Forbes places the Maroons ahead of Penn, Columbia, Hopkins, Duke, Cornell, Northwestern, & Brown as U Chicago’s 90 Nobel laureates influence the standings.
It’s just a ranking based on their criteria. Different in many places than a us news or wsj.
Maybe I’ll start a ranking. We need another.
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I didn’t see any kind of methodology listed. It may simply be the opinion of whoever wrote the article. How do you know that the ranking has anything to do with Chicago faculty’s historical Nobel laureates from many decades ago?
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UF won’t be using this ranking 
Isn’t this an old ranking? It’s 2022
Neither will Bama or ASU.
Ha ha. I was joking about Florida. Great school and very well respected and obviously #28 in US News, tied with UNC but passed by many schools in the Forbes attached.
It shows the silliness of all the rankings. I mean, what’s truly important ? We’ll that differs by person
There’s brilliant kids and fine programs at so many schools. And these rankings are silly.
If people find the right school for them, what else matters ?
Why does it always seem like Chicago folks bring these things up??? Too much focus on rankings which are incredibly subjective and highly variable from survey to survey.
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For an alternative ranking, with visible methods, this newer entry from WalletHub places UChicago at the 98th percentile, ranking 16th nationally across colleges of all types:
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Everything UChicago offers is top-notch, but since they are developing their CS and don’t really do Engineering, I have them in my second tier behind HYPSM among private universities.
I think UChicago is, in so many ways, just like Columbia.
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UChicago ranks around #10 on Shanghai as well, and has for awhile now.
One can find rankings that put Chicago in the top 10 or much lower (example is America's Best Value Colleges List ). However, the number is meaningless without knowing anything about the methodology used in assigning that ranking, and the link in the original post provides no methodology.
Rather than focusing on how a magazine/website/article ranks Chicago using a formula based on arbitrarily selected weightings of various criteria, I’d suggest focusing on whether Chicago is strong/weak in whatever criteria is important to you. It’s a great choice for some students and a poor choice for others.
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This is true about EVERY college.
I’ve read many a thread where someone got into their dream school, only wanting to transfer after a year.
Then there are the kids what didn’t go to the dream school - didn’t get in or couldn’t afford - and had a fantastic four years.
Ranking is not near as relevant as personal fit. Kids need to find the right place for them and not for name your publication.
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Whatever the other rankings, the Chicago folks would definitely be the perennial winner of the “most likely to bring these things up” rankings, if one existed.
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While not perfect, rankings provide a metric of relative quality within the confines of the specific ranking methodology employed. They should not be the only factor in making a decision for college or graduate program, but they are considered to be a relevant factor nonetheless - and not only by the applicants! Law schools, as just one institutional example, closely monitor their placement on US News.
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There is no question colleges focus on rankings and take advantage of the ones that suit them best.
It is interesting that most seem to take US News at the gospel.
When I went to grad school, Business Week was the one to look at for MBA - but now it’s US News too - they’re not the only but clearly the one most want to be rated highly in.
I wonder who decided their methodology is the right or most relevant?
I wonder what % of students use rankings as an important factor - obviously it would be higher at the higher ranked schools but I know of so many kids who go to the local state school or favorite football school - heck it was decided many years earlier.
Would it be fair to conclude that a ranking with no specific ranking methodology is worthless?
Clickbait seems a more accurate term than ranking.
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Why should the rankings listed in the original post be a relevant factor in making a decision for college? It’s not clear whether the rankings are the author’s opinion, she copied them from another website, she used a formula, etc. So it’s not clear whether the ranking criteria has anything to do with what a particular student values in college selection.
If we instead look at the Shanghai Ranking that you listed, it does list a methodology. which is summarized below. This methodology doesn’t sound like criteria that a typical undergraduate would emphasize when choosing a college. It could be more relevant to a PhD student, although I’d expect a PhD would probably focus on the faculty in the specific department that he/she will work with in research, rather than this type of general ranking faculty research ranking . I expect they’d also want to consider the categories within the ranking that are important to them, rather than just look at overall number. For example, it appears that by far Chicago’s strongest area in this ranking is historical Nobel prize winners. Maybe that is especially important to the PhD student… or maybe some other contributing criteria is more important to the student when deciding on colleges.
Shanghai College Rankings Formula
- 20% – Number of papers published in Nature and Science between 2016 to 2020
- 20% – Number of papers in Science + Social Science Citation Index .in 2020
- 20% – Number of highly citated researchers in 2021
- 20% – Number of historical faculty Nobel prize winners
- 10% – Number of historical alumni Nobel prize + Fields medals
- 10% – Per capita weighting on scores above
Chicago Rankings by Category
- Papers published in Nature & Science – 21st
- Science Citation Index – 141st
- Highly Cited Researchers – 33rd
- Historical Faculty Nobel Prizes – 5th
- Historical Alumni Nobel Prizes – 7th
- Per Capita Weighting of Above – 15th
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Same here! I recall when Booth (back then it was the GSB) beat out Stanford on the B-Week rankings. It was big news.