https://washingtonmonthly.com/2018/08/27/washington-monthly-releases-2018-best-college-guide/
This used to be a fairly straightforward ranking. Now, not so much. Other than the net price and loan default columns, it’s almost impossible to understand what the subheadings are actually measuring.
If they are ranking based on what the colleges “do for their country:”
Then someone was asleep at the switch for leaving out the service academies. Based on the criteria they say they are using, the SAs should be at the top of the list. (Or maybe they are included on some sub list I missed. Usually, the SAs get lumped in with the LACs.)
I think all rankings are useless, but this one is just funny based on what they say they are measuring.
Funny that they state they value service yet one of their criteria is earnings. Those 2 don’t usually go hand-in-hand.
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We would expect nothing different from an organization based in Washington DC!!
Ranked University of Illinois Chicago in front of the University of Chicago. That’s pretty funny.
^^^they probably think it’s the same school!
I’ve always found these rankings somewhat interesting. I do like that they are a litte more transparent and less dependent on “peer reputation.”
In the end, at least for undergrad, I’m in the all rankings are useless camp anyway.
@doschicos : that’s supposed to mean “enough to lift a student out of poverty”.
Hmmm. Rice at 77, UCF at 78. I get them mixed up a lot. Are you kidding me?
It’s not a ranking of academic quality! It’s a ranking of how affordable it is for middle and working class kids, how helpful it is for them, etc. So, yes, UChicago that admits few Pell Grant recipients may well end up lower ranked than IUC - even though UChicago gets higher points for graduating most of them and excellent financial aid, which UIC doesn’t offer.
Rankings are obviously all distortions and subjective (criteria selection is subjective after all), but this one is particularly entertaining. I really enjoy the proliferation of rankings and their increasingly idiosyncratic attempts to differentiate themselves from the others.
Top 5 ranked school is basically HYPSM in a different order. To me, as far as subjective prestige factor goes for undergraduate, HYPSM still is an accurate reflection. Also, another real life reflection to me is head to head choice given on Parchment which I tend to believe reflects actual decisions.
Parchment has zero credibility, in my opinion. The cross-admit reports they use to establish “revealed preference” are entirely self-selected, self-reported, and unverified, which means it’s really easy to submit phony reports. Students at some schools have been known to spend a few hours entering phony cross-admit reports to make their school look good. So you get anomalous results, like 63% of cross-admits choosing Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis (IUPUI) over Harvard.
And even apart from the problem of false reports, it’s just not a scientific sample. A story in the NY Times a few years ago pointed out that in that year’s admissions cycle, Parchment had 20,472 cross-admit reports from Michigan residents, but only 389 from New York residents, despite New York having twice the population of Michigan. And the number of reports for some schools is absurdly small. Parchment’s 2018 “Student Choice College Rankings” have Harvard in 37th place, behind such luminaries as the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, Texas A&M-Galveston, Evangel University (Springfield, MO), and Texas A&M International University (Laredo, TX). This was based on just 61 cross-admit reports (v. all schools) for the Merchant Marine Academy, which could represent as few as 7 students if each student applied to 10 schools. The figures for the other schools I named were similarly low.
As they say, garbage in, garbage out.
https://www.parchment.com/c/college/college-rankings.php?page=1&perPage=25
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/09/04/upshot/college-picks.html
Bingo. This would be a great essay question for AP Stats.
A few years back, another poster deemed this the “Mother Teresa Ranking”. IMO the overall ranking misrepresents the way that colleges best contribute to the public good. Colleges and universities are not churches or government agencies. They serve the public above all by discovering and sharing knowledge. Their contributions to social mobility also are important, but for the typical HS student or family on College Confidential, that isn’t necessarily a key factor in choosing a college. Assuming net costs are equal, how many students would choose Utah State over MIT because the former has a much better graduation rate performance rank (#23 v. #234 respectively)? When you combine social mobility, research, and service into a single composite, the resulting ranking looks like a haphazard mishmash. It’s like ranking hospitals by factoring in the number of people they employ along with the quality of care.
I do think it exposes a lot of interesting information
(especially from a public policy perspective).
Unfortunately, it does not do so in a very user-friendly way.
As far as I can tell (from viewing on a 15" MacBook Pro) one would need either to have a very wide display, or else to download it into Excel then freeze panes, in order hold the first column and first row in continuous view while scrolling. However, I don’t see any download or export buttons.
Parchment is like a big corporation setting its compensation bands by checking Glassdoor.
Great to see appropriate levels of Parchment slamming on here. Big ups.
@bclintonk For head to head selections between certain colleges whose rankings are vastly different, you are not going to get many samples. But I tend to believe stats among similarly ranked colleges or among top 20 colleges. It corresponds to what I noticed around me.
Even if the Parchment sampling had none of the problems cited above, they still would fail to capture up-front preferences revealed at application time. How many well-qualified students never even apply to Ivies or other “elite” private universities because, after doing their research, they actually prefer the state flagship or a LAC? Furthermore, college choices are heavily influenced by factors, such as location and net cost, that have little to do with academic quality.
If you want a crude, generalized ranking of student academic preferences based on massive amounts of data, simply rank colleges by average test scores. High average scores, together with high average entering GPAs (or class rank) and low admission rates, comprise prima facie evidence that a college has highly attractive qualities for students who easily could have chosen other schools.
However, net cost (and other factors weakly related to quality, including admission policies) will confound this ranking, too. It would be a mistake to conclude that Caltech and Olin are better than (or even preferred over) Harvard, Princeton, or Stanford based solely on average scores (or that HYP are better than anywhere else based solely on some other selectivity measure).