US NEWS Ranking, A few surprises

Your belief would benefit from an alternative figure in its support, @Silivon. That is, what can be said to be the actual figure at USC for the percentage of classes with fewer than 20 students. Your assertion may indeed be true, but without stronger analysis, it remains nebulous. Casual sampling is interesting (I did review your USC link), but not conclusive.

Importantly, it should be noted that U.S. News acquires most of its information from the schools themselves. The publication claims they are not in position to verify it independently, at least not on a routine basis.

Lastly, I don’t think it’s necessary to concede that you should not have relied on a source such as U.S. News for basic information such as class size. An expectation of reliable data in this case would seem to be entirely reasonable.

@merc81 Social network is fabulous in USC. That’s true. But class size is not accurate in usnews, which is misleading.

@Silivon
You posted a link (https://classes.usc.edu/term-20183/classes/dso/ ) to lecture classes in one program (DSO). Yes, we can see that in many cases, more than 20 students registered for those classes.
But how do we know that those classes are representative of typical USC class sizes?

Here’s a list of Fall 2018 classes in a different department (English).
Many of them seem to have fewer than 20 students.

USNWR gets much of its data from the Common Data Set files that colleges themselves prepare.
According to USC’s 2017-18 CDS, section I3, 441 class sections have 1-9 students; 1342 have 10-19 students. So 1,783 class sections have < 20 students. That would be approximately 60% of the total number of class sections (2,973), according to USC’s own numbers. If the 60% figure US News reports is not correct, then the fault would seem to be with USC’s own reporting.

I do think you’d be correct, though, to recommend that nobody should choose a college based solely on one magazine ranking.

@tk21769 Please read my post carefully. I mentioned in my post that you can choose any program in that page to see their actual class sizes.
Also DSO is under Marshall, one of the strongest school in USC. It doesn’t matter if you try to use it as a representative.

You can be sure that @tk21769 read your post carefully, @Silivon.

I don’t want to be offensive to anybody because I am also a Trojan. But do your all work before choose any university or college. Do not let a magazine bother you!
A magazine shouldn’t have the right to rank an university higher or lower. It’s not their business. If an university that have good reputation but doesn’t receive the rank it should have because of rigid ranking methods and false data, the university or their alumni should bring the lawsuit to the company who publishes the ranking.

@merc81 Let’s wait the usnews to respond to my voice.

@Silivon, personally, I believe all published rankings are specious at best, one, because they can be gamed, and FAR more importantly, they don’t tend to use any metrics parents and students should care about in their methodology.

We used Michelle Karchmer’s DIY College Rankings spreadsheet. I unfortunately can’t link it here…some random rule about linking to a blog, while CC lets links to Amazon through all the time. It’s a product, that happens to be sold through a blog, but I digress. Anyhoo, it is an elegant searchable and rankable Excell sheet that covers all IPEDS data. Then each searcher can rank what matters to them.

@eyemgh First, I respect to your any opinion. But my opinions:

  1. Not let a magazine bother college applicants.
  2. A magazine doesn’t have the right to rank universities because some errors will be harmful to some good universities in the long run.

I stop my comments now and let others leave their opinions. I hope usnews see my voice and more students choose their best universities.

Have you heard of the National Enquirer? Magazines have the right to publish. Freedom of the press.

And who lets a magazine ranking chose their future school? And I’m not sure a public service announcement here on CC does any good.

Finally I see no verifiable proof that any data is wrong.

A school advertising small class size as a come-on to attract students is doing something disingenuous. The school is basically saying: “Come apply at our school, we have small class sizes; you’ll get all the teacher attention you will need.”. What do you think will happen next? A tide of applications from students looking for small classes will flood the school. Sooner or later, the dam will break, the school will be tempted to take the money, open up the school. and fill up the classes. The class sizes will no longer be small.

If you chose a college just because of the ranking you are a fool. The ranking is just one of many data points when selecting a college to attend. Smart applicants know this well. Sorry that you maybe learned this the hard way.

"USNews is probably the best undergraduate ranking. It tries to gauge the actual quality of education at the undergrad level, as well as academic support, capacity to spend money on undergrads, and alumni satisfaction.

My main problem with their ranking is this:

Some schools, like Northeastern, Georgia and USC, are ranked ahead of their academic reputations/quality. Others, like Wisconsin, Illinois and Texas (and many other top state schools), are ranked below their general academic reps. Academic quality is the most important thing to me.

@prezbucky…Agree that US News is the “holy grail” for most following college rankings and academic quality being most important. Pleasantly suprised to see my alma mater of UC Riverside (up 39 spots…biggest jump of any college in the nation) on the up and up.

@silivon…as for USC…I got accepted there back in the day but without any scholarship. Didn’t want to financially burden my father (who was an alumnus there)…he preferred I attend a UC school for the quality of education and the cost effectiveness. Definitely let US News and USC know if that class size data is truly erroneous. Like others have said, do not pick a college solely on US News Ranking…use it (and others) as a general guide along with all of the other variables that are most important in the process of picking the right college for yourself.

If US News ratings & rankings did not exist, the public would be clamoring for them.

I was around when the US News rankings did not exist. It is a much better consumer experience with US News rankings than without. I don’t think that you realize the pressure that these ratings & rankings put on colleges & universities to improve. Sure, some cheat. Some get caught & some do not. But prove that a school is intentionally misreporting & see what happens.

But, for a simpler system, rank by largest endowment or endowment per student. (The results will be similar to US News.)

I have never known a student to attend a school based on ranking other than for a specific program or major such as finance or screen writing.

From what I have read in this thread, it isn’t really about US News as much as it is about your impression that your school has misreported information in their CDS which US News then used.

@Fisherman99 Congratulations to your USC and other UC school admissions. Which UC school do you get accepted? My professor’s daughter goes to UCLA and surely, some of my professors also think UCLA is better than USC. I know if my professor’s daughter chooses USC, she doesn’t need to pay for the tuition because her father is a professor in USC. But my professor wants his daughter to go to UCLA.

@Silivon, I was agreeing with you, not disagreeing. If you re-read my reply, I pretty clearly said all published rankings are bad, and the best way is to do it yourself. The best tool by far for that is DIY College Rankings by Michelle Karchmer.

@Fisherman99 It’s very hard to decide which school to be attended. But try your best to get a high GPA. I saw some UCLA students transferring to USC but also saw some USC students transferring to UCLA when I was a sophomore in USC. And some of my classmates go to Stanford, MIT and CMU for graduate programs.

@eyemgh Thank you! Now I am in SCU for my master degree. It’s a small university you might not know. You may think I am crazy. Why choose such a low-ranked school after USC? But the university paid me half of tuition and I like the location where I can work in some big companies while attending school.

Another I should mention here is faculty-student-ratio. But keep in mind many professors do not teach classes and they barely do research.
So you should do your own work, not let numbers decide your school choice.