@suzyQ7, I missed post #360 of yours in my post to you. Please disregard. It appears we are in agreement.
And @UWfromCA’s rankings are measuring his confirmational bias! (as well they should!)
These rankings (at least in the margins) are 75% beauty contests anyway. It’s not like most of the college consuming world hasn’t already skimmed USNews, Niche, Forbes, StartClass, QS and another dozen listing sites (as well one should when making a 4 year, potentially 100k+ decision).
Any of the lists are a great starting place for a college search - but if you’re really using them for more than bragging rights, you have to dig way deeper into the material. A kid who wants to study engineering should have a different list than a kid wanting to study linguistics or nursing - even if academic reputation where their primary concern.
Yes, “Plexuss” and “metauniversityranking” combine rankings that use different methodologies. For example, 20% of QS is based on student-to-faculty ratio, but it is only 1% of US News. As stated in the preceding posts, the international rankings also include measures of research output and impact to varying degrees. Interestingly, US News, THE and QS share the characteristic of being based heavily on “reputation” surveys:
(i) 22.5% of the US News ranking is based on peer assessment surveys of presidents, provosts and deans of admissions and guidance counselor surveys;
(ii) 33% of the THE ranking is based on the results of an “Academic Reputation Survey” of 9,794 respondents who “on average had spent 15.3 years in higher education and research”; and
(iii) 50% of the QS ranking is based on academic reputation (opinion survey of 74,651 academics) and employer reputation (opinion survey of 37,781 employers).
^ Yep. Any number of preferences can be used to make an app list. If a kid wants suburban schools of 5,000-20,000 students, with D1 sports (at least one D1 sport…) and four seasons, a pretty good list can be made.
I’m not sure I really have a point other than that applicants can get as specific as they want to and (very likely) come up with multiple reaches, matches and safeties… which speaks volumes about the depth of quality and variety of colleges in the US.
Ah, point two: Better to spend the time researching and picking schools according to fit preferences than to simply point at certain spots in the rankings and say “these are my reaches, these are my matches, and these are my safeties,” and arbitrarily apply to some of each.
“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.”
I think that is good though, because the combination may give a better answer. I would probably add an average salary fruit, like The Economist salary rank, in with those two, so there is a weighting among undergraduate experience, research, and salaries. jmho
And, as @UWfromCA shows, we can make lists using our own algorithms to get the results we’d LIKE to see. 
I’d like Rochester to move up the list. Maybe I’ll figure in Dunlop’s squash rankings. That should help. >:)
It occurs to me the topic is the USNWR rankings, so all these posts about other systems is really off topic. Not going to delete anything, but would be good to bring it back on topic, if there is even anything left to say.
Probably not much left to say, which is why we were just musing on ClarinetDad’s observation, “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” and discussing how these other rankings are similar to and different from US News.
@whatisyourquest I agree. I think in term of perception MIT is definitely up there with Harvard, Stanford but i feel it is a bit limited because it is more specialized in STEM. At what it specializes MIT is tops and its name will get wow reactions, just feels weird comparing it directly with more well rounded universities, but yeah it probably belongs more alongside Harvard, Stanford.
I also agree that Harvard, Stanford, MIT are the schools that have the biggest reputations and are the most well known. Berkley too but not to exactly such a big degree. Also Berkeley loses a bit due to the fact that its undergraduate program while obviously excellent in quality, is not at the same level as the graduate reputation. In general it is seen as a choice after one has been rejected from the ivies (other than Cornell) , Stanford, MIT, Chicago, Duke. I am not quite sure why that is though.
@tk21769 While perception can’t be fully measured, it has tangible manifestations, especially in the revealed preference of applicants and the reactions the the general public and even the informed public that these schools get. I am not saying that this is a serious criterion to use for college choice, or that rankings cannot be gamed but there is that general perception that has been formed one way or another after years of rankings, word of mouth, association with famous, successful alumni, historical circumstances etc and it is very hard to change.
Of course you are not going to get a better education at Harvard than say at Chicago or Penn, but Harvard has an 80% yield rate vs Chicago somewhere in the 60% range, more than 2/3 of cross admits choose Harvard over Chicago, Harvard has a name that elicits responses of wow you must be so smart , whereas most often saying Chicago, (or Penn or Columbia, or other less well-known top schools etc) to the general uninformed public will get a response ranging from cool to what is this? And Stanford, Yale, Princeton, MIT enjoy similar status in their areas of focus and expertise. If you ask the majority or the public which is the best US university in their opinion, their response is going o be one of HYPSM with very high probability. It is just how the perception is, it is partly grounded on actual facts and it is a self reinforcing cycle.
@CaliDad2020 actually we relied most on Forbes rankings. As has been mentioned often, colleges like Dartmouth, Rice , Brown, even Princeton, have much more in common with the liberal arts schools then they do with the likes of university of Arizona or university of Ohio or Penn State. My daughters criteria was that a college had to be under 9000 students and over 1600 students. Most college applicants in real life are considering a mix of liberal arts colleges and universities. Forbes’ list is great for this where you can evaluate everything across the board. And if one doesn’t use college rankings what is one supposed to base these decisions on, the school colors? College rankings are like democracy, the worst form of government there could be, except for all the other forms of government. Of course college rankings are figured with other factors like college culture, location and majors, but it is a good place to start.
