<p>These are the peer assessment scores from US World News - in other words, what people in the know (Provosts, Deans, Presidents) actually <em>think</em> about the schools. Only care about prestige? P1ssed off that Wash U is so high on the list? Annoyed that public universities get the shaft? Now you can rejoice!</p>
<p>Top 50 National Universities
1. Harvard,
MIT
Princeton
Stanford
Yale
6. Caltech
University of California - Berkeley
University of Chicago
9. Columbia
Cornell
John Hopkins
12. Duke
University of Michigan
University of Pennsylvania
15. Brown
Dartmouth
Northwestern
18. University of California - Los Angeles
University of Virginia
20. Carnegie Mellon University
University of North Carolina
University of Wisconsin
23. Georgetown
Rice
University of Texas
Vanderbilt
Washington University in Saint Louis
28. Emory University
Georgia Tech
University of Illinois - Urbana Champaign
31. University of Notre Dame
University of Southern California
University of Washington
34. Coll. of William and Mary
Indiana University - Bloomington
NYU
Penn State
UC San Deigo
University of Minnesota - Twin Cities
40. Ohio State University
Tufts
UC Davis
University of Maryland
44. Boston College
Brandeis
RPI
Texas A&M
University of Florida
University of Iowa
UC Irvine</p>
<p>Well, those people respect many schools because of their grad programs (see Berkeley and Michigan, which have amazing grad programs but its undergrad programs often get the shaft from many students)</p>
<p>Thats why I think its a good factor to include in the US News rankings, but other factors that reflect solely on undergrad are also equally important (ie incoming SAT scores, etc.)</p>
<p>completely unfair to undergrad focused schools like dartmouth who don't have all the grad programs like berkeley to attract attention. wash u is still too high.</p>
<p><em>unfair</em> is an interesting word to throw around.</p>
<p>I'd argue that prestige is always a popularity contest. But remember - these are people in the academic community who are rating these colleges. I think they know the difference between undergraduate and graduate education.</p>
<p>USNews2007, what's not fair,if you ask me, is that the USNWR purposely and knowingly cheats to knock down public universities in order to look better to the ignorant masses and sell more magazines. Like I always say, those in the know (employers and top academics and intellectuals), those who truly matter and impact the lives of students, know which are the best universities. But if there is anything that's "unfair", it is the USNWR deceiptful formula, purposely designed to harm the image of public universities.</p>
<p>Actually, those numbers don't represent very much. It does not represent the prestige seen by job recruiters. It also does not represent the prestige seen by graduate program adcoms (don't confuse them with deans of undergraduate admissions).</p>
<p>Actually Aurelius, it does reflect what recruiters think. I was a recruiter at the very highest level with Investment Banks and fortune 50 manufacturing and the peer assessment score was much closer to what top recruiters think than the overall ranking. As for adcoms, I'd say that all of academe share the same overall opinion of universities. You can't say that the deans think one thing and the adcoms think something else. They are all connected.</p>
<p>I'm not denying that there's a correlation, which there certainly is. What I'm saying is that you can't use the correlation in the reverse effect to arrive at a "conclusion" in judging the schools. (similar to the correlation vs. causation argument.)</p>
<p>For example, Johns Hopkins ranks very high in PA, but the number of high salary recruiters it attracts (which although decent) is probably not as high as many schools ranked lower in PA, such as Penn, Brown and Dartmouth. Recruiting is more heavily correlated with alumni network and also with the school's professional program, which helps the network. I know Michigan has very favorable recruiting, but that is not because of the PA.</p>
<p>For specialty recruiting, such as engineering, recruiting is based on the program stength, not on the overall peer assessment. For example, Carnegie Mellon will have better CS recruiting than almost any school ranked above it in Peer Assessment (PA). Georgetown will be better recruited for DC government internships than many schools above it in the PA.</p>
<p>For graduate admissions, I don't see how PA is very useful. For example, in the list for HLS' undergradate schools, many schools with low PAs like Dartmouth beat out schools with higher PAs. It is well-known that LACs do well in professional school admissions depite that they generally have low PAs compared to universities.</p>
<p>You can argue that PA gives a "general ranking," but I argue that a "general ranking" is not useful at all, because when you graduate, you'll have to chose something.</p>
<p>I think it should also be stated that a lot of people think that US News distributes these peer assessment surveys to random people on campus, and ask them to fill out stuff about universities they know nothing about. That's not true at all. They only give it to Deans, Provosts, and ask them to rank institutions that are similar to them, that they would know about, in their peer category. If they don't know, they actually check off "don't know" and it doesn't count in computing the average.</p>
<p>
[QUOTE]
God, there are too many of these sort of lists.
