I’m thinking to help get a decent idea of students’ thoughts on overall undergraduate academic quality, we (they…) could survey them about their thoughts on things like rigor, class availability, quality of class discussion, access to and interaction with profs, access to research opportunities, quality of academic support, and overall satisfaction with the quality of the faculty/teaching/academics.
So I did “contact” USNews to recommend replacing the counselor academic rep survey with this student survey. And to make sure the university/college officials understand their job in regards to properly rating other schools’ undergraduate academic quality: don’t base it on the grad school, don’t rate schools you have no idea about, etc.
I’m not entertaining fantasies of their ranking formula manager(s) ever seeing the ideas, but at least I tried. 