@panpacific and @prezbucky:
Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton are in the top 5 of all 3 of USNews, the ARWU US research ranking, and the hiring managers ranking.
MIT, Yale, and Columbia are in the top 10 of all 3.
Chicago, Cal, Caltech, Northwestern, UPenn, Cornell, and JHU are in the top 20 of all 3.
6 Ivies and 7 non-Ivies.
@cmsjmt, um, Rice is a good school, though fairly small, so not as many people have heard of them compared to Cal (though that says more about those people than it does Rice).
@PurpleTitan: how did you figure out those are my favorite colleges? 
I was trying to say - if the ranking methodology could narrow down to “quality” of faculty, students and finances only, plus indicators of effective administration to maximize the potential of the above three, it might generate a more relevant and convicting ranking. all the rest are derivatives and assigning “weight” to them is adding noise.
^ We’re blessed in this country to have so many great colleges and universities – obviously the high quality doesn’t end with the elites. Sticker prices are really high, but if the world rankings are right, our way of doing it works really well. Maybe you do get what you pay for.
@panpacific, you can easily make your own.
ARWU ranks research output. You can easily find rankings by SAT score and endowment size as well.
Um, what’s with the incredulity about Rice? It’s a great school.
One financial metric that I suspect* is not weighted as perhaps it could be:
Quality of facilities as they stand.
i.e. Endowment size is easy to measure. As is annual budget, and budget per student.
But a student going off to school today is not just experiencing the spending of the 2015-6 academic year. Rather, they’re experiencing the effects of prior spending and building. I rather doubt that past buildings built are included in the financial measures. But having a beautiful (or at least pretty) campus does matter to many (it mattered to me). And an engineering school that built $100M in new labs 3 years ago is probably going to deliver a better experience, ceterus paribus, than one whose last major lab expenditures were 30 years ago…
Except neither of these measure selectivity. Yield is especially off base. Unless you want to claim that the Universities of Nebraska-Lincoln (63%) and Alaska-Anchorage (73%) are far better schools than Duke (45%), WUSTL (34%) and Emory (29%), or UCLA for that matter if you want another state school (34.6%) or Michigan (40%). http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/2015/01/21/national-universities-where-the-most-accepted-students-enroll OK, I think we have thoroughly destroyed that metric.
Acceptance rate is not much different, since as has been pointed out this can be heavily influenced by tons of marketing as well as other factors. So while acceptance rate does tend to correlate better with our general notion of the best schools, it is hardly perfect. http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/lowest-acceptance-rate
I think this is much more on the right track in terms of something that I would like to know about a school, but I think the challenge is to isolate how it affects the undergraduate experience as opposed to being more grad school oriented. If that can be done, for many or even most majors that would be great to know.
It’s a stretch, but maybe faculty awards and pub citations help to pull in additional profs who are excellent teachers… who want to get to know and work with those profs doing the research and garnering awards. In a broader sense, it means the college is working hard to further knowledge – which should reflect positively on the school in some fashion.
I think the other one is a bit more straightforward: Research opportunities for undergrads who apply – maybe measure the % of research and internship applicants who are accepted into a position at some point in college – shows how much the school helps its students gain real-world (or “real-lab” hehe) experience, which will help when it comes time to go outside the academic bubble and apply all that knowledge in the workplace.
I would say Michigan is easily a top 20 school
@ClarinetDad16, UMich is top 20 by the ARWU research ranking and hiring managers ranking. In fact, it is the only school in the top 20 of both of those but not the top 20 of USNews.
In my Midwestern neck of the woods, Michigan has more man on the street prestige than half the colleges in the top 20.
I suspect it’s generally true that once you move outside of, oh, the top 5 or so (let’s just say HYPSM), that a local school will have more clout than a similarly ranked distant school.
i.e. The school that’s #20, but in your city, probably has more clout for employment purposes, name-dropping purposes, or what have you than then school that’s #19 but halfway across the country.
Ya had me at this, I wannabe_Brown
My high school’s facilities were absolute garbage in 2005 and we had 50% of the class score 1500+ (out of 1600) on the SAT and 45% of the class going to ivy league schools. We actually did have fancy smartboards in some of our classrooms. There was literally 1 teacher who knew how to use it so that it’s functionality exceeded that of an extremely expensive, complicated, and hard to use white board.
In the sciences, yes, quality of lab facilities can really matter a lot for research, and a little for undergrad teaching but in most classes as long as the temperature is satisfactory (which was not the case in my high school) and the students can sit for the 1-2 hours of class at a time without getting injured (one time a ceiling tile fell on a classmate of mine in high school) and without being exposed to carcinogens (e.g. asbestos) the facilities are sufficient for top notch learning.
Did I mention my high school’s tuition was over 20k/year for the privilege of those facilities?
Presumably, the marketing increases their visibility in the “Homecoming Queen” poll
It is possible, but given who fills out those polls it seems unlikely. Provosts and other top admins generally have their minds made up from years back and rarely change it, I suspect. I could certainly be wrong, but I suspect any volatility that occurs is due to new administrators filling out the poll. This, of course, applies to people that fill it out honestly, not those that try to destroy their peer group. HS guidance counselors are another story. I suspect they could be influenced somewhat by marketing literature, although I more strongly suspect they are much more influenced by both preconceptions on the one end and stories they hear back from recent graduates on the other.
Rice is a FABULOUS school. Absolutely top notch. As much as I don’t like these silly rankings, Rice has been around # 17 for years, and it is WELL deserved. Cal schools went through several years of budget problems and students not being able to get classes they wanted/needed. Rices position above Cal is well deserved. Not knocking Cal. But don’t insult rice.
I don’t fault anyone for not hearing of Rice ever since I learned about Harvey Mudd which I had never heard of before three years ago. Now I hear about it constantly.
Harvey Mudd is another FABULOUS school. Many consider it right up there with Cal Tech. I have Harvey Mudd and Rice Tshirts. I wear them when I work out, and 10 points for ANYONE who is familiar with them (and comments). Name recognition of a school is NOT a component of these silly rating systems.