<p>25.0% - Peer Assessment
16.0% - Graduation Rate - 6 year
10.0% - College spending/student
7.5% - SAT/ACT scores
7.0% - Faculty salary (adjusted for location)
6.0% - Classes - percent with <20 students
6.0% - Students - percent in top 10% of high school
5.0% - Graduation rate performance
5.0% - Alumni giving rate
4.0% - Freshmen retention rate
3.0% - Faculty - percent with highest degree
2.0% - Classes - percent with >50 students
1.5% - Admissions acceptance rate
1.0% - Student/Faculty ratio
1.0% - Faculty - percent full time
100.0%</p>
<p>Why the hell is peer assessment weighted more than any other?</p>
<p>That’s an easy question. It’s to maintain the status quo at the top of the rankings. After all, if many people believe that a school is great, it must be so. And (obviously) that college administrators are amazingly knowledgeable of the programs at schools they don’t work for or attended … that’s just good common sense.</p>
<p>Let’s be honest. Most of the above metrics favor private universties who can easily manipulate numbers to give them advantages for higher rankings at USNWR.</p>
<p>great another thread that turns into a 50 page debate about whats so wrong/great about the US News rankings</p>
<p>Graduation and Spending Rate are unjustifiably important in their metric.</p>
<p>rjkofnovi: not just any private school, but ONLY the elite well to do private universities. </p>
<p>its a private club. And the kids at the top have no intention of relinquishing their positions of favor. </p>
<p>Which is why most rational and reasonable college presidents despise the cottage industry that has become the insipid USNWR rankings. (and by extension, the elitists on CC that promote it.)</p>
<p>I don’t mean to suggest that every university is the same and of equal value. I am more of the view that every university serves a different clientele (its a business after all…a diploma mill…) and they have both political and economic and social agendas. </p>
<p>People who pick colleges solely by the rankings on USNWR are superficial and ultimately not helping themselves very well. They should focus on fit, programs, culture, and what is the real clientele that university is serving? WallStreet Investment Banks? Social Justice tanks? Are they elitist or inclusionary? Is it snob city or do they serve a greater good in society? </p>
<p>Are they tech heavy nerdvilles? (nothing wrong with that…just know it before you get there, however), or are they radical social agendas of the leftwing? </p>
<p>Is it sports/jock city? Frat and sorority clubville? and near and dear to my heart do the professors practice what they preach and demand from their own administration…i.e. true academic freedom? Or do they cut down students and destroy gpa’s because a student has an opinion opposite of the professor? </p>
<p>Do the classes have deep and abiding seminars and discussions? Or are they cursory reviews of top waves, meeting only periodically and expecting students to learn on their own? (I know this occurs at more than one Ivy School…because friends of ours are students there). </p>
<p>Does the college have too many majors resulting in a complete loss of mission and a watering down of substance to the point of absurdity ( I know a MAJOR state flagship in the top 10 that does this…rendering a degree something akin to online education)? Or do they have a reasonable number of majors but you work your hiney off for four years to get it, learning more than you thought imaginable, developing mentorships with wonderful professors who guide you onto greater things in graduate or professional schools? </p>
<p>Is your college a lofty ideals kind of place…lovely to learn but not very practical when it comes to job hunting as a senior? Or are they a nice melange of liberal arts and practical critical reasoning skills that employers love because you are first and foremost a PROBLEM SOLVER, not a spoiled whiner and complainer? </p>
<p>Can you cross maticulate majors (meaning…double major in say…French and Pre Med? Or Philosophy and Computer Science?) or do they channel you like cattle into one narrow vision of the world? </p>
<p>Will you be challenged yet able to rise to top of the class if you put in the hours and effort? Or will you be squelched and overwhelmed and frenzied and buried in the bottom half of the class? </p>
<p>Is it party city or academic nerdsville where everyone is an antisocial bookworm? Or a nice melange of the two, offering great distractions for those with an interest but strong academics for those willing to put in the work?
