USNWR Slanted in favor of the Northeast

College Search & Selection
21

<p>3togo-Your logic about time lags makes sense-reputations are a difficult thing to build…and to change barring some major institutional calamity. However, you may be surprised that the facts of the rankings over the last ten years don’t show much of a change. This lack of change is what fuels my bias charge. </p>

<p>My personal suspicion is that the practical approach to undergraduate education at the Midwestern and Southern schools is more related to their concern on how best to educate their students and less about how prestigious their brand is. Unfortunately, this approach has negative ranking and reputation consequences as the Midwestern and Southern schools that leads them to get consistently under ranked. </p>

<p>Cornell:
Highest rank: 6 (1 time in 1999-Fluke??-next highest was 10)
Lowest rank: 14 (5 times)
2007: 12</p>

<p>Brown
Highest rank: 9 (1 time)
Lowest rank: 17 (2 times)
2007: 15</p>

<p>Rice
Highest rank: 12 (1 time)
Lowest rank: 18 (1 time)
2007: 17</p>

<p>Emory
Highest rank: 9 (1 time in 1998-Fluke??-next highest was 16)
Lowest rank: 20 (2 times)
2007: 18 (tied with Vanderbilt)</p>

<p>Vanderbilt
Highest rank: 18 (3 times)
Lowest rank: 22 (1 time)
2007: 18 (tied with Emory)</p>

<p>Notre Dame
Highest rank: 18 (4 times)
Lowest rank: 20 (1 time)
2007: 20 </p>

<p>Here is the raw data for each of the Top 20 schools:
07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 98
Prince 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 4 1 1
Harv 2 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 1 1
Yale 3 3 3 3 2 2 2 4 1
Stan 4 5 5 5 4 5 6 6 4<br>
MIT 4 7 5 4 4 5 5 3 4 6
Cal T 4 7 8 5 4 4 4 1 9 9
Penn 7 4 4 5 4 5 6 7 6 7
Duke 8 5 5 5 4 8 8 7 6 3
Dart 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 11 10 7
Colu 9 9 9 11 10 9 10 10 10 9
Chic 9 15 14 13 12 9 10 13 14 14
Corn 12 13 14 14 14 14 10 11 6 14
WashU 12 11 11 9 12 14 15 17 16 17
NU 14 12 11 11 10 12 13 14 10 9
Brown 15 15 13 17 17 16 15 14 10 9
J H U 16 13 14 14 15 16 15 7 14 14
Rice 17 17 17 16 15 12 13 14 18 17
Emory 18 20 20 18 18 18 18 18 16 9
Vandy 18 18 18 19 21 21 22 20 20 19
ND 20 18 18 19 18 19 19 19 18 19</p>

<p>The only non-Northeastern school that seems to have changed its position and been able to maintain it is WashU (and UChicago to a lesser extent while Cal Tech has gone up and down). Northwestern and Duke have each been downgraded from their rank of ten years ago while Rice, Emory, Vanderbilt, and Notre Dame seem to have a glass ceiling on their ranking. IMO, the Peer Assessments (and rankings) don’t reflect the substantial improvements these schools have made in the last decade to improve their faculties, their student bodies and their facilities. As my prior post (# 16) shows, Rice, Emory, and Vanderbilt can make the case that they offer an undergraduate environment that is superior to some of its Ivy League and other Northeastern competitors. </p>

<p>And tarhunt,
You respond as if your ox has been gored… and perhaps it has. The reputations of so many of these “prestigious” schools were made long ago when there was not much competition in college education and many of these reputations have been perpetuated at the graduate level (I agree with your comment on research reputation and its likely impact on the Peer Assessments). Driven by the media in the country’s two largest markets, there is definitely an incentive to promote these schools as the be-all, end-all in American education. But smarts don’t just exist on the coasts and the top schools in Flyover Country don’t deserve the persistent condescension and under ranking. </p>

<p>Peer Assessments are just opinions of people working in the education industry. Neither you nor I have access to the raw data of the Peer Assessment and no idea of the distribution of the responses or the true depth and quality of the opinions that are being offered. I would love to see the raw data and be able to provide the specifics you are seeking. It would be interesting to see who is responding and evaluate just how much they know about the schools on which they are opining. The difference between you and I is that you are accepting the status quo and the quality of these Peer Assessments while I am not. Perhaps they are accurate, but I suspect that many are uninformed and heavily shaped by the bias of the media and the education industry in favor of those schools with greater media visibility and greater historical prestige. </p>

