I think these lists (in general) are a double-edged sword…
I think they are useful for finding schools that might otherwise escape your notice - let’s face it, no one has a good handle on the hundreds of competitive high quality schools that are out there.
On the flip side, they can be a pretty corrosive influence, both on applicants who fixate on the very top schools and on the schools themselves who can get obsessed over their relative rankings.
^^^Exactly NickFLynn. USNWR should list school by tier grouping and not an ordinal ranking. Of course that won’t be goof for business, so that will never happen.
^^^ The problem then would be that some schools would still be scrambling to break into the higher tier. Honestly, I don’t see that the problem is that USNWR (or anyone else) produces these lists - the real problem is that everyone (schools, parents, students) take them too literally.
“The problem then would be that some schools would still be scrambling to break into the higher tier.”
There should be a signficant drop between tiers.
The rankings should also clearly estimate which percentile a student needs to be in for an average chance of acceptance. Parents, especially, believe the 25th school is dramatically easier to get in than #1. Truth is, the differential applies to a very narrow group of students.
@rjkofnovi While that would be nice, no such drop exists in the real world. List any college, and people here could give you a VERY slightly better one, and a VERY slightly worse one, and then you could find people to argue they should be reversed.
Perhaps you are right PengsPhils. Still using a tier system would be more accurate than an ordinal one.
When do the rankings come out?
“using a tier system would be more accurate than an ordinal one”
If the tiers were by decile, with the schools listed alphabetically in groups of 28 (of the 280 in the category), I’m pretty sure that would leave some people even more dissatisfied.
Tiers should be split by groups of 50. That would make the most sense, at least IMHO.
People should be educated enough to realize that small difference in rank correspond to small or non-existent differences in quality.
“If the tiers were by decile, with the schools listed alphabetically in groups of 28 (of the 280 in the category), I’m pretty sure that would leave some people even more dissatisfied.”
Except that wouldn’t even work for the first 28 schools merc81.
“Except that wouldn’t work even for the first 28 schools”
I’m not sure what you mean.
^^^Your remark indicated to me that all groupings should include 28 schools. There is no way that all of the first 28 schools are of the same caliber/tier.
^ If tiers were by decile they would include 28 schools (tiers can be determined arbitrarily: deciles, quartiles, etc.), but I withheld an opinion on what actually should be the case. My point was to comment on how tiering could seem even more arbitrary and be even more controversial than an ordinal ranking.
You seem to be forgetting that the purpose of these rankings is to sell magazines and books.
Yes, these rankings are not scientific. They are done by a magazine for the purposes of selling magazines. It just boggles my mind that people place so much importance on them and actually believe they are meaningful or “correct”.
Tiers should be just tiers with a non-pre determined number of schools in each tier
^^^Exactly!
Just wondering at this point if you guys know what a tier is.