<p>After skimming through the top 10 schools in each state thread, in addition to countless other discussions on this board with a large emanating consensus of kids picking schools based national rankings and "prestige," as opposed to the even more important personal factors. </p>
<p>Where does this thought process come from? </p>
<p>You should pick a school based on which will accommodate you and your family's needs the most... Like, let's see... which school has a stronger program for YOUR specific major, which will benefit you (and your parents) most financially (whether that means tuition, room and board, food, traveling home, etc), the surrounding city, the faculty, how well YOU personally will succeed, etc. </p>
<p>NOT what US News thinks. </p>
<p>The University of Florida is ranked higher on all those dumb lists than Florida State University. However, I'm going into the music school. And FSU tops UF and MANY of those other universities in music ANYDAY. While UF has the US News academic "prestige," I personally would benefit way more in FSU's music school than UF's. </p>
<p>I choose FSU over UF. Not because a list told me to. </p>
<p>At the same time, I realize that these rankings are a good reference to go by, seeing how a lot these schools will be very well rounded. </p>
<p>But you need to look past that, that's all I ask.</p>
<p>I don't think anyone disagrees with you.. but when ranking schools, you consider the overall strength, not individual programs. That's why schools that are good in many fields are going to be ranked higher.</p>
<p>Nor is that always true, rgs. To a very large extent, schools are mostly ranked by how competitive it is to gain acceptance, which doesn't necessarily reflect how "good" they are. I'd argue that there are a lot of highly ranked, highly competitive schools that are much "worse" than lots of public state U's. But then again it gets back to the OP's point that it depends on what YOU are after....</p>
<p>hornplayer I think your talking about my post I put up saying where UF ranks over "new college" I agree with you when you say FSU tops UF music program but UF trumps 80-90% of the programs/depts. FSU has.</p>
<p>Future Pilot, I was not referring strictly to any post, just the overall picture. I only brought up FSU and UF as that is what most applies to me and it was the way I knew how to explain it most.</p>
<p>I had a little trouble finding out exactly what method they used for obtaining them. The only sentence I could find about it was on another portion of the website, and it mentioned something similar to:
"The rankings were obtained by asking faculty from nearby colleges to grade each other in terms of yada, yada, yada..."
But i'm not sure if that's referring to those particular rankings or not. If that's what they used though, it doesn't seem very accurate nor useful to me. Far too subjective.</p>
<p>The NRC rankings survey most faculty at all schools with a PhD program in the field being ranked. It is getting old but is considered the gold standard of rankings.</p>
<p>wow i had never seen that NRC list before but I really like it... really opens your eyes and shows you that a third tier uni can be better than a top 20 uni in certain departments...</p>