<p>If I'm looking to major in Finance/Business, which rankings should I be more concerned with? The overall rankings of the schools or the undergraduate Business rankings?</p>
<p>I would be inclined to put more weight on the overall rankings. There are various reasons for thinking this way. Depending on the college, you are likely to take courses, perhaps “many”, outside the specific area of your major, and in practice some of the courses (e.g. statistics, pre-law, advanced math, economics. specific regional courses) serve multiple majors, while others, depending on the college, may be “sector” requirements, these in the interest of encouraging you to get a well rounded education. Another reason is that, like a significant number of students, you may decide to change majors. In many colleges you don’t pick a major till end of sophomore year.</p>
<p>I would say look for good schools in your specific area. I am going into aerospace engineering, and it’s most important to me that the school has a good program in that. It doesn’t really matter if the Art History or Philosophy or Journalism departments are great because I don’t need many, if any, courses in those areas. </p>
<p>Now, if you are unsure what exactly you want to go into, then you might want to looks for a school that is strong all around. (Of course, the price and selectivity goes higher the more that happens.) </p>
<p>I recall something that the rankings of subject areas like this is done just based on recommendations from other universities (can’t find the source right now). But that would definitely make it a pretty unreliable measure. Honestly, though, I wouldn’t put much weight in any of them.</p>
<p>To get on Wall Street, don’t look at rankings. Go to Wall Street Oasis to find out which are target schools.</p>
<p>For jobs outside of Wall Street, many/any will do.</p>
<p>Depends if you want to go to a school that offers an undergraduate business major, essentially an MBA-lite, or go to a top school that doesn’t offer an undergraduate business degree, in which case you might major in something business related like economics. </p>
<p>The USNWR undergrad business program rankings are for schools that offer an undergraduate business degree program. However, there are plenty of other top rated schools that can be great for undergraduate economics…Harvard, Chicago, Stanford and Princeton are examples. </p>
<p>With many caveats, I’d say overall rankings are of primary importance (for those that care). </p>
<p>If you are going to specialize in a particular specialty (Aerospace for example), program reputation is key. For something like economics, 99% of recruiters / hiring managers will have a sense of the overall college rankings, but no idea about program specifics.</p>
<p>I would suggest you consider your goals (for an econ degree) more, and worry less about where it’s from. By that I mean…consider math, engineering or something more rigorous than business. Consider a double major. A math degree from an Ivy or select LAC has (IMO) more utility than a business degree.</p>
Overall rankings, and here’s why: Many secondary school seniors seem very sure of their undergraduate major and, even, their long-term professional career choice. The irony is most kids change their majors at least once, and sometimes several times, during their undergraduate tenures. Therefore, student “a’s” decision to attend university “x” – it’s not too highly ranked, but its undergraduate accounting program is very favorably rated – might become rather problematic when “a” moves from accounting, to history, to biology, to literature, to . . . .
You are a California resident, and you seem to be interested in the UCs. Disregarding all other factors (intended major, quality of teachers, etc.) and focusing only on selectivity, I believe that this is the most accurate rankings of the UCs.
UCB >= UCLA > UCSD > UCD >= UCI > UCSB > UCSC > UCR > UCM.
I used scatterplots, average high school GPA, and average test scores to reach this conclusion.
Edit: Looking at your stats, I think that you probably will not be accepted by most of the UCs. Many of the schools you seem to be interested in are not found on the same US News’s rankings (some are on the national universities rankings, others are on the regional universities rankings), so I do not know if any rankings will be useful to you.
I am likely going to attend Purdue University. I am only interested in the UCs better than UCSC and several out of state schools.
Isn’t UCSB more competitive than UCI on average for admission purposes?
No. UCI is more selective than UCSB. US News is inaccurate. Scatterplots provide evidence that UCI is more selective than UCSB.
UCI: http://i58.■■■■■■■.com/1255dee.png
UCSB: http://i60.■■■■■■■.com/mw4j11.png
It’s also stated on the UC admissions averages part of the website that UCSB has a noticeably higher average SAT and a barely lower GPA average.
Also most of my schools are, in fact, in the same US News ranking system. The only schools deviating from the standard national ranking are Cal Poly SLO, Santa Clara Univeristy, and UOP.
also san jose state
@EyeVeee I’m doing a Math major with a concentration on financial math
@metalmonk28 when looking at colleges I believe it is important to look at both the overall rankings and the individual department rankings and weight both in your decision. Also I would not just look at US News for overall rankings. Yes USNews is the most established ranking but even USNews has certain biases. So looking at a few other college rankings too would also help you get a broader and maybe less biased picture of the standing of every school.
I don’t think individual department rankings are important at all.
First of all, most departmental rankings are at the graduate level (usually doctoral programs). For virtually all majors outside of engineering and business, people don’t rank the undergraduate programs. But graduate program rankings do not map perfectly onto undergrad rankings. They omit schools that don’t have doctoral programs in the field (including all LACs), and they take into account factors that would be important to a doctoral student but not necessarily to an undergrad.
Even for the few programs that are ranked at the undergrad level - mostly engineering and business - the methodology is usually quite weak and unreliable. USNWR ranks undergrad engineering and business programs solely based on a single 1-5 rating scale from deans and senior faculty in engineering programs, which is a completely unreliable way to rank engineering programs. A single question is a terrible “survey,” and has so many measurement issues.
Bloomberg’s undergrad business program ranking is better - it’s all predicated on four outputs (employer feedback, student ratings, starting salary, and internship placements), and statistical manipulations are used to balance the survey and account for measurement error. They also have a way better explanation of how to use their rankings:
Index scores show the difference in measurement between schools better than rankings do. For example, the difference between a school with an index number of 91 and a school with an index number of 90 is small. The difference between two programs with index numbers of 91 and 83, however, is substantial. In either case, though, the schools might be separated by only one ranking place.
emphasizing the fact that mere numerical numbers of the rankings is not useful. (USNWR does not publish the results of the peer assessment “survey” they send, probably because the differences are negligible. Nor do they indicate to how many deans and senior faculty members they send the survey or how those people are identified.) And notice how very different Bloomberg’s scores are (good schools are on top but not necessarily the ones you might expect) from USNWR’s.
But that brings me to my third reason, and that’s that most students will take only about 1/3 of their total college classes in their major, and many many students will change their majors before or during college. Your major doesn’t become your institutional “home” in undergrad the same way it does in grad school, so it doesn’t make as much sense to pick a college solely because of your major. In one case in an above post, if you select a school because you want aerospace engineering and decide in your sophomore year that you want to major in art history but your school is not a good all-around school - or worse, if you pick a school you don’t really like because of your major, only to change your major later - you may regret your choice.
I think the Bloomberg undergrad business ranking is kind of a joke. They have Penn (Wharton) at #16, and Villanova, ND and Boston College top 3. This just does not make sense no matter how one looks at it.
Also I think departmental rankings do matter when looking into colleges. it is not the only thing that matters for sure, maybe not even the most important thing, but it is still important. i student interested in a specific field will be much better served at a college that has a strong department in that field. Yes most department rankings are about grad school, but they do measure departmental quality and this is something that trickles down to undergrad in terms of the quality of the professors teaching the courses, the quality of research opportunities, alumni network in that specific field etc.
So, the method is wrong because it doesn’t conform with your subjective view of what the outcome should be?
If we believe the outcome is wrong then either the methodology is wrong (wrong inputs), or the calculations are faulty (wrong math), or the information Bloomberg receives is incorrect (wrong data). All those are valid criticisms. But in the absence of those being wrong, then we have to accept the outcome is okay even if it conflicts with preconceived notions.