<p>Also, the effect on the distribution of majors at different colleges is another selection effect that muddies the comparison. Major is probably more strongly associated with employment prospects than college name in most cases (particularly when the major is a pre-professional one directly associated with the type of job, like engineering, architecture, or nursing, or is otherwise one which covers the expected preparation for the type of job, like statistics, applied math, or mathematical finance/economics for actuarial jobs).</p>
<p>PhD production rates can show selection effects based on the nature of the school and how well recruited it is – one would expect a pre-professionally oriented school that emphasizes co-op programs to be rather different from a small isolated LAC known for academic idealism in this respect. Medical school placement rates can be affected by whether and how the school does committee letters – some refuse committee letters to pre-meds who do not have high chances of admission, effectively screening out the “reach” applicants from their medical school admission numbers.</p>
<p>But it is unlikely that they can be considered equivalent for a given student based on the student’s academic interests and non-academic preferences.</p>
<p>On a really practical day-to-day level, worth finding out about a prospective college:</p>
<ol>
<li> What classes are taught by TAs?</li>
<li>What classes–and percentage of classes–are taught by adjuncts (instead of either full-time nontenure track or full time tenure track)? </li>
<li> For students who feel really strong pull toward a specific major, how many at College X are actually majoring in that field for the prior calendar year?</li>
</ol>
<p>There is not a single right answer to these questions. It really depends on you, the type of major you’re looking at, how you learn and what you need to be successful.</p>
<p>They may not be equally good fits for a given student who is considering small colleges (LACs). For purposes of this discussion, I think the question is whether the ranking is a good-enough, rough-and-ready indicator of academic quality to be useful in winnowing down the number of candidates for deeper research (assuming academic quality is a high priority.) Are any individual components of the ranking better indicators than (or equally good as) the overall ranking? If not, what better indicator is available? Or, are no indicators reliable at all? Are all colleges pretty much equally good, and the outcome depends overwhelmingly on the individual efforts of the student? If you believe that, then just choose any affordable school that is in an acceptable location and has the programs you want. Chances are, a large public university in your home state will satisfy those criteria. That in fact is the choice that many high school students and their families make. </p>
<p>In my opinion, average test scores alone (which correlate pretty strongly with the overall USNWR rankings) are a fairly good-rough-and-ready quality indicator. Are there “hidden gems” out there that more high-scoring students should be choosing, if only they were better decision-makers? Maybe. Consider the “Colleges that Change Lives” list. Earlham College is on it. It has some of the same characteristics as higher-ranked, traditionally Quaker colleges (Swarthmore, Haverford) and other more selective LACs. Should more students admitted to both Earlham and the higher-ranked alternatives be choosing Earlham? In fact, most of them won’t choose Earlham. In some cases that may be due to an irrational fixation on rank and prestige. However, both Haverford and Swarthmore happen to have much better need-based aid than Earlham. Haverford and Swarthmore are in what many students (quite reasonably) would consider more desirable locations than Richmond, Indiana. If you sit in on classes at all three schools, I suspect you’ll find the Haverford and Swarthmore classes are taught at a faster pace. So the high-scoring students who have the choice at all are likely to gravitate toward Haverford and Swarthmore more than to Earlham. That’s not to say that an exclusive focus on LACs in the first place is necessarily a rational decision. Misconceptions about other kinds of colleges might cause one to ignore them. However, at least in comparing apples to apples (LACs to LACS or research universities to research universities), for a large set of colleges that all have the programs you want, I think the US News ranking, or some individual metrics it uses (like test scores), is a fairly good, rough-and-ready indicator of overall school quality. If somebody here can point to a better, objective, practical way to do a first-pass quality assessment (so that you aren’t doing in depth research on 3000 colleges), I think we’d all be very interested.</p>
<p>This may already have been shared/discussed, but the financial health of a school is something to consider. This article is interesting. You can click on their list of schools and see which “grade” they have assigned. Hope the link works. (It only includes Private schools although I bet the information is also available somewhere for Public schools).</p>
<p>I’ll also add that the quality of an institution is not solely determined by what’s learned inside the classroom. For instance, what sort of speakers come to campus and with what regularity? How does the university encourage students to go beyond just academics and volunteer in the greater community? Are students discussing more than just the next party at dinner? How well does the school support the goals of its students? Etc. </p>
<p>On the other hand, don’t underestimate the positive effects of partying either (if you want to enter the business world). A lot of kids better their social skills in college, and the party-hard schools of Dartmouth & USC are also famous for the strength of their alumni networks, which I don’t believe is mere coincidence.</p>
<p>Some schools may “game” this aspect of the rankings by more heavily emphasizing test scores in admissions, or going test-optional so that low test score applicants and admits are not visible; others may have reasons for de-emphasizing test scores (but not going test-optional), which lowers this aspect of their rankings.</p>
<p>Additionally, some schools may not be very selective for admissions, but may have very rigorous academics, due to the nature of the academic programs and majors offered. Schools like South Dakota School of Mines and Technology would be examples. Other less selective schools (usually large state schools like Arizona State) may have a range of academic offerings for the entire range of students from the barely college-ready to the top students in the state, so it is not like a top student attending such a less selective school will necessarily find the academic offerings inadequate.</p>
