At least here in China, Harvard and Stanford are at the top of the pile in terms of reputation, followed by MIT, and probably Berkeley and Columbia. The other ivies, including Princeton and Yale, are not as well known, and Dartmouth, Brown, Chicago and Caltech even less so.
@merc81 At least one poster here on CC who feels the USNews rankings are irrelevant and just a way to sell magazines has a paid subscription to the site as they have quoted stats that are not available free. Ironic!
@TomSrOfBoston : Who? Or, more relevantly, could I ask you how that specifically relates to any of my comments?
@merc81 It was not related to your comments at all. it was just a curiosity. While I will am not an online subscriber I will be parking myself at B&N’s magazine rack and perusing the print edition on 10/4!
@TomSrOfBoston I don’t think you are talking about me, because I do not have a subscription to USNWR. But I think that is a bit of an overreach as far as logic goes, since it is quite simple to postulate that someone could love everything else about the magazine but think that particular aspect of it is worthless. That would not invalidate the statement that they think the rankings are just a way to sell magazines since there probably is a slice of the world population that would pay for a subscription based on that feature alone.
Just to be clear, though, I do indeed think that all college undergraduate ranking systems that attempt to quantify things like “Best College” or “Best Outcomes” or anything else that is so obviously personal and subjective and impossible to truly quantify are worse than worthless. Actually I think they have negative value.
Beyond the above, however, a member was referenced as having an opinion that the rankings are “just a way to sell magazines.”
I’m still wondering why you tagged me with respect to that, @TomSrOfBoston? How would I know who that could be?
@merc81 Your post mentioned the print edition. Sorry.
Perhaps it would be better to aggregate all the major college rankings and come up with a more grounded top 20, saved from any inherent bias from a single ranking…
I will release the results later today in a separate thread.
US News doesn’t even publish a news magazine anymore, does it? I think they make all their money off of their silly rankings.
@ClarinetDad16 I did something similar, just for the schools my son is considering. Some schools are very consistent across the various US and international rankings, others are not. A consolidated ranking like that can be interesting just to see the relative order of the schools your kid is interested in.
A similar exercise is published at https://plexuss.com/ranking/listing.
“We examined all of the college rankings that we could find and chose five which we believe to have the most methodologically sound criteria. Ultimately, we chose rankings by U.S. News (National University Rankings), Forbes’ America’s Top Colleges, Times Higher Education World University Rankings (Reuters), QS World University Rankings, and The Academic Ranking of World Universities (Shanghai Rankings).”
Looks like they need to update their raw data (some of which appears to be from around 2014 or so).
I probably should have expected Montclair to become a national university this year, it went up 18 spots on the Forbes ranking. I thought Rowan would also become a national university since Carnegie also classifies it as a doctoral university, but I guess it just doesn’t have enough graduate programs. Dropping 17 spots on the Forbes ranking probably didn’t help either.
Oh, and my college went down two spots this year. Goes to show you that a popular bench mob (for a team that didn’t even qualify for the NCAA tournament) and an accurate polling institute (run by a Lafayette and Rutgers graduate) doesn’t increase the academic quality of a school. But I digress.
Interesting - Forbes is consistently an outlier in those results. Seems not to like big state schools at all! UC’s, Penn State, Ohio State. Also Forbes include LACs in their list. (A huge flaw in their rankings, if you ask me - it’s hard enough to compare these schools the way USNews breaks it out, but how do you honestly compare Kenyon to UCLA? Or Smith and UMich? I can hear the cries of horror now: Williams is ranked 208th on Plexuss! You’re transferring to University of Wyoming this minute. They’re ranked 141!) Even accounting for the silliness of LACs with huge state schools, Forbes rankings seem, at a glance the most “out of whack” with the others. Of course, Plexuss even giving numbers to the LACs is meaningless as Forbes is the only input they use.
The amalgamation could be a more useful way to look at the rankings, but they need to adjust the Forbes list by at least splitting the Forbes ranking into NatU’s and LACs. (or putting scores rather than ranking numbers.)
