I was looking at their international list and they had UCLA at 8th while having Yale 17th, below Michigan and UW. What’s going on?
http://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/rankings?page=2
Very different criteria than their US list uses. http://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/articles/methodology
If you learn anything from this, it’s to not to rely on rankings.
As you can see, rankings can change a lot depending on what criteria you use, and various ones may not correspond to opportunities in the real world either. Instead, you should really research schools and figure out how they fit your goals, personality, and budget.
True. Made me think of three years ago where I decided to make a list of the colleges I’ll be applying to. The list was the first 20 colleges on USNews… in order… Oh god why.
There are lies, damn lies, statistics and now, college rankings. Just like analytic methods used in any area to quantify an area like collegiate education with literally thousands of variables, you can pick and choose only so many of those variables to rely on in any ranking system, hence each set of ranks will be different, some greatly, some subtly. The one thing that has amazed me since beginning to read this forum is how a numeric list of colleges generated primarily for the purpose of selling magazines, and secondarily to simply be a very rough guide and discussion starter, seems to be taken as something akin to a sacred text of unalterable truths by those who read it. It affects not just student and parent perceptions, but forces schools to respond in kind and often in ways that do not benefit the people they should be benefitting. I can only imagine that Dante would have created a new circle of Hell to house the USNWR and similar rankings.
Indeed, and many colleges game the rankings. Some game harder than others.
I am glad to see this topic surface. When you scan the forum, so many people (parents and students) appear so anxious about the rankings of the schools in making their college choices. The general rankings have a subjective element. And as other posters have mentioned, the objective measurements can be and are easily gamed.
Furthermore the rankings for the specific types of schools such as business schools and engineering are entirely subjective. And those casting votes in the survey are in academia only, not businesses hiring the graduates.
My favorite part about USNWR is that if you try to defy them (by say, deciding to not use SAT scores) they just lower your ranking in retaliation: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/03/12/usnews
One can always find fault with any ranking system and all should be taken with a grain of salt. But I’m not sure that using a school with a 75% acceptance rate is a good example. In the linked article Reed is also used as an example and again that school has a 40% acceptance rate. Clearly very high acceptance rates tells you that top students for whatever reason do not want to attend these schools. Now again I wouldn’t claim that acceptance rates mean everything but it sure does tell you something about how the students and families view the desirability of each school.
Seems the criteria are mostly about postgrads, and I’m not looking at that so much
@SAY, you do seem to focus on the type of fairly trivial things that teenagers in HS tend to focus on.
The U of Chicago was an intellectual powerhouse and produced extremely successful grads even back when they had a 60% acceptance rate.
Many kids who went to Wharton back when it had a 50% acceptance rate still went on to do extremely well.
Sure Purple and not too long ago the admission rate to Penn and a number of Ivies was 25-40%. So what. What is U of C’s admission rate today? Times change for whatever reason and and they have adapted to the new environment.There is nothing trivial about paying 65k to your child to go to college per year. I am simply pointing out the way things are today though I too think much of the hype about college admission is silly.
@SAY, paying out a lot of money isn’t trivial. Focusing on stuff like acceptance rates (rather than opportunities) is trivial.
So Purple to you an acceptance rate of 40% like Reed versus 9.76% for Pomona or CMC should mean nothing to the student and parents? If that’s true then why did the U of C and NU so purposefully pursue a policy to lower their acceptance rate? It’s the college admission departments themselves that are focusing on the admission rates and the students and families are just following their lead. I went to a top 12 school that did have a 30-40% acceptance rate in the 80’s and it didn’t bother me a bit.
@SAY:
"So Purple to you an acceptance rate of 40% like Reed versus 9.76% for Pomona or CMC should mean nothing to the student and parents? If that’s true then why did the U of C and NU so purposefully pursue a policy to lower their acceptance rate? "
For rankings and because people are sheep.
I think you have the causation backwards.
Most people pay excessive attention to rankings and admission rates (because most people are unsophisticated sheep) and thus colleges are heavily incented to game the rankings and bring down acceptance rates.
I actually have Reed close to Pomona and CMC in my own personal (alumni) achievements-based rankings because Reed turns out high-achieving alums at rates that are close to Pomona and CMC. If Reed takes in worse inputs on average and is less selective but turns out high-achievers at a rate that isn’t far off from Pomona and CMC, then they must be doing something right.
the rankings are just a bunch of hogwash.
I should come up with a list based on Food, Foliage and Football.
Purple if someone wants to go to Reed who can object and I’m sure the student will get a fine education. But the atmosphere will be quite different because most students at Pomona or CMC are attending either their top choice or two while at Reed virtually every student is attending because they were rejected at the other higher ranked schools. I agree with Acanonda that at some level the rankings are hogwash because in truth the professors at all the top 40-60 schools are more or less the same. It’s the student bodies that are very different in a top ten school versus the 40th or 50th ranked school. I’m not sure why the yield at Reed is so very low but surely that must reflect something about the school and how it is perceived by the prospective students since at 25% they have to admit four students for every one that attends. Reed is also seriously hurt by it’s extremely low 70% graduation rate. I have no idea why this is true but both Pomona and CMC have graduation rates of 90% which is very different. Both the very low yield and the very low graduation rate go a long way to explaining the much lower ranking of Reed compared to the top schools.
Oh the numbers game. How monolithic.
This is one of the factors of why acceptance rates are so low at some institutions.
Stanford a 30% non-graduation rate is a very large number that will worry many parents. As I said I have no idea why this is true but it used to be even lower while the top LAC’s are all around 90%.