<p>Finally, I challenge the arbitrary weightings assigned to various aspects of the USNWR rankings. Anyone can create a ranking system that would produce different results-that is exactly what I did in my prior posts. For example, I think we would agree that prestige of a college is vastly overrated when it comes time to interview for and perform a job. Furthermore, the value of this undergraduate brand declines as one moves further and further away from the college years (although this is much less true for graduate education). In my admittedly simple scoring, some of the top Southern and Midwestern schools-Rice, Emory, Vanderbilt-rank higher than Cornell and Brown based on factors that directly affect the daily life of an undergraduate. Is this result really an inaccurate reflection of the undergraduate experience and the level of preparedness that a student would have upon graduation? The status quo would say no, but the student, his/her family, the potential employer all might have a different answer.</p>

22

<p>I really don't get your point.</p>

23

<p>Pretty much the only thing that will remain constant with US News is that Harvard will remain at or somewhere near the number 1 spot. This gives the rankings credibility in the eyes of the public and allows the magazine to do pretty much whatever it wants from the number 2 or 3 spot on….. </p>

<p>Everything else in the rankings is pretty much bs…. Everyone should take the numbers that the magazine uses, save the peer assessment and predicted graduation rate and other irrelevant nonsense, and uses those as criteria for judging colleges. When doing that, one sees that there is truly little difference among the different schools. This is how the rankings vary wildly from year to year, how Caltech can be number 1 one year and 4 the next, or how Chicago can jump 6 spots in one year…. (well, that and numbers fixing :) )</p>

<p>I don’t believe that there is any conspiracy to slant the rankings toward the NE, but I do know that the magazine is a business, a business charged with selling as many issues as possible…. That said, I think there is way too much thought being put into this. Since it is IMPOSSIBLE to determine intent of the magazine editors, short of their stating it, it’s impossible to know if there is any real conspiracy being undertaken. </p>

<p>People treat US News like the end all be all of college rankings, like what it says is to be glorified holy word. This is completely silly. Anyone with half a brain knows that a slight shift in the methodology could render a different result…. Moving some weight from the Peer assessment to selectivity, scrapping graduation performance, and so on..... I mean, out of the 2400 people who responded to the peer assessment, who in the world didn’t give Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, etc scores of 5 (distinguished)? Who are the “peers” filling out these sheets who are giving Dartmouth, Northwestern, and Brown scores of 4.4? </p>

<p>The whole thing is pretty silly and I think we should take it with a grain of salt, because I promise, next year, the rankings won’t be the same, and there will be even more to argue about……. Wasn’t the University of Pennsylvania number 4 last year?.............</p>

24

<p>Wow, KK was coherent, concise, and logical. With a brain like that, I'm kind of surprised he didn't get into Tufts, and had to go to one of the lesser Boston schools, Northwestern.</p>

25

<p>kk, I agree with virtually all of your points, particularly that there is very little to pick from among the top schools and especially in the group ranked in the tier below HYPSM. I am not accusing USNWR or anyone of any kind of conspiracy, but I do challenge the underlying assumptions (held by many on CC and in the aforementioned press) that the Ivies are inherently better than some of the lesser known Southern and Midwestern schools (including your beloved Northwestern). Based on historical prestige and reputation, schools like Cornell and Brown are able to remain consistently ahead of these schools in the rankings. In the minds of the education establishment, hell would have to freeze over before we could see the likes of Northwestern, Rice, Emory, Vanderbilt and Notre Dame crack the top 10 on a regular basis.</p>

26

<p>
[quote]
There aren't any schools in the south, midwest, or west that are BETTER than the top-10 northeast schools...which top-10 school would you have removed to make way for...Emory!??! Vandy!?!?

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Man, apparently Jyankees hasn't heard of Stanford or Chicago. Duke and CalTech must've slipped under the radar too.</p>

<p>Yeesh. :rolleyes:</p>

27

<p>"I'm kind of surprised he didn't get into Tufts, and had to go to one of the lesser Boston schools, Northwestern."</p>

<p>-I'm thinking of going to Northeastern for grad school, just for the comic value.... :rolleyes:</p>

