Well? And if you don’t mind, please also explain why you feel the way you do.
Personally, I lean towards the definitely “Yay” side. But your opinion is of course your opinion.
Anyone?
<p>Definately Yay. </p>
<p>The rankings are extremely political (Penn gets rated so highly because the editor-in-chief of US News is a Wharton grad) and the fact is that any school in the top 25 is an amazing academic environment. Each school is different in personality and atmosphere. People need to choose on where they feel comfortable rather than on what rankings say.</p>
<p>yay</p>
<p>(10 chars)</p>
<p>I definitely agree. The rankings are a starting point for a person's college search usually, but aren't helpful in choosing the college after acceptance letters come in. Most of the top 25 colleges (with perhaps the exception of HYP) are similiar to each other.</p>
<p>Yeah, everyone knows UC Davis should be #1.</p>
<p>CREDIBLE INSTABILITY. </p>
<p>yup. definately overrated. you should go to the school that fits you best. success isn't limited to the US News top 25 or whatever.</p>
<p>that said, I know that I wouldnt be happy at say..... Montana School of Mining..... so I think they are useful to a degree.</p>
<p>Nay. I think it provides some degree of guidance for those who are completely clueless.</p>
<p>Both. I think people should either be against all rankings or for all. You cant hate one ranking because your schools low on it and love anoother because its high on the other one</p>
<p>nay. It actually helps. However, deciding one school over another because one's 11 and the other's 6 is pretty asinine.</p>
<p>All ratings without a competition are totally subjective, but it seems to me the main people who would nay them are those whose schools are not ranked as high as desired.</p>
<p>nay --- helps you get a general sense of what tier a school is in</p>
<p>Nay. I'm sure some people put too much weight in it, i.e. using it to say that school #34 is superior to school #35, but if you take it in context it can be helpful. Plus, they usually have some pretty useful statistics in the actual magazine.</p>
<p>I think that the USNWR Rankings can be useful. It lets you know how well a school is according to ITS SPECIFIC RANKING METHODOLOGY. When I look at the rankings on USNWR, I look at them, and I take them with a grain of salt, like I do other rankings. My only problem with USNWR is that it has become like a bible for many of those applying to colleges. Many won't apply to school A because its ranked number 20, but will apply to school B because its number 10. Or, when choosing colleges that they have been accepted to, some will choose one school over another because it's ranked higher. I personally look at a variety of different college ranking guides, including USNWR, THES, the Fiske Guide to Colleges, etc., and gather knowledge from each and every one of them. For instance, a school may be ranked highly on USNWR, but may not be reviewed as highly on another ranking guide such as THES, Fiske Guide to Colleges, etc. Basically, I think that it's good to look at the USNWR rankings, but no one should use it as a sole method of saying whether a school is good or not.</p>
<p>Nay. They're very useful for international students, firstly because we don't seem to accord the same importance as Americans do, and secondly because they're a great way to find schools similar to the ones we're interested in but have never heard of before. I don't know anyone who applied to college based on any rankings (though parents are apt to use them to brag about Jr's accomplishments).</p>
<p>Nay - it really is the best out of the rankings IF you look at the scores at every category and not just the overall rank. But it is better than other rankings like the Princeton Review.</p>
<p>Of course it is nowhere near perfect, which you can see at how unstable several school's rankings are. Wash U went from not being in the top 25 fifteen years ago to top 10, colleges simply don't do that. There are schools that jump as much as 10 rankings in one year and colleges CANNOT improve that much in a single year - it's impossible.</p>
<p>NAY - overrated, but not horrendously/signifcantly</p>
<p>Its pretty useful in gauging American colleges - everyone agrees to some extent that most of the best schools are in generally the right areas - besides WUSTL, which everyone seems to dislike lol</p>
<p>Its way better than most of its competition as well.</p>
<p>I think it's REALLY done an injustive to public universities, particularly to Berkeley and Michigan, which were considered <em>much</em> more prestigious before USNews College Rankings came out. </p>
<p>(And no, I don't attend either of those, nor am I going to in the near future.)</p>
<p>Nay for gauging ranges of quality. It's nice if maybe you don't know how say Pepperdine stacks up against Georgetown, but once you get within 10 ranks of one another, it becomes less meaningful. The funny thing is, as one law school prof said about law school rankings:</p>
<p>There are 25 schools in the top 15.</p>
<p>I think US News, with its emphasis on selectivity and strength of student body, exposed Berkeley and Michigan for what they were: universitites with strong graduate schools but academically inferior undergraduate programs. The students in the graduate programs are top, but the undergraduate students are very below par. Since a school is no better than its students, Berkeley and Michigan cannot break the top 10 with their inferior student bodies.</p>