Figure out what matters to you and look at that. How many people choose the major you’re considering? What’s the average class size (or percentage of classes with under X students)? How many students total? % of students pursuing post-graduate degrees? How many live on campus? Do they guarantee housing for all 4 years? Percent of students involved in Greek life? Students studying abroad? Schedule (i.e., semesters, 4-1-4, trimesters, one class at a time.) What sounds great to one person might be awful for someone else.
You can dig into the details after you’ve done some sorting. There are a TON of very good schools out there, but not every good school will be a fit for you.
The possibility that they CAN be manipulated doesn’t necessarily mean they ARE manipulated (systematically or enough to make a significant difference in the rankings.)
A college cannot maintain very high average test scores just because it is popular. For the Ivies, Caltech, MIT, Swarthmore, etc., to maintain such high average scores, they must continue to attract only a sufficient number of applications from top students, then convince them to enroll. Those students tend to be more able than the average student to consider many alternatives and select what they think is the best.
On the other hand, what those students care about most may not be what the OP cares about.
@insanedreamer, of ACCEPTED students, not the kids who actually choose to go? I always found that accepted students business (colleges LOVE to tout their accepted students test scores at their info sessions) to be quite misleading. They’re routinely skewed high – because, of course, high stats kids have a lot of options and many choose to go elsewhere – and sometimes substantially so.
Scores for accepted students often get reported in this forum as well, sometimes, it appears, as a way to make certain schools seem more selective than they actually are.
@tk21769 - Stanford relatively has the lowest 4 year graduation rate of the peer group.
Are their kids graduating in 4.5 years?
Are their kids double or triple majoring in 5 years?
There are a few factors in play in how some of the numbers are computed:
at some schools (not Stanford, MIT or Rice) a lot of kids transfer out
at other schools a lot of students transfer in
the only kids who count toward graduation rates started as freshman and graduated from that same school
so if 18% transferred out the max graduation rate would be 82%
the schools also show their 6 year (and sometimes 5 year) graduation rates
Stanford, MIT and Rice have very high six year graduation rates. Kids do not transfer out from those schools and they do finish where they started. That doesn’t hold true at many of the flagships and is worse sometimes far worse at non flagships. In fact sometimes those numbers are red flags and should stimulate questions as to why…
You will see that it is typical for the higher HS GPA admits to have lower yield (the inverse of admit rate, which you can also see on that page). (You may want to ignore the 0.00-2.99 group, since this is probably a tiny sample size of special admits like recruited athletes.)
They need to be considered in context of admission selectivity. Stanford, MIT, and Rice admit top-end students who are less likely to flunk out (who do you think has a better chance of graduating college, the student with 3.9/2300 in high school, or the student with 2.8/1400 in high school?). Also, non-flagship state universities often have lots of part time students, or students taking course loads at the lower end of the “full time” range, or students who take gap semesters to work to earn money to pay for school. These students may take extended time to graduate, may not graduate at all, or may transfer to other schools because their jobs or other obligations required them to move away.