Columbia chose not to submit additional data this year. That data is for criteria that generally helps boost schools’ rankings. Without it, US News relies on publicly available data, therefor has fewer criteria to figure into their weighting scheme.
Here’s the background:
The question is, what happens next year, when that recalculated data will be fed into US News’ weighting (whatever that might be hext year.)
You are confusing Cal Poly (public) with Caltech (private).
You are also mixing undergraduate engineering rankings with graduate school engineering rankings.
I wonder how the math professor that broke the story about Columbia is faring. I guess he’s tenured, so he should be ok.
That’s REAL academic bravery.
Rankings etc are silly, but I guess they’re ok as a GENERAL reference. However, gaming the system to boost rankings by higher ed institutions is absolutely not, when our kids are at stake. It’s frankly quite outrageous.
Deleted in error.
These are the rankings for Cal Poly that @eyemgh is referring to:
And if you’ve paid attention to the changes in rankings over time, it’s very easy to see which schools have made gaming the rankings an art form.
Amen! I am cautioning DD to be very, very careful about these rankings for, among other things, precisely this reason.
In another thread, someone pointed out that many universities are issuing bonds, and these rankings help attract investor interest. Besides the critical issue of cheating our students/parents, any business (including a college) that raises investor money better be REAL sure that they are abiding by federal and state securities laws.
I apologize. I always look at graduate school rankings and undergraduate (where doctorate offered) rankings. Never looked at the ones where they isolate (doctorate not offered).
I wonder if the Regents at U of C are having a conniption fit: Cal and UCLA are TIED for 20th place!
Imagine that…
Which ones? Washington and Lee I hope?
I don’t name names 
Obligatory rankings post.
It’s nonsense, little more than a popularity contests. Of course the contestants with more money.
Let us look at what factors that go into the US News rankings that have a direct positive relationship to the income of the students:
Total: 43%
Factors that have an indirect positive relationship (factors that are related to amount of money provided tuition and donations, relative to number of students):
Total: 30%
Factors with a direct or indirect negative relationship with the income of students’ families:
Total: 5%
Factors with unclear relationship (or no relationship) with family income of students:
Total: 22%.
So 73% of each ranking is the result of how many of their students are from wealthy families.
Let us also look at the assumptions made in the rankings:
Class size index and student/faculty ratio (9%) assume that having smaller classes is an objective measure of “quality”, i.e., that having smaller classes means that every students has a higher likelihood of succeeding.
Faculty compensation (7%) - first, it doesn’t take CoL into consideration, so rural colleges will tend to be at a disadvantage, and it doesn’t take into consideration that there are many factors that attract the best teachers to a college which have little to do with salary. Since the ranking is for the “quality” of these colleges as undergraduate institutions, these should not be ignored, but they are.
The ranking methodology are far better than they were. However, because the differences in the scores are so small, the effects of factors like family income of students has an oversize effect. That is why, for colleges with the same “quality” in everything else, the colleges with the richer students will always be ranked higher. That is why the same popular private colleges whose students are predominantly wealthy will always be ranked at the very top. No matter how good UCLA happens to be, they will always have far more students who drop out for financial reasons than Notre Dame or WashU, and far fewer alumni giving money and in far smaller quantities (which is also the result of having no legacy preference).
There is also the issue of SAT scores which UCLA does not even consider, which affect their rankings.
Of course, the most ridiculous factor of them all remains “Undergraduate academic reputation”. Why? Because it is based on the opinion of administrators. These are people who are rarely, if ever, in classrooms, rarely speak to students, use the most simplistic factors to determine “students success” (including, in many cases, use of websites like “Rate Your Professors”). They are not asking a single actual academic or instructor, just the administrators.
These administrators also usually have absolutely no idea how the undergraduate programs of most other colleges happen to be, but will happily provide their uninformed opinion. This uninformed opinions is then taken by USNews as “expert opinion”, and constitutes 20% of the ranking score of a college.
Finally - administrators are super busy people, and will not fill out these questionnaires unless it will benefit them or their present college. That means that they have a vested interest in giving high scores to the colleges where they may work next, and to provide low scores to other colleges, to push these down in the rankings.
So not only are these scores often not based on factual evidence, but they are also highly biased. This factor alone ruins any meaning these rankings have.
All that being said, college rankings are a fun parlor game, so long as they are not taken too seriously.
Columbia seems to be most expensive.
My Fit Custom College Ranking
Build your own custom ranking by entering your preferences below.
https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/myfit
More than $2, but part of a package that provides much more data/access.
The student experience really sucks for UCLA OOS and UCB OOS per $ of tuition. I wouldn’t consider them in my top 20 :-).
And, AMAZINGLY, USNWR ranked then tied for 20th!
Is it because of class size that the OOS experience is bad for these two schools?
Slow day today? 
Nope. People will argue about those too. There’s another thread that listed Washington Monthly’s ratings and they placed Brown at #40 and Rice at #63 under their “methodology” and their “methodology” makes complete rational sense to some.
There’s no methodology that will ever convince people that one school should be ranked higher than another. Average SAT score, average HS GPA, average graduating starting salary, overall employment outcomes, total applications, none of that is proof that a school is better - it’s all based on on artificially created standards with no evidence of superiority.
Please note:
What would be a better way to do the Peer Assessment… which is proxy for “Faculty/Teaching Quality and Academic Rep”?