These are not small questions or irrelevant questions…they are very important questions and highly relevant and really what define YOUR college experience. </p>
<p>I am NOT making value judgements so don’t jump on me. I am only identifying important attributes and characteristics in the differences between colleges and what a student should be focused upon in the selection process.</p>
<p>Does the college have too many majors resulting in a complete loss of mission and a watering down of substance to the point of absurdity ( I know a MAJOR state flagship in the top 10 that does this…rendering a degree something akin to online education)?"</p>
<p>Which major state university is ranked in the top ten at USNWR?</p>
<p>^^^ a top ten among the list of state universities. I am of the opinion that the “national rankings” at USNWR should be completely separated between LAC’s with major research and graduate programs (think Ivy and Duke and MIT etc.) and State schools. </p>
<p>But I am not an expert on rankings nor do I really care that much for rankings.</p>
<p>We all know it’s marketing and an effort to sell a lot of magazines, but that doesn’t mean that USNWR’s rankings publications are useless. </p>
<p>While I would certainly distrust/discard certain elements and would never use the PA scoring to guide a prospective student in the selection of an undergraduate destination, USNWR performs a useful function by providing a lot of data in an easy-to-retrieve fashion. An aspiring college student should definitely use some of this data to learn about places that he/she considers. </p>
<p>As it relates to this thread and how one ranks undergraduate colleges, I suggest the following:</p>
<ol>
<li> Look at Student Body Strength (better students are preferred)</li>
<li> Look at Class Size Data (smaller classes are preferred)</li>
<li> Look for Teaching Quality (need to consult sources other than USNWR and the goal is to find colleges where the students say that their profs are knowledgeable, accessible, communicate well, are genuinely and actively interested in their student’s learning, etc.)</li>
<li> Look at Institutional Resources and how an institution prioritizes its spending (more money is better and a visible commitment to things like undergraduate financial aid reflect dedication to undergraduates.</li>
</ol>
<p>Taking each of these in turn, I would suggest looking at the following data points, most of which can be found at the USNWR online site: </p>
<ol>
<li><p>STUDENT STRENGTH:
a. Very Useful
SAT & ACT Standardized Test Scores—consider both the 25/75 data as well as the % of students scoring above a certain threshold, eg, 700+, 600+, 500+ on each individual test/section
b. Moderately to Minimally Useful
Acceptance Rate
Students Ranked in the Top 10% and Top 25% of their high school class
GPA measurements</p></li>
<li><p>CLASS SIZES
a. % of classes with fewer than 20 students
b. % of classes with more than 50 students
c. Student/Faculty Ratio
d. % of classes that involve the use of a TA</p></li>
<li><p>TEACHING QUALITY
USNWR does not provide information on this although they recently updated their list of colleges with a strong commitment to undergraduate teaching. For information on what the paying customer thinks of what is being delivered in the classroom, consider other sources. There are several and there is remarkable unanimity in their conclusions (although they don’t automatically agree with USNWR’s Teaching Commitment list). </p></li>
<li><p>INSTITUTIONAL RESOURCES and WILLINGNESS TO USE THEM for undergraduates
a. Endowment Data-consider both absolute size and per capita endowment and remember that graduate students often cost far more per student than undergraduates
b. Financial Aid data, including the % of need met for different groups of enrolling students
c. Retention/Graduation data
d. Spending per student measurements</p></li>
</ol>
<p>In order to create something resembling a reliable ranking for undergraduate students, I would discard USWNR’s Alumni Giving, Graduation Differential, and the completely fraudulent Peer Assessment ratings. </p>
<p>Of course, individual students will consider more than the above and will undoubtedly assign different weights than USNWR has done. My suggestion is to focus on the data that is important to you and compare that data to other institutions and THEN reach your own conclusions about what is the proper rank. IMO, there is little doubt that the result will be an “undergraduate ranking” that is far more relevant to the prospective student.</p>
<p>Well, this is explains why Berkeley isn’t ranked in the 30s.</p>
<p>Hawkette, you place a lot of weight on the strength of the undergrad student body because you’ve argued that you learn more from your peers than your profs. Fair enough. But, why then is use of TAs viewed as a negative? Surely, TAs are closer peers to undergrads than crusty, old profs…besides, at universities with top graduate schools, the TAs are usually the best and brightest young apprentices of their chosen fields.</p>
<p>
Name some schools that should be ranked ahead of Berkeley by USNews, oh grandmaster.</p>
<p>SAT/ACT SCORES: Of limited use because they’re so easily manipulable. Apart from obvious ploys like going “SAT-optional” so as to artificially boost reported SAT scores (on the theory than only applicants with high scores will submit them), schools can and do target their admissions decisions and “merit” aid offers to manage their 25th and 75th percentile scores, thus gaming the numbers. Some schools invest much more heavily in this game than others. Consider two schools, A and B, each with 12 students (the number of students doesn’t matter, you could construct a similar table with any number) whose SAT CR+M scores are distributed as follows (arranged from highest to lowest):</p>
