Why is Northeastern dropping so much in the college rankings?

This year Northeastern dropped 8 positions in the USNews rankings. what is going wrong?

Nothing is going wrong. It’s the vagaries of a ridiculous ranking methodology that gets tweaked every year for the issue du jour.

NEU is effectively the same school it was in the last rankings, when it was 8 positions higher.

Northeastern’s a fine school but…see this: https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2014/08/26/how-northeastern-gamed-the-college-rankings/

What goes up must come down.

so, the president’s “magic” is not working anymore…?

@PikachuRocks15 That old article has been linked to here on CC multiple times each year. If you read the article it is a very positive about Northeastern, once you get past the clickbait headline.

i’d also point out that Northeastern has hopped around the 39-49 range for the pas five years, and there has always been a lot of ties. in most years, 39-49 was basically three tiers of schools that switched up the order for no reason each year. Nothing has changed, nor is it a case “what comes up must come down” as this variance is typical of US News in that range of the rankings.

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@newenglander9 US News changed metrics again and included schools that were test optional. That switched around rankings. Also keep in mind Northeastern is often a 5 year school because of their highly regarded Co-op program. One of the metrics used for ratings is percent graduating in 4 years, so that affects Northeastern’s ranking negatively despite being a huge draw for the school and for employers hiring Northeastern grads.

This is a prime example of why people should ignore the rankings. If you like Northeastern, apply. Moving eight notches on an artificial list is not kind of red flag. You could just as easily find a list in which it went up eight places.

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I don’t know guys. Dropping 8 points is huge. If I was a parent I would pull my kid out and go to another school ranked 8 points higher ??.

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Just thought that I would add this to the discussion.
https://â– â– â– â– â– â– â– â– â– â– â– â– â– /edu/e/college-rankings/40750
WalletHub ranks research universities and LAC’s together, unlike USNews which ranks them separately.

Northeastern ranks 46. BC comes in at 57, BU at 69, Tufts at 49. Northeastern is ranked higher than Barnard, Case Western and several University of California campuses.

Among research universities Northeastern ranks 37.
https://â– â– â– â– â– â– â– â– â– â– â– â– â– /edu/e/best-universities-in-usa-ranking/39704

You can check out the link to their methodology.

Apparently CC does not allow links to that website. You can Google it.

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