<p>I know that rankings should not play a huge factor in college decisions, but I was just wondering why Brown has a consistently lower rank in US News than its peer colleges. I believe that Brown is a much more prestigious school than what its rank shows.</p>
<p>The simple answer is that Brown behaves in a way that the USNWR doesn’t reward.</p>
<p>Schools that choose to put their own philosophy and character aside and behave in a manner that the US News rewards can see a huge increase in their ranking; WashU is a great example.</p>
<p>^^examples??</p>
<p>I guess the thing that WashU is most notorious for is spamming advertisements to lower acceptance rates, and then yield protection. However, the way that USNWR calculates rank, yield is not even factored into the equation, while acceptance rate is only 10% OF the 15% weight that the “Student Selectivity” category is given for the overall rankings (there are 7 of these “main” categories). CR+M SAT scores and high school class standing in top 10% is together 90% of that 15%-weighted category. Given the way USNWR calculates its rank, I don’t think that what WashU is infamous for doing can “boost” it so many places…</p>
<p>Source:</p>
<p>[Methodology:</a> Undergraduate Ranking Criteria and Weights - US News and World Report](<a href=“http://www.usnews.com/articles/education/best-colleges/2009/08/19/methodology-undergraduate-ranking-criteria-and-weights.html]Methodology:”>http://www.usnews.com/articles/education/best-colleges/2009/08/19/methodology-undergraduate-ranking-criteria-and-weights.html)</p>
<p>Of all the Ivy schools, maybe Brown is one of them that is below the average of all Ivy (peer) schools.</p>
<p>I think that, in the end, Brown’s peer assessment score is mainly to blame.
I found an interesting thread on CC on which the OP adjusted USNWR’s rankings so that the peer assessment scores are held constant, and therefore are no longer a factor in the rankings. In this purely “objective”-data-based USNWR ranking, Brown came out above Columbia, Caltech, and Cornell at number 10. It seems that as far as objective data is concerned, Brown does quite well for itself. Granted, this thread was from 2006, but the USNWR rankings do not seem to have changed all that much. Although the magazine changes its methodology, they only make minor tweaks and the result is minor change in the rankings (Brown was 15th in 2006, 16th for 2010). Colleges themselves certainly do not change much in 4 years. Therefore, the OP’s adjusted rankings are probably still valid today, but only in a general sense.</p>
<p>As for peer assessment, Brown is in line with Duke and Michigan at a score of 4.4/5.0 according to the 2009 rankings. Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Stanford, Yale, Berkeley, Caltech, Columbia, Chicago, UPenn, Hopkins, and Cornell all surpass Brown in the PA score, which is given the most weight in the USNWR rankings at 25% of the total score. Both Duke and Brown rose in the rankings with the PA taken out, so in conclusion, it seems that PA in the end may be the main factor contributing to Brown’s lower position in the rankings.</p>
<p>I feel that Brown is unfairly hurt in the PA scores because a school’s graduate school/research reputation will inevitably affect the people who are rating those schools’ reputations (even though those deans, provosts, etc. know full well that they should only focus on rating a school’s undergrad part for these particular rankings). Brown is primarily undergrad-focused, and in my opinion, should not be ranked among the research universities. I feel that Brown belongs more in the LAC category, along with Dartmouth…although that would also be kind of a stretch. Brown and Dartmouth are somewhere in between a LAC and a research university–in fact, Brown calls itself a university-college–an so do not fit in any of USNWR’s categories in the first place. Rankings are far from good indicators of how “good” a school is relative to others. To actually assign specific places to colleges is questionable at best. A tier system would be better, but more specific than USNWR’s current 3 tier system.</p>
<p>Rankings without PA:
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/220855-peer-assessment-free-rankings.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/220855-peer-assessment-free-rankings.html</a></p>
<p>PA scores from 2009:
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1063120173-post26.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1063120173-post26.html</a></p>
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<p>We are being bombarded with more ads and mailings from some Ivies (Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth and UPenn) than from WashU. But I will admit that we have seen nothing from Brown.</p>
<p>^I do not actually believe that WashU “spams” any more than other top schools wanting to make the public aware of their excellence (UChicago anyone?). However, that is its reputation, and one that I think is short-sighted and undeserved.</p>
<p>@mgcsinc: tsk, tsk. Maybe you enjoy continuing unsupported opinions without any actual data. This is a thread questioning Brown’s ranking, so there’s no need to bash another college just to make yours looks better.</p>
<p>My intention was not to bash a specific school; rather, I was highlighting the fact that the USNews rankings put an emphasis on some arbitrary factors at the expense of others. </p>
<p>In any case, it is ridiculous to act as if one need not put down other schools in order to explain a school’s rank. That’s the whole point of (and problem with) ordinal ranking schemes - they compare schools against each other, rather than against some objective baseline. In order to complain about a school’s ranking, you must be implicitly or explicitly arguing that other schools should be ranked lower.</p>
