<p>For those interested: </p>
<p>National University Rankings: National</a> University Rankings 2012 | Washington Monthly</p>
<p>Liberal Arts College Rankings:
Liberal</a> Arts College Rankings 2012 | Washington Monthly</p>
<p>Proud to say my college, Knox, is number 11 for LACs! :)</p>
<p>USCD what the hell.</p>
<p>Washington Monthly is the anti-prestige ranking; they’re quite up from about it. They say there’s too much emphasis on prestige so their ranking is based on non-prestige-based measures of what the school actually does that makes a positive contribution in the world, like promoting social mobility (how many kids from low-income backgrounds does the school actually enroll and graduate), graduation rate above and beyond “expected” graduation rate based on socioeconomic factors, research output, and a variety of public service measures like how much of the school’s work-study money goes into public service, and how much community service do the school’s students perform.</p>
<p>Considering how unorthodox these metrics are relative to the usual SAT scores and how much wealth does the institution lavish on its students, some of the “prestige” universities come out quite well on the service-oriented Washington Monthly ranking, too. Like Stanford at #3, Harvard #11 and MIT #15 among research universities. But so do a lot of top publics including most of the UCs (UCSD #1, UC Berkeley #5, UCLA #6, UCR #8, UCSB #14, UCD #17) along with UNC-Chapel Hill #4, U Washington #8, Georgia Tech #10, Michigan #13, and Wisconsin #18.</p>
<p>And let you think these metrics are stacked in favor of public universities, notice that the bottom ranks are also littered with public institutions.</p>
<p>I think it’s an interesting antidote to the usual US News baloney. I don’t know how much I’d rely on it in choosing a college, but it measures things that are real and useful, things that colleges ought to care about, and that those of us who support colleges financially, whether through contributions or tuition dollars or indirectly through state and federal taxation that heavily subsidizes all colleges, public and private, ought to care about as well.</p>
<p>UCSD: #1
Texas A&M: #2
…
Yale: #41
Northwestern: #75</p>
<p>:rolleyes:</p>
<p>Since PhD production gets discussed here so frequently, I scanned over the lists to see where schools fell. Although colleges like Caltech and Swat did exactly as well as you’d expect, both the university and LAC lists held some surprises. Because I’m too lazy to compile and sort the full lists, here’s the top 25. </p>
<p>Universities
1 Caltech
2 MIT
3 Princeton
4 Yale
5 Dartmouth
6 Stanford
7 Chicago
8 Brown
9 Rice
10 Duke
11 Cornell
12 Harvard
13 William & Mary
14 Case Western
15 Columbia
16 Berkeley
17 Rochester
18 Brandeis
19 CMU
20 Tufts
21 WUStL
22 Northwestern
23 Johns Hopkins
24 Penn
25 UVA</p>
<p>Interesting that 6 universities place ahead of Chicago - most notably Dartmouth. “Life of the mind” and “teacher of teachers” indeed. At #15, Columbia and its Core also seem to underperform. Case at #14 is something of a surprise, and at #11, Cornell does quite well given its diversity of colleges.</p>
<p>WUStL, Penn, and Northwestern, criticized for their “pre-professional” focus, on the other hand, fall right about where you’d expect. Hopkins does surprisingly poorly given its academic heft; perhaps having so many pre-meds and engineers hurts its numbers.</p>
<p>LACs
1 Swarthmore
2 Harvey Mudd
3 Carleton
4 Reed
5 Williams
6 St. John’s
7 Grinnell
8 New College of Florida
9 Amherst
10 Haverford
11 Vassar
12 Oberlin
13 Bryn Mawr
14 Smith
15 Wellesley
16 Davidson
17 Pomona
18 Wesleyan
19 Kenyon
20 Kalamazoo
21 Macalester
22 Whitman
23 Mount Holyoke
24 Colorado College
25 Earlham</p>
<p>This list is more along the lines of what you’d expect, but there’s still some interesting quirks. Bowdoin, Middlebury, and Claremont McKenna are conspicuously absent. MoHo is a bit further down the list than the other 7 sisters. Davidson beating out Kenyon and Wesleyan is somewhat surprising, and with Swarthmore, Haverford, Bryn Mawr, and Earlham all in the top 25, Quaker(-founded) schools are well-represented.</p>
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Ditto. Even if you don’t accept the sum, many of the parts - such as the number of faculty with awards, research expenditures, Peace Corps activity, etc. - are pretty interesting and not covered by US News.</p>
<p>^You are probably blowing things way out of proportion. Being 23rd out of hunderds of schools is by no means doing “poorly” (JHU). You also don’t know what the percentages are. Perhaps the difference between being the 10th and being the 25th is only a couple percentage points, which would not be a significant difference and would certainly not enough for you to label one is more preprofessional and what-not.</p>
<p>The ARWU rankings also measure stuff real and useful…alas, those rankings are quickly whisked off stage. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>I believe it is Xiggi who dubs this the “Mother Theresa” ranking.