<p>School A: 1550/1510/1450/1440/1440/1440/1440/1440/1390/1380/1380/1380
School B: 1450/1450/1450/1440/1400/1400/1390/1390/1390/1380/1280/1180</p>
<p>School A obviously has a “stronger” student body, right? Stronger at the top? Check. Stronger in the middle? Check. Stronger at the bottom? Check. Yet School A and School B would show up exactly the same in U.S. News which uses only the 25th and 75th percentile scores, which for both schools would be 1385-1445. It doesn’t matter, for U.S. News purposes, how much above your 75th percentile score the top quartile are; as long as they’re above the line, they count just the same. By the same token, it doesn’t matter how much below your 25th percentile score the bottom quartile are; the only ones that matter are the students immediately above and immediately below that 25th percentile cutoff (in my example, the 3rd and 4th student from the bottom). Similarly, it doesn’t matter whether the middle half of your class is bunched closer to your 75th percentile or closer to your 25th percentile; anywhere in that middle 50% range will do. At the end of the day it’s very few students whose scores actually determine the 25th and 75th percentile marks; they’re not the kids at the extremes, and only in a very loose sense are they the kids in the middle. Smart adcoms know this, and they’ll go through all kinds of gyrations to land the last few kids who at the margins will help pull the 25th or 75th percentile score up a notch; that’s far more important than the strength at the top of the class, or the weakness at the bottom, or where within the middle 50% range the rest fall. Not a very informative set of statistics.</p>
<p>CLASS SIZE DATA: Not very useful because easily manipulated, and it’s well documented that this sort of manipulation is done. For U.S. News, a class with 19 students is hugely different from a class with 20 students, yet a class with 20 students is considered the equivalent of a class with 50 students; and a class with 51 students is considered the same as a class with 500 students. You’re a college administrator, the provost tells you she wants to boost the school’s US News ranking, what do you do? Easy: find all the classes in the 20-30 student range, cap enrollment on most of them at 19, and consolidate the rest into larger sections with 50-student caps. Find all classes currently having 51 or more students, and cap those currently in the 51-60 range at 50, while consolidating the rest into a small number of mega-classes (after all, having 5 60-person classes is worse, as far as US News is concerned, than having 1 300-person class). Are students better served? Well, not really; many will be closed out of classes they could previously take, even though those classes were already relatively small. Others will be forced into classes that may be much larger than they previously had been. But the school’s US News stats will improve, potentially quite dramatically if the school is ruthless enough.</p>
<p>SPENDING PER STUDENT: Not a useful statistic. In some sense this is just a measure of inefficiency, or cost per unit of production. It may be loosely correlated with real resources available to students, or not; it may be loosely correlated with educational quality, or not. Or it may simply reflect bloat and inefficiency. A school that is able to find real efficiencies—for example, using its market leverage as a large employer to negotiate lower health insurance rates for its faculty and staff—will find that it is punished by US News for those efficiency gains, which US News will mark down as less spending per student.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>How about Georgetown?</p>
<p>higher average SATs (1490 v. 1450 @ 75th percentile M + CR)
lower admit rate (18.8% of a national applicant pool v. 21.6% of a largely regional pool)
smaller S:F ration (14:1 v. 22:1)
higher 6-year graduation rate (93% v. 90%)</p>
<p>(Not that I wouldn’t prefer Berkeley anyway.)</p>
<p>^^I guess it’s that pesky much lower PA score of Georgetown that keeps it below Berkeley.</p>
<p>^^In all due seriousness, yes.</p>
<p>tk, you forgot a few others in which UC Berkeley scores higher than Georgetown:</p>
<p>10.0% - College spending/student
7.0% - Faculty salary (adjusted for location)
6.0% - Classes - percent with <20 students
6.0% - Students - percent in top 10% of high school
4.0% - Freshmen retention rate
3.0% - Faculty - percent with highest degree
1.0% - Faculty - percent full time</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>In the few places where TAs are both well selected and well trained, perhaps. In most places that recruit graduate students on a worldwide basis, that is a pipe dream. While TAs can be “the best and brightest young apprentices of their chosen fields” very rarely is that the field of … education.</p>
<p>25.0% - Academic Reputation
25.0% - Retention/Graduation Rates
22.0% - Finances
15.0% - “Student Quality”
8.0% - Class Sizes
3.0% - Faculty - percent with highest degree
1.0% - Student/Faculty ratio
1.0% - Faculty - percent full time
100.0%</p>
<p>These seem to be the main categories (plus a few that don’t really fit in).</p>