So, manipulated self-reported anecdotes = meaningful information?
132
“The rankings are popular for the same reason that college football and basketball rankings are popular - humans love to construct hierarchies. As highly-social animals we are hard-wired to understand and embrace rankings. It’s crucial to every member of the baboon troop to know who is currently on top, who is rising, and who is fading away.”
Totally.
Your car is nicer than mine. But my house is bigger than yours. Your kid goes to Duke. But my kid goes to Yale. We have a winner!!
Exhibit A is the current leader in the polls on the Republican side. Whose behavior and hairstyle clearly show our baboon roots.
"Budweiser is the most popular beer in the US, but ask people who actually like beer and it is considered...not so good."
100% yes. Bud is slightly less watered down and flavorless than Bud Light, but not by much…
Give me a nice hoppy ale, please. Or, if it’s a lager, make it German, and brewed according to the Purity Law of 1563 or whatever year it was…
Your point is a good one, of course: Popularity does not necessarily equal quality.
Dunno about all of our species, but ranking is definitely an American culture thing. And so what? USNews found a ‘need’ and filled it, making bank. Isn’t America great? 
Incidentally, does anyone notice that USNews has stood the ‘test of time’? For all of its faults – as many have pointed out here – USNews survives. OTOH, trying to fix/improve upon these ‘faults’ doomed any chance the Dept of Ed had at doing a new ranking. Utter failure; it was DOA.
DOE cannot do ranking because it would always be inherently politically skewed by whomever was in power in the agency at the time.
My dream ranking system would just provide all of the meaningful data in a giant Excel sheet and let me filter it and weight it based upon my own preferences/biases…for instance, cost would be a huge factor for me. What good is the education if nobody can go there. As much as I personally prefer a small school, I would probably rank a school higher that educates more students well versus a school that educates an elite few well.
- A lot of really bad beers are brewed according to this law (e.g. bud and bud light). All the law states is that beer has only 3 ingredients, water, hops, and barley.
Tons of beers violate this (e.g. any lambic, shandy, and lots of craft beers), many of which are absolutely fantastic beers.
I don’t even think DoE can get that far. The political skewing, such that it is, is from the colleges themselves; DoE surveys 3,000 colleges and gets back 3k^10 ideas, most of which conflict. In general, any comments from the tippy top privates will nearly all conflict with those from the publics, and probably even the HBCU’s.
Heck, even IPEDS appears to have ‘optional’ fields, or at least some colleges just fail/refuse to enter certain data. The DoE cannot even enforce its own reporting requirements. It has nothing to do with those in the WH.
In contrast, if you want to show up in USNews’ magazine, you had better complete the forms.
@iwannabe_Brown
Bud and Bud Light also use rice. Most (or all?) American macros use corn. That disqualifies them from claiming that they are brewed under the Purity Law.
I’m aware that there are adjuncts that taste good. I just had Paulaner Original Munchner on my mind. 
U.S. News has “stood the test of time”?
Didn’t they stop publishing the magazine
And hence the efforts to keep their school rankings stuff alive. Its a convenient source of info in one place… if you ignore the rankings stuff 
CC is full of beer snobs! Next you’ll be getting forums for “Heineken” (elitist European) and “Sam Adams”(typical NE bias), but how about us in fly over country? (well…Florida technically isn’t fly over country, but whatever)!
Does the King of Beers get a forum?! NO! I demand a Bud Forum and I want it now!!!
We should resurrect the wine snobs thread(s)
^ I wonder where Frasier and Miles Crane went to school, and if they relied at all upon the USN rankings in formulating their app lists…
@torveaux, ranking by cost will be pretty difficult when costs can differ a lot even for students at the same school.
Miles went to Yale, if I remember correctly.
NILES went to Yale and Oxford; Frasier to Harvard (d’oh!).
Dang it all! Thanks Lucie!
Niles must have been a hoot in that residential college system…
And now for the on-topic part of this post:
Has anyone mentioned adding Student Satisfaction as part of the “Faculty Resources” portion? That would reflect the quality of teaching directly, or at least the students’ perception of it.
Great idea, but colleges refuse to release the data, when such surveys are completed.
Perhaps its rankings is the only thing keeping USNews alive, if only in the internet space? hahahaha
Great idea, but colleges refuse to release the data, when such surveys are completed.
What if USN owned the research? They could figure out a way to produce, distribute and tabulate the surveys.
Direct mail would cost a lot. Maybe they could make the survey available online and provide enough security to keep non-students from participating.