US News 2017 rankings

It would surprise me if UCLA spent double what UCB does on their students

Regarding endowment per student I noticed Vassar was not on that list but this is the list I found. Slightly different

http://www.reachhighscholars.org/college_endowments.html

Re #563, the earlier source linked to Wikipedia, so hence the discrepancy.

Why stop now? Here’s the inaugural Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education Survey, starting with 2017.

  1. Stanford 2. MIT 3. Colombia 4. Penn 5. Yale 6. Harvard 7. Duke 8. Princeton 9. Cornell 10. CIT

is there a link for the entire ranking? i dont have a membership to the WSJ. Again, i’m also disappointed because the #1 public school (Michigan) is only ranked #24! Public schools are very underrepresented in college rankings.

@guitar321 ^^^^Someone posted the ranking earlier in this thread.

@guitar321 If you want to view the ranking behind the paywall, google it and click the link in the search results, it will let you see it all that way.

I dunno -

@TomSrOfBoston

there are plenty of ways to judge “performance” - anything from a +/- on ROI compared to peers in similar majors, 'innovation" (Reuters just put out their own list using this metric), Employment and “continuing education” success per dollar spent, and, most bestest, a combo of factors.

It’s not like no one in the world judges big institutions on performance, success or perceived success, ROI etc. That’s kind of what a good % of Wall Street does to earn their nickles. Maybe Universities should be publicly traded - imagine if they had to make their quarterlies! At least USNews only comes out once a year.

i don’t think im doing it right because i can’t see it @OHMomof2

This info isn’t really available. The WSJ’s rankings’ salary “data” is from College Scorecard, which is only for students receiving federal aid and has nothing to do with which school they graduated from, just any school they got federal FA to attend.

@marvin100 Some sites, like Payscale, try to do for schools, and sub-groups (Humanities Colleges, Comp Sci, etc. And I’m not sure exactly where they got their info from - they have an “Alumni Analytics” department they use. The payscale list is interesting. Might not be perfect but is probably more informative than “peer reputation” which risks being an echo chamber of “the usual suspects.”

Payscale data is self-reported. Peer reputation is subjective and doesn’t pretend to be otherwise–you may disagree with it or disregard it, but it’s not pretending to be an objective measure. ROI–a term borrowed from the biz world–has the veneer of objectivity and math, but if you look just a little bit closer, it’s clearly inadequate and almost certainly misleading.

[Here](https://www.quora.com/How-accurate-is-Payscale-com)'s a fairly smart discussion of Payscale’s accuracy, fwiw.

@CaliDad2020

@marvin100 USNew’s data is also mostly self-reported. And, as you note, peer reputation is subjective, but is a big part of USNews rankings and they pretend to be objective. That’s the problem. “Academic reputation” (peer institutions and HS guidance counselors) is the most important metric in the USNews rankings of National Unis and LACs. Making them, therefore, highly subject, while presenting the rankings as highly objective.

I won’t defend Payscale’s methodology - I don’t know enough about them. But in my opinion US News overweights “peer” opinions. It just seems such a sloppy metric.

At the end of the day, tho, if a student, parent or counselor can’t look beyond the various click-bait rankings, different click-bait rankings won’t really change the dynamic.

Yeah, I don’t see it this way at all–I’ve never thought of USNews’ rankings as objective or even claiming to be objective, and I’ve never met anyone who treated them that way (in 14 years of full time test prep and college app consulting). What I have heard/seen frequently though, is people claiming that because USNews’ rankings are subjective, “objective” measures like ROI are better, an attitude I’m trying to correct by drawing attention to the deeply flawed salary data used to compute “outcome” and ROI.

More importantly, I’m not arguing that USNews’ rankings are good or even better. I’m just critiquing a major element of the WSJ rankings.

Well, Robert Morse has certainly made claims about its objectivity in his interviews and columns, so…

Can’t seem to find that, @dfbdfb . What I did find is this:
http://www.usnews.com/education/best-graduate-schools/articles/how-us-news-calculated-the-rankings

When Payscale data is criticized as “self reported”, I think the usual intended meaning is that it is reported by individuals who may not comprise a representative sample, and whose reports are not vetted for accuracy. The Common Data Set figures and the “Peer Assessment” results that drive the US News rankings may or may not be significantly flawed, but they are not “self reported” in the same sense as the Payscale data are.

Most of the USNWR data (class sizes, faculty compensation, SAT scores, admission rates, graduation & retention rates, etc.) strike me as “objective” (which isn’t necessarily the same as “correct” or “appropriate”). The PA scores aren’t, and whether they comprise a representative sample of informed/expert opinion is a bit hard to tell. I’m not crazy about them just because it’s hard to know exactly what the “Peers” think they are assessing.

@marvin100 Say WHAT? Have you read the USNews page?

It is littered with “objective” suggested terms. “data” “metrics” “formula” “quantitative measures” - I think you are likely in the minority here. My guess is most consumers view them as objective. But as you note, they are highly subjective - and rely much to heavily on peer accolades.

A few random excerpts.

"They allow you to compare at a glance the relative quality of institutions based on such widely accepted indicators of excellence as first-year student retention and graduation rates and the strength of the faculty. "

"The U.S. News ranking system rests on two pillars. The formula uses quantitative measures that education experts have proposed as reliable indicators of academic quality, and it’s based on U.S. News’ researched view of what matters in education. "

http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/how-us-news-calculated-the-rankings

@tk21769 except we know for a fact in some case the “self-reported” results of schools are jobbed or out and out lied about and we know some schools, like Northeastern, took a very methodical and scientific approach to rising in the rankings and succeeded. And USNews themselves describe the data they use as self-reported and we know 22.5% of the metric is Peer assessment - the highest percentage for any data point.

Not that I think it makes a huge difference - any school in the top 50, say, by USNews metrics is likely in or close to the top 50 in the WSJ (but not Payscales ROI, fwiw, there are many more state schools in the top 50 of that list) or Forbes or whomever.

I just think folks think USNews is more “objective” and “scientific” than it really is.