<p>Enlightening article on how some colleges (especially LACs) are wooing their fellow institutions in making sure their own college gets a good PEER vote. The peer score apparently counts 1/4 of USNWR's grade.</p>
<p>"The magazine surveys presidents, provosts and admissions deans at schools, asking them to rate their peers' academic programs on a scale from 1 (marginal) to 5 (distinguished). Those who don't know enough about a school to evaluate it fairly are asked to mark "don't know."</p>
<p>Fifty-eight percent of the 4,089 people who received surveys responded.</p>
<p>When it comes to the very specific category of liberal arts colleges, however, Syverson said ballots go to only 645 officials at the 215 schools in the category. If 58 percent of that group came back, that means fewer than 400 votes were responsible for a crucial piece of that ranking.</p>
<p>That's a relatively small group whose sentiments can swing a ranking so marketing to those voters has become common."</p>
<p>Ratings are essetially meaningless because the criteria they use have little to do with what goes on in any particular classroom. And don't talk to me about the advantages of world class faciltities. Some of the greatest minds our world has ever known were schooled in an Athens marketplace or the barest of rooms in 18th century Cambridge.</p>
<p>The only things that matter in undergraduate education are the intelligence, diligence and dedication of the student and the quality of the instruction in any particular class. Yes, the quality of peers can be a factor but not necessarily an important one. Yes, the CV of the instructor can be a factor but many a distinguished researcher is a less that ideal instructor for any number of reasons.</p>
<p>Nobody can adequately explain why a particular medeival history course at Harvard is necessarily better than a similar course offered at good ole state university. An inspired student and instructor at the latter will trump the former every time and can be a magical happenstance. A well designed academic program at a college like Case can be every bit as challenging and effectual as one at HYP for any particular student.</p>
<p>Ratings like the USNews are merely beauty contests which may reinforce our perceptions based on an evaluation that is even less than skin deep while utterly failing to explore the heart and soul of education, the part which takes place in hundreds of classrooms on campus every day.</p>
<p>Originaloog: I bow down to your ability to sum up everything I believe in so few lines. That post should be reproduced, mounted and sold in every college bookstore in the world.</p>
<p>At one institution where I worked, a grad student had the job of getting the business school into the top 50. It sounded like a monumental task, one for which a grad student shouldn't have been responsible. </p>
<p>Turns out that all he was going to do was bombard peer institutions with marketing material. It worked.</p>
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The peer score apparently counts 1/4 of USNWR's grade.
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What's equally interesting is that if you add up admission factors, they're only 15% of the equation. Within that 15%, 50% of the score rests on the average SAT/ACT scores.</p>
<p>The</a> methodology changes a bit each year and many of us suspect this is how US News can insure attention each year. By tweaking the percentages, they ensure a little movement on the list.</p>
<p>originoloog, I agree that the ratings are meaningless, but the point is -- from a business and markinting standpoint, they are NOT meaningless to the colleges. </p>
<p>It's similar to what I face as a web designer -- no one thinks that Google rankings determine which web sites have the most reliable information or are the prettiest to look at..... but getting a site to appear prominently in Google during a search can make all the difference in the world as to profitability of a web-based business. So no matter what arbitrary algorithms Google decides to employ to rank web sites, web marketers will try to second-guess them and work to bring their site's Google-ranking up. It happens that Google also runs on kind of a peer-respect formula -- site rankings go up when lots of peer sites link to them, so just as for the colleges, the secret to raising web site rankings often is a p.r. campaign directed to one's business peers and competitors.</p>
<p>I am sure that colleges can directly connect their application and yield numbers to those US News rankings, no matter how arbitrary and ill-conceived the rankings are.</p>