<p>Hope this is not a duplicate post:</p>
<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp_YVt7CfJI%5B/url%5D">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp_YVt7CfJI</a></p>
<p>Very interesting. Guess we'll have to read the book if we want to know more.</p>
<p>I believe this is last year's survey, unless the new one has come out and the results are the same.</p>
<p>I like Princeton Review because of its qualitative approach. You can find out more about the culture of schools for PR than you can from most other, readily available sources. On the other hand, the surveys are not random and the sampling sizes are mostly too small, even if they were random, to produce anything like a decent level of confidence or accuracy.</p>
<p>This review came out in August of 2006, so it is the most recent. Here are the ratings for Chicago:</p>
<h1>3 Best College Library</h1>
<p>#1 Best Overall Academic Experience for Undergraduates </p>
<p>#6 Their Students Never Stop Studying </p>
<p>#14 Intercollegiate Sports Unpopular or Nonexistent </p>
<p>#12 Most Politically Active</p>
<p>I also like PR's approach to college ratings, Its much easier to rate individual qualities than to rate a college over all.</p>
<p>take this rating, and any other with a grain of salt--I would say you can maybe get a gist of how good a school is by seeing where it is ranked by many many different rankers. When you do that, things get pretty impressive. </p>
<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uchicago#Rankings_and_reputation%5B/url%5D">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uchicago#Rankings_and_reputation</a> gives a nice idea</p>
<p>I agree. PR's rankings are bogus. Chicago's academic rating was an 89 only 2-3 years ago; I don't think it was even in the top 20 (Reed was #1, as I recall).</p>
<p>warblers:</p>
<p>I believe that a single-year ranking is not very useful, but the qualitative information is quite useful. On the other hand, if a college consistently scores at or near the top of a ranking in a number of years, it's a pretty high probability that it is strong (or weak as the case may be) in that category.</p>
<p>Chicago was #1 two years ago, not in the top 20 last year, and back at #1 in this year's latest rankings. I doubt the University changed much over that period, these rankings are cute, but meaningless.</p>
<p>idad:</p>
<p>Once again, I think to say that they're meaningless, OVER TIME, would be to deny probability. For instance, a ten-year stretch in which Chicago was #1, #24, #1, #29, #10, #7, #31, #4, #18, and #2 would indicate that it is very probable that students at Chicago generally feel the academic experience is quite good. It would also indicate that any single-year ranking is not terribly useful, and that the margin for error is extraordinary. Using these ranking to compare schools that generally post high scores in this category would be foolish.</p>
<p>In that sense, the rankings are helpful because they allow someone looking for a place where the students feel the overall academic experience is very good to locate a number of schools that might fit the bill when creating a preliminary list.</p>
<p>The University of Wisconsin is often ranked highly in the party school category. My subjective experience would suggest that this is accurate.</p>