<p>Indeed. I find it ironic that right after I posted my list of publics which actually produce successful/notable people at a higher per capita rate than some privates with higher average test scores*, @tk21769 went back to asserting that high test scores are the best indicator of how good a college is. </p>
<p>Yet how good is a school if they take in better inputs and produce superstars at a lesser rate than a state school?</p>
<p>*At least Rice has a relatively high rate of grads who go on to win a prestigious scholarship/fellowship, though, and Rice and JHU have high rates of STEM PhD production. WashU and Vandy (and probably Emory as well) don’t seem to excel in anything despite taking in much better inputs than the top publics.</p>
<p>It seems that looking at outcomes is a very good way to tease out which schools have been gaming the rankings most successfully.</p>
<p>What I actually wrote was this:
“In my opinion, average test scores alone (which correlate pretty strongly with the overall USNWR rankings) are a fairly good-rough-and-ready quality indicator.”</p>
<p>I’m not too familiar with the CCAP “America’s Leader’s” list. If it does show that “Cal, UMich, Wisconsin, UT-Austin, UCLA, UVa, UNC, Illinois, and Indiana actually produce more leaders in American society PER CAPITA than JHU, Rice, CMU, WashU, or Vanderbilt”, that would be an interesting finding … but not <em>too</em> interesting. After all, the schools in the first group aren’t ranked by US News all that much lower than the schools in the second. Michigan has the same 75th percentile M+CR as JHU, and nearly the same as CMU. I’d want to know how CCAP defines and measures “leaders”. </p>
<p>I don’t think any of these metrics can be relied upon to make fine distinctions among peer schools. I wouldn’t be surprised to see some more-or-less plausible ranking system place Berkeley and Michigan more in line with the Ivies (as in fact the USNWR Peer Assessments do, and some of the international rankings do). What would be far more interesting would be to see many top-N schools showing up among the colleges that get “C” or “D” (or vice-versa) in the financial health assessments cited above. </p>
<p>Except that I didn’t say they were peers. I said that if you go by outcomes after graduation, the first group outranks the second group. If you go by grad outcomes and didn’t know anything about entering SAT scores, you would not consider Vanderbilt to be a peer of Cal & UMich. You would consider Vanderbilt to be a peer of Indiana and PSU.</p>
<p>Taking a look at the list of C’s and D’s, I notice no schools among the elite (Top 25) with that grade, but there are some schools that appear in US News and get mentioned on CC occasionally. Most prominent among those is Northeastern (C+) and Baylor (C, though once you break into the Top 100-200 area, more names show up…</p>
<p>Here’s an interesting data set: the top three per capita producers of Fulbright Scholars are Claremont-McKenna, Pitzer, and New College of Florida (in that order). CMC’s acceptance rate is about 10%; Pitzer’s about 15%; NCF is around 60%. Pitzer and CMC have total costs of attendance exceeding $60k. NCF is a public college costing less than $30k (sticker price for out-of-state students was about $40k, but almost all qualified for automatic $15k scholarship). CMC is renowned for successful alumni/ae, and is considered a strong investment as a college, but most kids won’t get in. How much more valuable would Pitzer be than NCF to justify a price tag three times higher?</p>
<p>@Purple Titan - I have skin in this game. My son applied to all three colleges I mentioned. CMC rejected him. Pitzer accepted him, but without a penny in financial aid. He would have preferred Pitzer, but he couldn’t justify $40k annual difference, and is going to NCF. He hopes to go to law school, eventually, and couldn’t see incurring debts and having to spend every free moment earning money for the next four years. </p>
<p>^^^^ Of the 35 highest-ranking national universities in the Forbes ranking, 32 also are in the USNWR top 35.
The average difference between these two rankings, for these top schools, is less than 6 positions.<br>
One can single out individual cases where the ranking differences are wider, but that should not obscure the fact that Forbes and USNWR, for the most part, point to pretty much the same set of top schools. </p>
<p>Still, every ranking offers its own perspective on school quality. You can pick the one you think best measures the factors you think are most important (or invent your own). It may be the case that the the “American Leaders” category of Forbes’ ranking does give a better picture for some purposes than the USNWR ranking. You can find it here:
<a href=“http://centerforcollegeaffordability.org/rankings/2013-rankings”>CollegeLifeHelper.com;
(link to the “component rankings” pdf; it’s in one of the center columns)</p>
<p>These are the top 10 producers of “American Leaders”:
1 Harvard
2 Yale
3 Princeton
4 Stanford
5 Caltech
6 Cornell
7 MIT
8 Amherst
9 Swarthmore
10 Dartmouth</p>
<p>See the “methodology” section for a description of how “American Leaders” are defined.
It counts the alma maters of 1900 federal officials and over 8,000 current state-level legislator and
executive branch officers (who together account for over half of all “usable individuals”).
It counts the alma maters of Emmy, Oscar, Grammy, and Tony award winners. One category Forbes doesn’t seem to count (either among “American Leaders” or in any other “outcome” category) is physicians. If a school like JHU is cranking out many future doctors, but few federal officials, it might not score so well in this category. Note also that PhD production counts for 3.75% of the total, while “leaders” production counts for 20%. If a school like Carleton College is cranking out many future PhDs, but few future state legislators, it might not score so well in this category. </p>
<p>tk, your premise is simplistic and does not really look at the big picture. It seems to be that a school is better because it attracts and admits ‘smarter’ students. I would argue that given the raw material those schools are given (the student body) they do an extremely poor job of turning out exceptional people. Every one of the kids that can get into the uber-elite schools should be a mover and shaker in the world. Many of them turn out to be, but those kids would do that regardless of the college they attend. Given the talent of the kids getting into the schools, 90-95% of our movers and shakers should come from the Ivies and their ilk. </p>
<p>Measure a school by how far it moves the needle. I don’t measure the managers that work for me by how good their teams are. I measure them by how much they improve what they were given.</p>
<p>If he’s pre-law, that path definitely make sense (though for law, given the huge loan amounts and employment prospects, I’d say non-T14 isn’t worth it).</p>
<p>If he was looking to work right after graduation, none of them have great name recognition, but the Claremont colleges would be better known and probably have stronger networks (and offer more majors with cross-registration).</p>