28

<p>kk, a further comment on your post. You state that the rankings change wildly from one year to the next. My conclusion is just the opposite. Occasionally, this occurs (as you point out for the moves by Chicago and Penn in the 2007 results), but the overall rankings don't change much in a single year or even in a decade. Is this accurate? Or is this inertia? Or is this a reflection of a methodology that allows the schools with strong historical reputation and prestige to retain their spots while locking out others who might actually be doing a better job of educating its undergraduates?? As you rightly point out, the results could change rather significantly if the methodology were altered, but my point is that the system is designed to not allow for much change in the status quo. People may intellectually recognize that there is little difference between the schools in this tier after HYPSM, but the rankings rarely allow the Northwestern/Rice/Emory/Vanderbilt/Notre Dame group to pierce the top 10 while the next tier of the Ivies-Cornell/Brown/Penn/Dartmouth/Columbia-rarely move down. Many will claim that the greater selectivity of this Ivy group confirms their elite status and that they are thus deserving of their higher ranks. But is it their high ranks and historical prestige that encourage their annual avalanche of applications and thus higher selectivity or is their educational product really a higher quality offering than that offered by lower ranked schools located in the Midwest and South? Furthermore, the higher selectivity of Ivies certainly owes something to the geographic advantage of being located closer to the major metro centers of the Northeast and its significantly higher numbers of high school students? If Rice (of any of the schools that I have mentioned) were located in Philadelphia, does anyone really doubt that its reputation and selectivity (and its ranking) would soar? Or what if Cornell or any of the other Ivies were located in Atlanta or Nashville, would they really be able to reach and maintain such lofty ranking levels? Think about it for a second and maybe you begin to get a sense for how the deck is stacked in favor of these "prestigious" Ivies and against those in Flyover Country.</p>

29

<p>Peer assessment is definitly biased toward research reputations. This hurts schools like Wake Forest, Rice, Tufts and William & Mary whose focus is on Undergrad teaching. These schools would be ranked higher than the research State U's if more focus were on SAT scores and admit ratios.</p>

30

<p>doctorb:</p>

<p>peer assessment doesn't seem to hurt Dartmouth, which has few grad programs.</p>

<p>sakky:</p>

<p>don't forget, back when CalTech was king of the USNews roost, there were many land-grant colleges ~ top 10, including Cal and Michigan; UVa and UNCC weren't far behind. Of course, the eastern blue bloods cried foul. Further, unhappy easterners is not good for magazine sales, since a large portion of the pop lives in the east -- USNews marketers don't want to antagonize thier readership!</p>

<p>So, USNews came up with some more "objective" criteria, and included endowment in their stats (endowment is supposedly a proxy for how much grads love thier school). Of course, colleges that are older than the nation (aka Ancient Eight) have had 400+ years to build endowments. The poor, old land grant colleges have only been around 100 years, but, being public, have only been agressively courting donors for the past generation or so. </p>

<p>Voila! Blue Bloods back on top! :-)</p>

<p>No flames, please, just an interesting connection from a cynic. :rolleyes:</p>

31

<p>the colleges at the top are not stagnant. If you are number 1, you can't move up. That doesn't mean that a school that went 5-4-3-2 in a 4 year period to move from 5th to 2nd should logically move to #1. #1 is working to improve all of their stuff too, but obviously their ranking doesn't show it. There is no logical that a school climbing the rankings should climb all the way to the top. You are arguing like the schools at the top are sitting there waiting to be passed by someone new.</p>

<p>I also agree that USNews is not a good ranking of undergrad education. But that wasn't the point of the first post.</p>

32

<p>i dont get how you can compare Emory and Vanderbilt to Northwestern</p>

<p>even by peer assesments, it is 4.0 and 4.0 to 4.4, tied with Brown and Dartmouth</p>

<p>and Rice is a 4.1</p>

33

<p>Foryourenjoyment,
Have you read this thread from the beginning? A major thrust of the discussion is how the subjective nature of the Peer Assessment works to the benefit of the more “establishment” colleges, most of which are located in the Northeast. Comparing the rating of Emory and Vanderbilt to those of Brown and Dartmouth is exactly what I am challenging as this is all based on the opinions of academicians who are in The Club. The Ivy League (and to a lesser extent, probably Northwestern and Chicago because after all, the city of Chicago was the 2nd largest city in the country for most of the 20th century) are in The Club. The lower Peer Assessment scores of Rice, Emory, Vanderbilt, and Notre Dame may, in the mind of the education establishment, reflect inferior institutions vs the Ivy League schools and Northwestern, but I suspect that they reflect more on the lower visibility that these schools have because of their distance from New York and Los Angeles. In fact, based on the objective data that measures the faculty resources, the selectivity, and the financial resources, these Midwestern and Southern schools demonstrate the superior strength of their undergraduate offering.</p>

