<p>I checked out a book called the top 361 colleges in America, which is an aggregate of all the better colleges in the US. Apparently, Stanford's academic experience matches Cornell College in Iowa. And the best schools for academic are schools that I've never heard. On their top 20 list of top academic schools, Yale came 18th. Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Princeton and all those schools didn't even make the list.</p>
<p>Someone unconfuse me</p>
<p>You have an older edition. It is now Princeton Review's Top 366 Colleges.</p>
<p>Otherwise I am afraid I'll have to leave you confused. You seem to have read a book I am unfamiliar with. The colleges aren't ranked by Princeton Review. There are summaries about all 366 colleges, listed in alphabetical order.</p>
<p>Unless you are referring to the "student polls" they use for filler? Perhaps someone else can figure out where you got lost.</p>
<p>I resorted to the US News Rankings as my top college list, but I was told (and not sure of the validity) that US News uses donations and endowments as a component for their rankings, which the Ivy Leagues tend to have the most of amongst other schools.</p>
<p>The Princeton Review Guide to Colleges is a very helpful research tool for those rising high school students who are looking for a reasonably objective and informative compendium of information about all the best colleges.</p>
<p>It's "lists" are fun and interesting.</p>
<p>You should also look into the Fiske Guide as well.</p>
<p>
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And the best schools for academic are schools that I've never heard.
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</p>
<p>You should probably do some more research, then.</p>
<p>The US News rankings kind of like the beer beer market: because BUD was the first mass produced beer, they had an early advantage on locking the market so now when you think beer, you think BUD as a default brand. Is it really the best beer though? Well, you can taste a bunch of beer brands and decide for yourself.</p>
<p>US News is only 1 ranking source. They admittedly tailor their rankings so that the household names come out on top. Although the most popular, US News may not be the best. One year Cal-tech came out as number 1 and specifically because of this fact, they admitted the methodology MUST be flawed, so they changed it to make it more Stanford/Ivy type of school friendly. If I can find the link, I'll post it. Basically, I think they de-emphasized entering student body strength and made a stronger emphasis on soft factors, student/faculty ratios, etc. Personally, I think there are better rankings out there, but US News is the "BUD" of rankings. Some of the international rankings de-emphasize prestige and rank schools on quantifiable metrics such as student body, research, etc. I hold those rankings as more credible. I do recognize, however, the strong branding that US News has based on it being the first and I can only hope at this point that they improve their ranking process to make it more fair.</p>
<p>See </p>
<p>for a more selective list and a discussion of various sources of college lists or rankings.</p>
<p>You say US News tailors their rankings to make the IVIES and other schools like Stanford retain their prestige? </p>
<p>How the hell is WUSTL 12th -- Tied with Cornell and above Brown.</p>
<p>International rankings place those same universities in the same upper echelon tier. There's little difference at the top except the inclusion of OC and others...</p>
<p>USNWR sucks for different reasons.</p>
<p>I didn't say it, US News said it. My god, right now I can't find the link....if I have time later I'll look again.</p>
<p>As for WUSTL...it's all about gaming the system, which they do well.</p>
<p>Ougnala, part of the confusion stems from the fact that the 2006 edition of The Best 361 Colleges has major misprints on the Stanford page. Basically, all the stats on Stanford are wrong. I own the book, and tucked into the front cover is an apology and correction sheet from the publisher.</p>
<p>^ Yeah, I was just about to say that. The book admitted to misprinting the information on Stanford and included a page correcting the errors.</p>
<p>"Playing</a> With Numbers" by Nicholas Thompson</p>
<p>"When Elfin was first charged with creating a ranking system, he seems to have known that the only believable methodology would be one that confirmed the prejudices of the meritocracy: The schools that the most prestigious journalists and their friends had gone to would have to come out on top. The first time that the staff had drafted up a numerical ranking system to test internally--a formula that, most controversially, awarded points for diversity--a college that Elfin cannot even remember the name of came out on top. He told me: "When you're picking the most valuable player in baseball and a utility player hitting .220 comes up as the MVP, it's not right.""</p>
<p>To Elfin, however, who has a Harvard master's diploma on his wall, there's a kind of circular logic to it all: The schools that the conventional wisdom of the meritocracy regards as the best, are in fact the best--as confirmed by the methodology, itself conclusively ratified by the presence of the most prestigious schools at the top of the list. In 1997, he told The New York Times: "We've produced a list that puts Harvard, Yale and Princeton, in whatever order, at the top. This is a nutty list? Something we pulled out of the sky?" </p>
<p>The walls around the system that confirmed the top Ivies began to crack in 1996 when Zuckerman hired James Fallows (a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly) to edit the magazine. Fallows hired former New Yorker writer Lincoln Caplan and, when Elfin left in January of '97, Fallows put Caplan in charge of special projects at the magazine, which included the annual development of the rankings. The two began to make a series of changes that improved the rankings, most noticeably by eliminating one decimal place in the scoring (schools now get grades like 77 instead of 76.8) to create more ties and reduce a spurious air of precision. Caplan also hired a statistical expert named Amy Graham to direct the magazine's data gathering and analysis. Although both Caplan and Graham have left the magazine, and both declined to be interviewed, sources within U.S. News claim that, after looking deeply into the methodology of the rankings, Graham found that U.S. News had essentially put its thumb on the scale to make sure that Harvard, Yale, and Princeton continued to come out on top, as they did every year until 1999 after Elfin selected a formula</p>
<p>This was done in large part by rejecting a common statistical technique known as standardization and employing an obscure weighting technique in the national universities category. Consider the data from the 1997 book, the last year the numbers for overall expenditures were posted publicly. Caltech spent the most of any college at $74,000 per student per year, Yale spent the fourth-most at $45,000 and Harvard spent the seventh-most at $43,000. According to the U.S. News formula applied in every single category except for national universities, the absolute rates of spending would be compared and Caltech would be credited with a huge 40-percent category advantage over Yale. Under the formula used solely in this category the difference between Caltech and Yale (first place and fourth place) was counted as essentially the same as the difference between Yale and Harvard (fourth place and seventh place) even with the vast difference in absolute spending.</p>