<p>puts Stanford University in California on top, followed by </p>
<p>2 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 99.4
3 United States Military Academy 99.3
4 Princeton University 99.2
5 Cornell University 98.9
6 California Institute of Technology 98.8
7 Amherst College 98.7
8 Rice University 98.6
9 Williams College 98.5
10 Brown University 98.4 </p>
<p>The mixing together of research universities and liberal arts colleges on one list is itself interesting, as is the high ranking for West Point. What do you think?</p>
<p>Any ranking purporting to be entirely objective followed by extreme vagaries about how they constructed this "objective metric" is extremely suspect to me.</p>
<p>But I actually find their collection of top 50 or so quite interesting due to the mesh of LACs, publics, and privates and what I see as a general recognition of schools that tend to have a reputation for strong UG experiences and higher student satisfaction.</p>
<p>So objective? Hardly. Nonsense? Entirely. Fun? Well, I don't think we'd be posting on CC if we didn't have some interest in these things.</p>
<p>Btw, I just clicked through and skimmed the Brown info-- it's rather complete and mostly accurate from my 5 second scan over.</p>
<p>So while I'm not sure I buy the rankings, it appears this site has done a decent job collecting information about these schools, better than some more well-known college search sites.</p>
<p>The intro page says this about Ranking Factors:</p>
<p>"StateUniversity.com builds on these very reliable government sources by introducing our own ranking system. We use many different measures in determining the Rank of a particular school, however the most important factors are a school's ACT/SAT scores, it's student retention, faculty salary, and student / faculty ratio."</p>
<p>So....Clackamas Community College is better than University of Pennsylvania?! Let's see if a bunch of kids on College Confidential start applying to Clackamas, LOL</p>
<p>
[quote]
Well, considering it has Texas State Technical College - Waco ahead of UCLA, I'd consider it a bit suspect to say the least.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I looked up the admission requirements of Texas State Technical College and ALL you have to have is either a diploma or GED - there are NO other requirements. </p>
<p>Yep, I'd definitely say they should be ranked higher than UCLA, UC Berkley, Boston College, NYU, etc!! </p>
<p>What a joke - sorry all you grads of Texas State Technical College!!</p>
<p>It's very much a ranking of student family wealth - retention, ACT/SAT scores, etc. No attempt was made to measure the "value-added" of the college itself.</p>
<p>Mini-- I'm not sure of any ranking that has ever looked at "value-added" that has gone nationwide mostly because there is no metric that is consistently measured that could really demonstrated "value-added", so while I agree this ranking is as crappy as any other, that particular complain about ranks is damn near universal.</p>
<p>FWIW, retention has to do with a lot more than student family wealth. Many top schools have significant programs designed to ensure retention, so if anything, retention is more a measure of institutional wealth/priorities + how common it is to transfer out when it comes to select private schools.</p>
<p>At schools with larger "alternative" undergraduate populations (part-time students, returning adults, etc), retention is artificially reduced by these populations with less aid options and more external factors that prohibit them from remaining in school, but for the straight out of high school population, retention is not a terrible measure, IMO.</p>
<p>I'm not disputing the correlation between wealth and SAT scores, more retention, which encompasses quite a bit more than that. SATs encompass quite a bit more than wealth as well, but I generally agree that the SAT is a crappy indicator of intelligence. I think it's a great indicator of general intelligence after it's been morphed significantly by extrinsic socio-economic factors.</p>
<p>But that's a discussion for a different thread, I think.</p>
<p>median family income in the united states is currently in the vicinity of $61,500 per year. per the collegeboards 2008 college bound seniors report, the average sat score of someone in this income range is around 1000 (it is 984 for those in the $40,000-60,000 bracket and 1012 for those in the $60,000-80,000 bracket; the math works out to almost exactly 1000 at $61,500). students with family incomes around $160,000 averaged around a 1080 (1079 in the $140,000-160,000 bracket and 1083 in the $160,000-200,000 bracket). </p>
<p>in other words, students from families of average incomes would have to be pre-dispositioned to score approximately 120 points HIGHER than those from families of high incomes for mini's claim to have any validity. obviously, this is unlikely to be the case.</p>
<p>how much of sat scores ARE attributable to wealth is a legitimate question, but the answer is quite clearly less than 80 points.</p>
<p>A 93 point differential at $50k to $100+K, simply for medians. (Point differentials represent smaller and smaller percentages of the test-takers as scores get higher.) I will have to run down the full explication for those earning more than $150k.</p>