rarely do they correct them.</p>
<p>Both the website and the Guide/rankings seem designed primarily to serve as a come-on for the profit centers such as SAT courses, etc. That, among other reasons, is why they shrug off the heavy criticism of their silly "rankings". The more "controversial" the better, from their point of view, since the purpose of the rankings is to hype the book, and the purpose of the book is to solicit customers for training courses, etc.</p>
<p>For what it's worth, I feel I got a very good look at the diferent schools from PR. I also liked the information in the Fiske Guide.</p>
<p>I would not try to defend ANY of the ranking services, publications, or methodologies. Some of them will like them, and some of them you won't. Some of you want to mix and match data from previous years with current ones in order to fit your own interpretations of how things "should be", even when rejected by the publication itself. And some of you are obsessed with them.</p>
<p>I was (and am) trying to make one point, and one point only: it is emphatically NOT true that HYPS, MIT, and Caltech, are universally ranked the best undergraduate institutions in the country, and, in one of the "Big Three" publications, NONE of them even make the top five. This is a factual question about the rankings, not how anyone (including myself) actually feels about them.</p>
<p>Mini,</p>
<p>I apologize for bringing "feelings" into the discussion. Too often I allow my feelings to intrude on other peoples endless and tireless litany of "facts" and statistics that seem to inspire their boundless confidence.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, as someone who recently had to rely on his subjective "feeling" about this or that school, I felt that the PR, fiske and perhaps P R O W L E R guides were somehow more informative for students than the USnews "ranking" which I guess is one of the "facts" you and Byerly are so concerned with debating. On top of that, I was unaware the PR took its "rankings" seriously, only its numeric scores for the various things it looks at independently of each other which are interesting but hardly definitive. Perhaps it does, but for me it would hardly matter.
On another thread, I argued that I preferred the Preferred Preference Survey for similar reasons; that is, it is based for the most part on the subjective opinions/decisions of real people--the people who will actually make selections and does not have a pretense of judging which school is objectively better, just preferred.</p>