Stanford #6? That’s odd.
D’s school rose a point or two so this year I believe USNews is brilliant and useful - ha, ha.
Go Gators!
Clark University fell from 66 to 91!
@iglooo Why do you find it odd? Genuinely curious. I only became interested in the rankings once my kids embarked on the college journey, so I am not as familiar as some, in terms of what it means
I find the " average first-year student retention rate" to be quite helpful when evaluating LACS and, to a lesser extent, National Universities (due to public schools’ missions & due to honors colleges). Very useful with respect to LACs & to private National Universities.
@jym626: Thank you for posting the link to US News.
The photos of each school are interesting. Brown University did an excellent job while Northwestern University, while offering great water view perspectives, could have been even better. Davidson College’s photos were unimpressive for such a gorgeous campus.
@momo2x2018 As long as I remember Stanford was always up there. You wouldn’t think rankings change much from year to year. Besides, Stanford is much much harder to get in in my area than any of the schools listed higher. It is rare anyone gets into Stanford in my kid school while to other schools it is not that uncommon.
Vaguely amused that my D20 will likely be applying to 3 schools that are in a 3-way tie (NYU, Tufts, and Rochester).
And yet U Rochester doesn’t appear on a lot of people’s radar. I still can’t figure out why.
S1 applied to U Rochester as an undergrad, got in, didn’t go.
S1 applied to U Rochester as a grad student, got in, didn’t go.
Guess where he works now?
One thing to remember is that this National ranking does not include many great colleges (LACs), excellent regional colleges, and the service academies. It’s probably a good idea to put these rankings in perspective and to really understand the weighting of the criteria for rankings before stating your college is “ranked #18” etc.
Graduation rates mostly reflect student characteristics. Strong students are likely to graduate whether they attend highly selective colleges or moderately selective colleges, assuming affordability.
However, a way that college treatment effects lower graduation rate would be financial aid and scholarships. If the college has a tendency to reduce financial aid for continuing students, or has high scholarship renewal criteria resulting in a high rate of scholarship loss, it may have lower graduation rate due to financial dropout or transfer away when the college is no longer affordable.
No, I don’t care. Rankings have never helped me determine which college is a good fit for my kid. I do wish USNWR had used a different picture to represent my kid’s college though. There are many beautiful, historic buildings on campus. Surely, they could have picked one of those.
Don’t care and never have. I did look at them, however. Meh.
Evidently people DO care judging by the number of replies this post has, plus the handful of other “Dream U got ranked X, moved up/down Y spots!!!” posts I’m seeing.
Personally I’d rather see a slew of smaller lists ranking colleges by major and other factors. The one-list-fits-all approach isn’t very useful on the whole.
No, I haven’t looked at the list, but I did read the copy of it posted earlier in this thread.
So Lawrence and St Lawrence are tied at #58. That makes things better and worse…
Mort Zuckerman, the owner of US News, probably cares a lot that people buy his magazine
@socaldad2002 : Not sure if I understand your post above. These are rankings of National Universities; US News has separate rankings for LACs which include the three main military schools.
Also, US news has a separate category for regional schools.
I find the most useful part of the hard copy magazine, year after year, is the directory of colleges in the back. Easy to carry, ordered by state, comprehensive list of nearly every college in America with most of the data you need and also a brief description of the college.
I understand that but if you slice and dice the data enough, every college will be top 10, top 25 in some sort of ranking. For example, Cal Poly SLO is #4 in the Regional Universities West ranking but isn’t even ranked in the Top 100 by Forbes or Niche ranked (#115 and #132, respectively). So what does being #4 in the West really mean when factoring in all of the colleges in the U.S.?
Lastly, I take the rankings with a grain of salt and only feel it is one of dozens of criteria that should be used when determining which college(s) to apply to.