I agree that (a) I would not rely on it too much in choosing a college, and (b) it’s an interesting antidote to USNWR (from a public policy perspective, if not from a personal choice perspective).</p>
<p>This order of top 10 universities for PhD production is a little different than others I’ve seen. Elsewhere (notably, on the Reed site) Chicago also comes out in the lower half of the top ten, with MIT and Caltech in the top half, but with a bunch of LACs (and no Ivies) rounding out the other 7. This list may be defined on a different time window, or on a different set of fields, than the others. </p>
<p>Here’s a listing for science & engineering PhDs:
[nsf.gov</a> - NCSES Baccalaureate Origins of S&E Doctorate Recipients - US National Science Foundation (NSF)](<a href=“http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf08311/]nsf.gov”>http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf08311/)</p>
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<p>Perhaps. But, one thing the Washington Monthly poll does <em>much</em> better than USNews is breaking down how money at the wealthiest colleges and universities gets spent, rather than the gross metric, “expenditures per student” which tends to encourage wasteful spending. Research not important? Low-income scholarships not important? Net price? As they say, YMMV.</p>
<p>I’m from UCSD, and I am happy to see UCSD get some rep and notion as one of the nation’s top public universities (it really is)</p>
<p>However that being said, it is silly to judge your college decision or an opinion of a college on one set of rankings, whether it is Washington Monthly or USNWR</p>
<p>There is some innate desire in people to know what/who/where is “the best”. We want to rank countries, cities, colleges, sports teams, athletes, anything that can be ranked. I don’t think that’s bad in itself. The danger is when we extrapolate objective data into which country/college/person is subjectively the best. Michael Phelps tops all other Olympic athletes in gold medals and total medals. That doesn’t mean that he is the greatest Olympian of all time. What about eight-time Olympic canoeist Josefa Idem with one gold and four other medals or two-time decathlon gold medalist Daley Thompson? There is simply no way to compare sports where the number of medals obtainable differs or to compare athletes with 32 years of Olympic competition and fewer medals vs. three-time Olympians who win a bunch.</p>
<p>Likewise, there is no objective way to rank the “best” colleges. A college that produces a high number of Nobel prize winners might be abysmal at teaching undergraduate foreign language courses. A college with a very high “selectivity” rating might produce very few graduates who are motivated to serve the poor. Even grouping data together and trying to come up with the “best” overall reflects the biases of those doing the ranking. They may, for example, care only about academic factors that can be represented numerically, although student happiness and a feeling of belonging can have a heavy influence on whether students get to know their professors and classmates and have meaningful intellectual discussions outside class. </p>
<p>This is why I like to see rankings that are original and even quirky. They provide a different snapshot of schools than the usual USNWR stuff. Rankings are good for some basic guidance, but they can’t replace a student’s judgment about what he/she needs academically, socially, and financially, as well as what he/she can give in return – and which schools meet those needs and opportunities for service. The “best” school is the best school for that student. I know many a student who, after doing final college visits, turned down a much more highly ranked school for another school because he/she had the sense to know which one would be the better fit.</p>
<p>No, these rankings aren’t especially useful for prospective students. But then, it is not possible to create a one-size-fits-all ranking for prospective students. It might be possible to create a ranking useful to policymakers and taxpayers looking for the best application of societal resources. So, I tend to prefer these rankings to USNWR.</p>
<p>A friend at my college said, “I guess it depends on what you value the most. SAT and ACT scores don’t matter to me as much as public service (at least in the grand scheme of life in general), and Knox’s affiliation with the Peace Corps is what helped me make my final decision.”</p>