34

<p>Peer assesment scores are garbage, and compeltely reflect grad prestige. Why would random people from different schools be familiar with the undergrad quality of every other school anyways. Peer assesment score is the worst factor - otherwise, how could you explain Michigan or UBerkeley being scored higher than Dartmouth or Brown (which are clearly superior for undergrad but which lag in grad).</p>

35

<p>“Peer assesment scores are garbage, and compeltely reflect grad prestige. Why would random people from different schools be familiar with the undergrad quality of every other school anyways.”</p>

<p>-I agree completely. It seems purely absurd that a person could be well-informed on the quality of all the schools on the list…. I mean, honestly, how much does an admissions officer at Princeton really know about the University of Alabama? </p>

<p>“You state that the rankings change wildly from one year to the next. My conclusion is just the opposite. Occasionally, this occurs (as you point out for the moves by Chicago and Penn in the 2007 results), but the overall rankings don't change much in a single year or even in a decade.”</p>

<p>-From what I’ve seen this does happen; pretty much every year, at least one or two schools moves up or down by about 2 spaces. While that may not seem like much, to me, colleges don’t change by that much that often, and having schools move up and down so frequently is disingenuous …. It says that the quality of schools can, and does, vary by year, which is absurd. To me, for the rankings to be more valid, they should remain constant for a few years. That is, it should take at least 3 or 4 years for schools to move up and down on the list, not 1…… but this won’t help sales of an annual magazine now will it? </p>

<p>“Or is this a reflection of a methodology that allows the schools with strong historical reputation and prestige to retain their spots while locking out others who might actually be doing a better job of educating its undergraduates??”</p>

<p>-I think the case could be made for some Southern/Midwestern schools, especially Rice. I also think that the methodology is tailored to render a certain answer, that is, one that sells magazines! … As bluebayou put it: USNews marketers don't want to antagonize thier readership! But then hey, I also don’t think Cal Tech should be on the list at all, so what do I know. :) </p>

<p>It’s often said that anyone can uses statistics to prove anything. This seems to be the case with these rankings. It’s no accident that HYP are always in the top 3 spaces- this is to preserve credibility. The editors could of course add criteria that drove Harvard and Princeton out of the top spots, and replaced them with a school like Duke, but then would the public believe it? I highly doubt it. </p>

<p>“People may intellectually recognize that there is little difference between the schools in this tier after HYPSM, but the rankings rarely allow the Northwestern/Rice/Emory/Vanderbilt/Notre Dame group to pierce the top 10 while the next tier of the Ivies-Cornell/Brown/Penn/Dartmouth/Columbia-rarely move down.”</p>

<p>-Like I said, it seems to be that this is what sells magazines. That is, if this is a working business model for the rankings, why should US News change the methodology to render different rankings? The magazine is not a governmentally charged organization- it’s a business trying to make a profit. As such, it most likely isn’t too worried about the validity or fairness of the rankings…. In fact, I don’t know that there is a big difference between the likes of Harvard and Rice, or Stanford and Brown, and so on. Having a hierarchical ranking system like this only makes us think there is, makes us think that the quality of the schools is widely separated. I am in no way saying that all schools are equal, because they’re not, but the difference between Harvard and Rice surely is not as pronounced as the rankings would have us believe.</p>

36

<p>Some people are biased against schools in other regions, but these perceptions are beginning to change (even if its not yet reflected in the rankings).</p>

37

<p>"It’s often said that anyone can uses statistics to prove anything."</p>

<p>It's often said that about 84% of the people who claim that statistics can be used to prove anything drink coffee. Therefore coffee would seem to be the culprit here.</p>

38

<p>
[quote]

[quote]

There aren't any schools in the south, midwest, or west that are BETTER than the top-10 northeast schools...which top-10 school would you have removed to make way for...Emory!??! Vandy!?!?

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Man, apparently Jyankees hasn't heard of Stanford or Chicago. Duke and CalTech must've slipped under the radar too.</p>

<p>Yeesh.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>I didn't forget about any of those schools, they are already IN the top-10. They can't replace northeast schools, as they're already there. That leaves the other midwest, south, and west schools to replace northeast schools. The only school even comparable is Northwestern. Emory, Vandy, Rice etc. are all too far out for them to be top-10 any time soon.</p>

39

<p>East Coast bias... so what? Get over it...</p>

<p>
[quote]

Brown
Highest rank: 9 (1 time)

[/quote]
</p>

<p>(btw, Brown's highest recent ranking - at least prior to 1991 - was actually no. 8 in 1997)</p>

40

<p>Kinda like the bias some CCer's have towards other non-UC public and private schools?! ;)</p>