@citivas I tend to agree. Even with a kid at Mid I struggle to see it with the group at the tippy top. Same with Wellesley. They both seem like third be at home in the tier 2 group.
The trouble with rankings like the QS, THE or USNEWS, is that they measure an arbitrary selection of easily quantifiable criteria, and then pass that off to the general public as a comprehensive evaluation of the ‘Best Universities’. It’s akin to rating a Rolls-Royce, Ferrari and Toyota using the same criteria, and then proclaiming it to the world as the ‘Best Car Rankings’ - on what criteria? Speed, Luxury or Reliablity?
If you are trying to measure undergrad selectivity/prestige, which I suspect a lot of people try to use these rankings for, its better to examine things like SAT scores, student preferences for those who were admitted to 2 or more schools, number of Rhodes/Marshall Scholars produced or olympiad medallists, science fair winners, national debaters matriculating, etc. I expect by most measures it will be something similar to HYPSM and Caltech on top (with H/S perhaps edging out the rest), then Chicago and Columbia, followed by the other ivies/Duke/Hopkins/Berkeley/CMU CS, etc, after which it becomes a lot more nebulous. Of course, even these rankings are too simplistic because there are a lot of people who might choose, say, Penn over Chicago, or Cornell’s engineering over Columbia, not to mention the fact that the admissions process is so complex that a lot of people accepted at Harvard get rejected at other schools and vice-versa.
International prestige is a whole other ball game, and is influenced mostly by research activity, graduate school strength and famous alumni, which is why schools like Berkeley jump up significantly, while others like Dartmouth and Brown disappear. See: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/2016/reputation-ranking#!/page/0/length/25/sort_by/rank_label/sort_order/asc/cols/scores
@robotrainbow Of course they’re a good place to start. That why I say they are a good data point. And if you know what you’re doing - like in your case you kid knowing the size school they want and not caring as much if a school had a lot of opportunities for research in grad level labs, then Forbes would be great.
But the truth is that info is available at a lot of places right now. USNews is the grand-daddy is some ways (I remember when I was going to college there was some book we used in the college counselors office and it had indications of school competitiveness. Come to think of it, this was probably pre-USNews. or at least pre-ubiquity of USNews, yet somehow we all knew what were the competitive schools, what were the good fits, etc. (note: I just checked and I am, indeed, so old as to have gone to college before the USNews rankings… sigh.)
I have no issues with rankings. I have just seen a few too many parents (and a few too many kids) make choice based on rankings that anyone familiar with the school they were choosing knew was not a smart choice educationally.
A hammer, used well, build things. Used poorly, gives you a black and blue thumb.
One thing I do like about the USNews ranking is that it seems to try to see things from a student’s perspective, as if to answer the question, “What will this school do for me?”
Will it make me love it so much that I will donate after I graduate?
Do peer administrators believe it offers quality academics?
Will (most of) my classes be small?
Does the school have plenty of money to spend on me to provide opportunities in things like research, internships, study abroad, free movies, pizza, etc.?
How likely am I to graduate in four years? Asking my folks to foot the bill for a 5th year would blow…
Questions like these can provide information for kids to help them make (more) intelligent decisions. It is hard to contrast schools in terms of the actual quality of education offered – which is the holy grail of info that we’d all love to know when researching schools – but the answers to these questions (and others) can help.
Yield and acceptance rate tell us which schools the kids prefer. And certainly a high-quality crop of admits can improve a school marginally. But US News at least attempts to tell them which schools will serve and educate them best – which is really what we want to know, right?
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children who hope to go off to Wall Street or Silicon Valley and make a lot of money
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That’s sort of the point of college these days. You can’t compare with the past, as our society has changed to where going to college is not about become an educated person - as it was in the past - but about getting a better job, or a job at all in a profession they like. Like it or not, that’s the reality we live in. So rankings should reflect which schools do the best job at giving students the outcome most of them are looking for.
Small minds in Silicon Valley @KingTut27? That’s rude - and ridiculous. And contentious. But you know that. And given that the oldest university in the US was built 20 years ater Shakespeare died, and many centuries after Plato and the other ancient Greek philosphers, it’d be a bit hard for them to have planned to attend an Ivy League football game.
@KingTut27 why so belligerent? Why so condescending? You can show pride for your preferred school without trying to tear down others. Btw, with each passing year, there is less and less difference between a random Ivy and UChicago. So fully expect to see the problems you seem to associate with the Ivies at UChicago within a generation. You reap what you sow and by sowing the same seeds like it’s Ivy and non Ivy peers, UChicago will reap the same fruit. Is that good or bad? Who knows. Only time will tell
Probably true, “in general”.
The vast majority of kids prefer a college within a few hours drive from home. So, many California kids have no interest in moving east. Second is (obviously) cost. Cal or UCLA at $36k instate can be seen as a better value than a top private at $65k. (Same reason some easterners would turn down Stanford to attend a non-HY Ivy.) Still others seek the big time athletic school experience. And finally, certain programs (Engineering at Cal or Film/Theater at UCLA) are likely much ‘better’ than can be had in the east (excluding MIT engineering).
@prezbucky agree but i think one of the issues with US is its limited/non-existent focus on actual academic and career outcomes ( like some bundle of metrics like number of masters , phd produced, average salaries, % with jobs straight out of college). also the other issue is that USNews focuses way too much on subjective assessment rankings by other colleges and high school counselors which have very limited value in my opinion.