Hi, anyone have any input on whether the Niche student reviews are legit? I looked up about 10 small LACs and they all average three and a half stars in the student review section. I am looking to read student reviews but this makes me wonder if the reviews are manipulated somehow, with the average coming out the same for so many schools.
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I don’t know that niche manipulates reviews. With that said, I don’t place much value in these crowd-sourced ratings which also use unverified data. And if you look at the # of reviews relative to the #of kids who have attended over those years, you know you are getting only a tiny percentage of the story.
I would recommend that you read reviews and based on them, figure out what you’d like to dig into a bit more. For example, if lots of kids at a school talk about knowing their profs well, etc., you can probably know that the classroom experience will be “personal”. If Greek life comes up around social life, you might want to know what people outside that do for fun. If kids talk about doing a lot in the city nearby, you may want to know what kind of budget you’d need for that.
Iow, use it not for the answers but to figure out which questions to ask.
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Good advice, thank you. I still think it’s weird how so many colleges have an average of 3 and a half stars.
Gen Zs like giving out mostly 3s, 4s, and 5s. A lot of satisfied kids who give 4s, kids who are really happy and give 5s, and a bunch of kids for whom the experience was OK. That would give you an average around 4. However, there are a small number who hated the school and give 1s and 2s, which will tend to pull down the average to around 3.5.
The average is irrelevant, because few objective criteria are being used. What is relevant is to see which things keep popping up and figuring out what that means to your kid. So Harvey Mudd has a large number of low reviews complaining about how difficult the classes were. That indicates that the academics are challenging, not that teaching is bad. A large number of people complain about how few parties there are. For some kids that is good, an for others it’s not. Important information, but the 1 that was given to it by a partier is meaningless.
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I think they’re valid enough to give you an idea of what the school is like and what problems the school might have. I like that the reviews indicate when they were posted so you know the info is current. This is not the case at Unigo where you have no indication of how dated the info is–I read a review in which the student happened to mention 2012 and it became apparent that the reviews are next to useless.
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Or, alternatively, what are the best points that a schools has. As I wrote, For a kid who does not like a party atmosphere, a dozen reviews giving a school a 1 because “boring, no party scene” are a benefit, not a problem. Conversely, for a kid who wants a lively social scene, a dozen 5s because “great academics, students more interested in intellectual development rather than partying” are a reason to avoid attending that college.
Overall, students are often really bad at identifying many objective problems, such as teaching issues (out of date concepts, low academic standards, etc). On the other hand, students are really good at identifying characteristics which are really important for “fit”.
That being said, looking at Niche reviews on issues of “fit”, it is important to understand who the student body are. So if students at WashU complain about dorms, one should always remember that the vast majority of the students at WashU are wealthy to very wealthy White and Asian kids. It doesn’t mean that the dorms aren’t bad, but that the students writing the complaints may have different expectations than the average middle class student. BTW, WashU’s dorms are great, and even the wealthy kids attending WashU comment on how great they are.
Of course, some complaints on Niche belong to the “you either have never even visited the school website or suffer from real reading comprehension issues” category. There is no need to take complaints like “Colby is too rural”, “UCLA is way too built up”, or “Wheaton (IL) is too religious” seriously, since these are part of the description of these colleges. Same for colleges which are known to have specific cultures. So complaints that Oberlin is “to liberal” or that Harvey Mudd is “too nerdy” are also not to be taken seriously.
So Niche reviews are useful, with these caveats, and with ignoring the actual scores, but looking at the reviews themselves.
One last thing - sometimes people who are not students will “bomb” a college that they do not like, because of political reasons, with a large number of negative reviews. Sometimes these people are more or less honest, and simply say “this place treats {insert group here} badly, I give it a 1”, while others are extremely dishonest and pretend to be students complaining about whatever they don’t like “I am a student at this university, and a member of {insert group here}, and I was treated badly by faculty and by other students”. Also - students lie too, especially if they can do so anonymously.
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