Forbes places a 25% weight on Student Debt and another 25% on student satisfaction.
My guess is ED1 and ED2 will attract wealthier full pay students, so this might affect the student indebtedness of the average student at UChicago because these students will graduate with less debt? I know UChicago is need blind, but having more full pay students will still impact indebtedness?
Also because more students will be attending their first choice university, student satisfaction is likely to be higher?
Both these factors might combine to move UChicago up a couple of spots from its #20?
Assume you’re right – doesn’t that show you that this kind of rating is pretty meaningless?
Personally, I’ll be curious to see whether ED leads to higher student satisfaction or a push to make UChicago a less distinctive place.
I’d take a random number generator over Forbes’s ranking. They use Rate My Professor and Payscale in their ranking, for crying out loud - you might as well use the rate of new posts being made in the College Confidential Sub-forum for that school and call it “popularity”.
Even deeper than that, Forbes’s ranking commits the same fallacy Forbes does in their magazine - conflating money and high profile, noticeable alumni with success. It’s peak capitalism, and I’m glad people mostly ignore the ranking because I’d much, much rather have colleges fighting to lower class sizes and get more full time faculty to appease US News than trying to push everyone into business and engineering to appease Forbes - or even worse, as you pointed out, get around it by admitting only rich kids. It’s antithetical to everything higher education stands for.