<p>I’ve long understood WashU’s status as a ranking-gamer to be a sort of gospel, so I didn’t think twice about citing it as an example. Apparently there is still some debate on this point, though, so I’m sorry. My understanding is that WashU explicitly endeavored to increase their ranking, though purportedly though ‘legitimate’ means, and they were successful. If WashU simply understood the rankings to be a proxy for quality, and wanted to increase the quality of the school, then I suppose that this is not particularly suspect. If, on the other hand, they just wanted to increase their ranking for prestige reasons, then I would guess that there was some reprioritization that I would call ‘bad’.</p>
<p>I’ve had a few conversations that have gone like this:</p>
<p>Other person: “Isn’t Brown the lowest ranked Ivy?”</p>
<p>Me: “Yeah, but WashU is ranked above Brown, Cornell, and Georgetown.”</p>
<p>OP: “Hmm, yeah, those rankings are redic.”</p>
<p>Me: “Yup.”</p>
<p>Is that elitist? Sure. But isn’t the whole point of the USNews ranking to create an elitist ranking of schools, ignoring the overwhelming importance of fit in choosing a college?</p>
<p>Like any good capitalist, I prefer to trust the market. If we’re going to try to come up with a ranking of schools, shouldn’t we trust the informed decisions of motivated individuals - students who are actually choosing between colleges - over an completely arbitrary formula based on the intuitions (and profit motives) of some magazine editors? A revealed preferences ranking does exactly that - unfortunately, though, the last one was done in 2005, so far as I know. At that time, Brown was ranked 7.</p>
<p>For a cautionary tale about how arbitrary and disconnected from reality USNews rankings can be, see this: <a href=“http://www.lls.edu/media/press-releases/documents/USNews.NameChange.07.21.09a.pdf[/url]”>http://www.lls.edu/media/press-releases/documents/USNews.NameChange.07.21.09a.pdf</a></p>
<p>I hold fears that that market may be increasingly influenced by those arbitrary rankings as the competition among students increases along with the need to prove oneself better than “all the rest,” leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts…</p>
<p>^^^^
I definately agree with you moosemaster. I absolutely love Brown’s view on academics, and it was one of the schools that was on the top of my list. However, in the back of my mind, I worried over Brown’s rank of like 17 on the USNews ranking. I know that it is incredibly shallow and shortsighted to do this. It is, undoubtably, a factor in many students’ college decision though.</p>
<p>Perhaps - it’d be nice to see a new revealed preferences ranking, though if anything I think Brown might even do a bit better now.</p>
<p>Because the US News report uses an inaccurate and misleading ranking system.</p>
<p>I’ve noticed that several groups of schools on the USNWR rankings have the same raw score. Is there any particular method as to which school is placed above which? And how does it make sense to say that both P-ton and Harvard are #1, but then Yale jumps down to #3? If P-ton and Harvard are tied, then shouldn’t Yale logically take the next spot at #2? Brown is actually #10 if you count the tied schools as all occupying one place…which i feel is the way it should be but would probably make the list less sensational and thus less magazines would be sold.</p>
<p>@mgcsinc: I’m not sure about that. In 2004 and 2005 (not sure what data RP used) our yield was 57.5 and 56.3% respectively. Last year, it was 55.2%. From what I heard from prospective freshman, one of our big problems was in matching other schools’ financial aid offers: while we’ve increased our aid, other places (read: Dartmouth, Stanford, Columbia, Penn) have increased their aid even more. And we don’t even come close to Harvard’s 10% rule. I’m not sure we should prioritize aid at the top income bracket above other things we need to spend on, but it is most likely going to be a factor in our yield/RP.</p>
<p>Still, I heard (admissions officer?) most of the people who turn us down go to: Yale, Harvard, Stanford or Princeton, so we’re probably not doing much worse than we were in 2005 at gaining cross admits, anyways.</p>
<p>I think there’s a whole science to that issue. See [url=<a href=“Ranking - Wikipedia”>Ranking - Wikipedia]Ranking</a> - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia<a href=“though%20there%20aren’t%20really%20any%20sources%20cited%20there”>/url</a>.</p>
<p>haha, thats pretty arbitrary i gotta say</p>
<p>Brown is ranked lower because it is comparatively somewhat poor compared to some of the other top schools (disclaimer: it is still one of the richest schools in the country). This is because it is not primarily a research institution. According to Brown’s university-college philosophy, the grad school only really exists in order to enrich the undergrad experience - attract better profs to teach undergrad, create research opportunities etc. This has hurt both Brown’s endowment in comparison to schools like Wash U which churn out profitable medical research, and has also hurt Brown’s name recognition and thus peer review scores. It’s not often that you’ll be watching the news and hear, “researchers at Brown University recently discovered…”, while you do hear that pretty often from Columbia, Harvard, Stanford etc.</p>
<p>However, while Brown is not as wealthy as some of its peers, this deficit makes basically no difference in any sort of tangible sense to the student life or academic quality, and I don’t think the quality of the science research a school pumps out should have much bearing on a school’s rankings, so I don’t really agree with Brown’s ranking, but such is the USnews methodology. Schools like Dartmouth and Brown probably belong more in the Liberal Arts College rankings.</p>
<p>As other users have said - Brown is its own entity. It’s neither the biggest research powerhouse in the world nor the most difficult to get into. Yet some of its students are wonderful, and its researchers are all high caliber to amazing.</p>
<p>The simple answer is some comparisons cannot be made in a valid way, and so some system is chosen and some numbers assigned.</p>