I wonder what the people who made these lists were like in high school.
[/QUOTE]
</p>
<p>Actually, this is a component of the USNews rankings. And the people who make these lists could probably cheat people out of money even in High School.</p>
<p>I agree with you Aurelius. The PA does not apply to all people. CMU makes much more sense than Yale for a person who is set on a CS career. Georgetown is probably a better bet than Caltech for a future IBanker. </p>
<p>You mention JHU having a higher PA than Penn, Brown and Dartmouth. That's not what I mean by a difference in PA ratings. I personally do not see a difference between a PA of 4.6 and 4.4. There is a difference between say 3.9 or 4.0 and 4.5 or 4.6, but there isn't a difference between 4.6 and 4.4.</p>
<p>It's interesting that this list is closer to what most of us have in our heads than the main U.S. News list is. The oddities in the rankings of such schools as Penn and WashU have magically vanished.</p>
<p>Of course, I'm not an unbiased observer. I can't help but like any list that places my alma mater, Cornell, above three other schools in the Ivy League. :)</p>
<p>Alexandre-
What exactly is it about the US News formula that treats publics unfairly? SAT scores? class size? student faculty ratio? Peer assessment? Graduation and retention rates?</p>
<p>I don't see which components of the US News formula are unfair to publics? Michigan, Berkeley, Georgia Tech, and so on are ranked high.</p>
<p>I think the USNWR is unfair for the following reasons:</p>
<p>1) Mean SAT scores and ranges are measured differently at public universities than at private universities. Either the USNWR should adjust for the difference in reporting styles (which favors private universities by an average of 40 points) or they should not use the SAT as an indicator. </p>
<p>2) Graduation rates are indeed important. But is there a difference between graduating 87% and 93% of the class? I didn't think so!</p>
<p>3) Class sizes can be manipulated at private schools by limiting the class to just 19 students. State schools cannot impose such limits and have countless number of classes with 20-25 students. Is there a huge difference between a class with 19 students and a class with 20-25 students? Furthermore, the real difference in class sizes between large publics and smaller private universities in in intro classes, most of which are very straightforward and where close interaction with professors is aesthetically pleasing, but not entirely beneficial. </p>
<p>4) Student:Faculty ratio is meaningless, since some universities, like Chicago, Caltech and Penn have a huge chunk of their faculties engaged purely in research. </p>
<p>5) Alumni donation rate. It has already been established without the shadow of a doubt that it has nothing to do with quality, but rather, with size (the smaller the alumni network, the higher the hit rate) and with the number of years the university alumni center has been activelly soliciting alums (privates have been doing it much longer than publics). </p>
<p>As far as I am concerned, the USNWR is extremely biased. Not all of it is bad of course. The Peer assessment score and selectivity rankings are definitely useful. The Faculty and Financial resources ranks are useful, but should not be factored into the rankings because they are impossible to translate effectively.</p>
<p>Yeah, I'm especially more pleased at this list since my future school is now 6th.. and not 9th lol.</p>
<p>Seriously, though, I think that this list - again - is more realistic than the actual general ranking. When it comes to graduate admissions, job recruitment etc... I think that this is the sort of ranking that will prevail. When people mention the WSJ rankings I always like to point out the fact that those rankings did not, in any way, compute the accepatance RATE of kids at those schools... it merely computed what percentage of the class was heading to what it considered top professional schools. A huge variable that has been left out is how many kids WANTED to go to these kinds of places... schools which breed students more for doctorate programs, for example, take a hit... small LACs with far less applicants may get a boost simply by luck, since their graduating class isn't as big... Just look at the disparity between Harvard and Princeton in that ranking. Do you really expect me to believe that the disparity between a Harvard and Princeton degree alone accounts for the significant difference between those schools? Or is it more likely that the students who attended Harvard - a school with several professional programs as opposed to Princeton's almost non-existent ones - probably ended up applying to more professional schools at their alma mater?</p>
<p>Lastly, when people say that this list unfairly biases schools with not-so-strong graduate program I can't help but cringe. USNWR sends these list to deans and provosts and the like... all people who are well aware of what the USNWR rankings are for... they clearly do know that these rankings are for the colleges at the respective universities. Consider Dartmouth's relatively high placement... it has barely any graduate program... were these deans and provost's considering these school on their graduate merits, the list would look a lot more like the Shiangtao rankings and Dartmouth would thus fall even more behind.</p>