That’s a very interesting list, at least in part because it shows how “objective” lists are really just as subjective as those general impressions that we all develop on our own.
LACs sort of fall off the radar because the Plexuss ranking methodology uses the USNWR list for research universities only. That, alone, says something about how methodological biases can have serious implications on this kind of “quantitative” data.
I also found it interesting that because international rankings are included in the algorithm, a number of schools commonly associated with the traditionally-elite “prep” culture in the northeast drop precipitously. (Brown lower than UIUC—sacrilege!)
@CaliDad2020, there was a website called “metaunversityranking” (now down) that combined what it claimed were “the three most influential rankings, the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU or Shanghai Ranking), the QS World University Ranking and the Times Higher Education World Ranking (THE).” Back in August 2015, out of curiosity, I went through the exercise of adding the then current US News national universities ranking as a fourth measure, which moved a handful of schools up or down a few spots here and there. The “top 50” were as follows (with average rank):
1 Harvard 2.25 avg. rank
2 MIT 4.25
2 Stanford 4.25
4 Princeton 5.75
5 Caltech 6.5
6 Yale 8.25
7 Chicago 8.75
8 Columbia 10
9 Penn 13.25
10 Johns Hopkins 14.5
11 Berkeley 14.75
12 Cornell 16.5
13 Duke 20.50
14 UCLA 21
15 Michigan 22.75
16 Northwestern 24
17 NYU 34.5
18 Wisconsin 35.25
19 UCSD 37.75
20 Washington 38.75
21 Illinois 40.5
22 North Carolina 43.5
23 Carnegie Mellon 44
24 Washington U 46.75
25 Brown 49
26 Texas 49.75
27 UCD 60.75
28 Boston U 62.25
28 UCSB 62.25
30 Minnesota 66.5
31 Georgia Tech 67
32 Penn State 69
33 USC 70.5
34 Ohio State 73.75
35 Rice 74.75
36 Purdue 81.5
37 Pitt 82.25
38 UCI 82.5
39 Vanderbilt 87
40 Maryland 89.75
41 Emory 98.75
42 Colorado 100.25
43 Rochester 102
44 Virginia 105.25
45 Florida 111
46 Tufts 113.5
47 Case Western Reserve 117
48 Texas A&M 117.5
49 Michigan State 121.75
50 Arizona 127
I was happy to see one of my favorite graduate schools solidly positioned in the middle of the list (due to the international research based rankings) but not so happy that my “perennial top 20 US News” undergraduate school dropped off the list completely. (Maybe if I make the US News list count for 50% and the combined ARWU/QS/THE list count for 50%, it will miraculously reappear, thus relieving me of this burden and shame.) 
The international rankings tend to be kinder to US public schools because they give quite a bit of weight to research output, staff awards and overall rep – including grad/PhD level. So you get things that would seem odd to some, like seeing schools like Illinois, Wisconsin and Washington being in the top 30 in the world, while schools like Dartmouth and Brown – which most here consider to offer elite undergraduate education – ranked #100 or worse. I’ve seen UVA also ranked in the 100s in at least one major world ranking, which defies logic if you’re looking at things from an undergrad perspective.
For just undergrad rankings, I’m not sure it gets any better (currently) than the USNews ranking, warts and all.
@UWfromCA Nice. But I say if they’re your rankings, job 'em how you want to! That’s the fun of rankings!
@CaliDad2020, I agree, and also with @prezbucky’s assessment, so I’ll make it 80% US News and 20% ARWU/QS/THE. Whew! It’s now solidly back on the list. B-)
You are combining rankings that use totally different methodologies. Apples and oranges. The worldwide rankings are based heavily on research output while USNews attempts to measure the undergraduate experience.
@suzyQ7, I was wondering the same thing about test optional or test flexible schools. But it’s possible that being test optional actually skews the SATs higher, since only students who do well will report their scores to give themselves an admissions boost. Either way, it’s all part of a game.