do not like so many generalities…lol with post #18.
The Princeton Review Top 380 schools is the most useful tool. They are not ranked but pull in a variety schools.
Figure out which metrics matter to you and then look at the report. But really – if you’re interested enough to come here to CC, you probably care about a little more than rankings! There are schools that increase their selectivity by dropping supplemental essays and application fees – for the push of a button, you can apply to them. Schools can increase their test scores by becoming test optional. Endowments help – they make resources available to more students, but if the profs are really engaged and the classes are small, you might be better off than at a school that uses those funds for a new sushi bar in the dining hall. If a school wants to take more of its students through ED, it can improve its yield. If they want to have more students employed or in grad school within a year of graduation, they can take more kids from families who can underwrite their transition to the real world. It’s probably more valuable for any school that interests you to ask how they get those numbers rather than if the ranking is accurate. Ultimately, you need to make a choice based on what’s right for you.
Count me as one CC regular who is openly skeptical and derisive about the USNews rankings. I question its very premise. I question the methodology. I question the motive behind them. I question the business model behind them. Back in the Stone Age, before blogging, online publishing and the 24 hour news cycle, you went to a brick and mortar library or bookstore, picked up a copy of the Cass-Birnbaum Guide to Colleges, thumbed through it and before you even got to the opening page there was a list of about 200 colleges broken into chunks of twenty to thirty, arranged broadly by selectivity and listed alphabetically within each tier.
The remainder of the Cass-Birnbaum book was devoted to in-depth descriptions of about 100 colleges - it was softcover and at least three inches thick and was the gold standard of college guides for most of the baby boomer generation. Then something interesting happened while we were still in college. The Yale Daily News came out with its own descriptive guide. YDN essentially eighty-sixed two-thirds of the colleges found in Cass-Birbaum and concentrated on the first couple of selectivity tiers. Their biggest innovation was the degree of subjective commentary on each college, resorting to the kind of language associated with gossip magazines. It was a big hit; I think YDN eventually sold the use of its name and it has been a forty year franchise.
Cass-Birnbaum gradually faded from the scene; its dulcet-toned, guidance counselor style was no match for the breathless, chatty, “here’s the latest” style that YDN and later competitors like Kaplan and the short-lived “Preppy Guide to Colleges”, lent to the proceedings. People seemed to warm to the idea that they were getting content that wasn’t being filtered through the lense of professional educators. They wanted to know what was “really going on”.
The idea for a strict ranking of colleges didn’t originate with USNews. Newsweek periodically came out with its own poll, essentially a survey of guidance counselors. It wasn’t trumpeted as a yearly event. It was a feature - really not much more than a sidebar - of its Education section and treated as a “here’s what the experts say” sort of thing. I’d be surprised if there were more than three or four of them published from the 1950s through the 1970s, probably on the premise that professionals don’t change their opinions on a yearly basis.
It was during one of those fallow years for the Newsweek poll that USNews stepped in and published one very like it on its own, a simple beauty contest based on what college presidents thought. I think the major difference was the amount of hype they gave it. It was featured on the front cover and given great fanfare. People quibbled about it. There were some surprises. For example, by 1983 it no longer made sense to bracket out the traditional men’s colleges (Amherst, Williams, Wesleyan, Bowdoin, Hamilton, Haverford, Tufts, Sewanee, W&L, Kenyon etc) in a category of their own since nearly all of them had gone co-ed since the last Newsweek poll. In their first head-to-head contests with colleges that had been co-ed for years (often referred to sniffingly as “the progressive” co-ed colleges) the latter came out surprisingly well, especially Swarthmore and Carleton, both of which finished in the top five, IIRC, and even Oberlin (yes, Oberlin) finished among the top ten.
Nor was the ivy league given pride of place. They had to duke (no pun intended) it out with large regional powerhouses and the result was that by 1985 (there was a year in-between during which no poll was published), half the top spots were taken by the likes of Stanford, Chicago, Duke, Berkeley and UNC-Chapel Hill.
I think the lesson that USNews took from those first couple of beauty contests was that controversy paid. People cared about such things, even worried about them. I remember the president of Wesleyan firing off a letter to Mel Elfin, protesting that it had been mis-categorized as a “National University” one year (where it received a “Noteworthy” asterisk along with MIT, Michigan and UVA.)
More thought seemed to go into making the rankings more and more “scientific” - or, scientistic, some would say - and to publishing the results on a yearly basis. More and more bells and whistles were added, particularly on the financial side which is something every newspaper knows will attract readers, particularly the breadwinners in the family. Schools with relatively low endowments per student like Oberlin, Smith, Bryn Mawr - all the Seven Sisters except Wellesley - quickly fell out of the top ten even though they were offering the same product they had been only a few short years before. Public universities had to be bracketed out again because their financials didn’t match.
The poll has gradually become a reflection of which colleges and universities spend and/or raise the most money from one year to the next. And, colleges responded by making financial aid a separate line item on their yearly reports as opposed to the traditional accounting practice of simply reporting it as discounted revenue (the way a car dealership would.) It should therefore come as no surprise that the highest ranked colleges and universities tend to be the ones that charge the highest sticker price they possibly can while discounting it as much as possible without going broke.
THANK YOU, USNEWS (NOT)
Overall, I find US News pretty accurate but I agree UT-Austin could probably be higher.
All rankings subjectively choose which parameters they look at.
I think of the US News rankings as more focused on undergraduate education. Many other rankings pay more attention to things like graduate and professional schools, research, how many Nobel Prize winners are associated with a school, and so on.