The Forbes College Rankings 2018 Are Out!

Just another ranking. Top 100 are all great schools.

What I like about the Forbes is that it combines LACs and Us in one list. That also means ranks drop for most schools, though. Top 100 USN is really top 200 Forbes, in a sense.

Forbes publishes a “best value list” which is a financial outcome list.

Forbes’ “top colleges list” only 20% has to do with financial outcome, and 20% debt . The rest has to do with, (20%) niche satisfaction score, (27.5%) metrics tied to a handful of famous alumni, and (12.5%) graduation rate.

Issues:

  1. The weighting of nearly 30% for a some famous alumni should be closer to 10%. Conflating a few hundred graduates notoriety over the decades with the thousands of graduates… I’m not saying it is invalid, just way over weighted.

  2. Financial outcome should be a combination of nationally adjusted salary and debt over 20 or so years (40%). Equally weighting debt and salary and treating them as separate things is dumb. If a hypothetical university turned out grads that make 1M a year and their debt after school was 1M they would be average. They would have the highest salaries and the most debt.

I would recalculate their spreadsheet… but you have to pay for it. So Forbes’ data is unknown.

@Joblue : But that isn’t what the Forbes ranking is about.

Also, does your post mean that #76 through #99 are not outstanding ?

Elite school grads get recruited for the best jobs. (Of course, we can debate all day about the definition of “best”.)

What may be the best school for any individual student is not the point of the Forbes rankings.

P.S. Also the most selective colleges & universities expose students to others who are highly intelligent, hardworking & motivated, and this has a substantial effect on the entire student body. Almost like comparing those who qualify for & chose/choose to accept the grueling challenges of the US Marine Corps over the US Army. And, yes, I realize that the US Army has elite troops such as the Rangers just like large state universities have honors colleges.

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“(27.5%) metrics tied to a handful of famous alumni”

Seriously, this is 27.5% of the ranking? But they can’t accommodate coop schools who would never meet the 5 year metric?

“In spite of frequent push back on CC as to the value, quality, and results produced by the Ivies, they occupy 6 of the top 10 spots with the remaining 3 filled by “NYT dubbed Ivy Extended” Stanford, MIT and Duke along with Caltech.”

This is the first year that a LAC hasn’t made the top-10, in fact Forbes got the notoriety it did when Pomona was number 1 a few years back. Are LACs considered ivy-extended? I wish we were all here in 2008 when US military academies made the top-10 in Forbes’ first ranking (maybe to get attention), I wonder if they too would be considered ivy-extended.

The Ivy extended term was a New York Times moniker (not my creation) that included MDCS. I think most informed people would consider Williams, Amherst, Swathmore, Pomona etc as peers to these schools.

Certainly not suggesting a hard and fast group to the exclusion of any. Just a very consistent and defined group at the top

Graduation rate counting so much hurts Stanford when its undergraduates take time off to pursue other activities.

Right…because there’s a biiig dropoff at [checks notes] #101