<p>I agree with her. I can careless about SAT/ACT averages. My college has a high acceptance rate, but it doesn’t mean much because it’s a midwestern college where not as many people apply. If it was in the northeast, I would guarantee it would accept far fewer people. It still does have a pretty high SAT/ACT average, but it’s indeed SAT optional.</p>
<p>This ranking makes more sense than USNWR’s.</p>
<p>More sense?</p>
<p>Well, let us try this. Please explain how much sense it makes that wedged between the the Harvard/Michigan sandwich, you will find the academic powerhouse of the University of Texas at … El Paso, a school that admits about everyone with a pulse, and where a command of English is not mandatory for students, and hardly for … its faculty. Except for a reasonable tradition for engineering and track and field, the only notable element is its stunning Bhutanese architecture. Otherwise it is an academic wasteland in a town that is more New Mexico than it is Texas, and more Mexico than Texas. This might explain than a quarter of its students did NOT break 400 on the M/R sections of the SAT, and its top quarter barely breaking the 500 mark.</p>
<p>It is obvious that the media is trying to come up with a better mousetrap than the seminal USnews. This ranking might well stand for something and offer a different perspective, but it surely has NOTHING to do with academic excellence. </p>
<p>So it remains a futile exercise to win the prestigious Mother Teresa college award. It makes the Princeton Review look like a gem.</p>
<p>Hey! Don’t bash UTEP! They won the NCAA Basketball Div 1 National Championship in 1962 or something like that!</p>
<p>But tbh these rankings are more useless than the USNews ones</p>
<p>Faculty winning awards doesn’t make them good teachers, having more students in Peace corps or ROTC doesn’t make the school better, and schools that attract more “rich” kids are set back.</p>
<p>Don Haskins and Texas Western College won the NCAA title in 1966 before the school was called UTEP. Does that mean anything in this context?</p>
<p>Faculty awards mean little; not speaking English better than a Walmart cashier, however, should mean something. </p>
<p>I am afraid you are not too familiar with UTEP. If one needed a poster child to show how utterly moronic this ranking is, there is no need to look further.</p>
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<p>It means, that given the rankings parameters and the premium it puts on social mobility, that it makes the presence of Harvard and Michigan look that much more remarkable.</p>
<p>And what does social mobility really mean if the best school in the country according to it is … UTEP? Could such criteria not apply to any community college? </p>
<p>It is supposed to make “more” sense, remember. I think this is a case of a non-sensical methodology going haywire. Should a school be rewarded for graduating five more percent of its students over the baseline of an abysmal 30 percent (probably SAT based)? Yes that is 35 percent graduation in SIX years. After a decade? Try 46 percent.</p>
<p>How is the net cost calculated at a non-residential school? And does this metric not reflect the sales job of a school that operates like one of those for-profit diploma mills? Go to school as long as you can milk the Pell system? </p>
<p>Really?</p>
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<p>With respect to personal choice of a college, the issue isn’t whether joining the Peace Corps makes you a more worthy human being than scoring well on the SAT. The issue is whether a relatively high PC volunteer rate or high average scores are useful indicators of college quality. </p>
<p>The relative number of graduates who go into the PC might tell you a little about the kind of student the school tends to attract or the atmosphere of the school. If you want to spend 4 years surrounded by friends who are out to save the world, not out to make a killing in investment banking, this might matter to you (although the PC number is no doubt a very small fraction of the total population at ANY school). Average SAT scores probably matter more to more people, as a rough indicator of the academic competence of your fellow students (to the extent they are a valid measurement of that).</p>