<p>Don't employers use these rankings? I hear many people on these forums consider it the best rankings yet flawed...</p>
<p>How would you improve the rankings? And what would you want the rankings to be like?</p>
<p>Why would employers use rankings? I doubt that any employers consult rankings list before making selections. They know the reputation of programs in their field, and they recruit from colleges with reputable programs.</p>
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Allow users to manipulate the data to create customized rankings. Want rankings based solely on peer assessment? Done. Want rankings based on selectivity and alumni giving? Easily available. </p>
<p>Of course, that would remove much of the bragging component that comes with the one-size-fits-all ranking…a terrible loss, to be sure.</p>
<p>The idea of college rankings itself is flawed because it rests on the assumption that all prospective college students are looking for the same things.</p>
<p>The college selection process is subjective and depends on your individual needs and preferences. US News’ approach to evaluating colleges ignores these factors completely.</p>
<p>What’s more, it is preposterous to look for substantial differences in teaching quality between schools like Columbia, Stanford, Yale, Duke, etc. College rankings perpetuate the notion that out of any two schools, no matter how similar, one *must *be clearly superior to the other, that there’s always a way to differentiate between them, that the better school needs to be determined and is the one you should attend–as opposed to the school you like better, for whatever reason.</p>
<p>Consider this: Let’s imagine that USNWR ranks Duke two places above Northwestern one year and one place below Northwestern the next. What does this mean? That you’d be wise to choose Duke over NU one year, but not the next? That Duke was better than Northwestern one year, but became worse than NU in twelve months? How? Did it lose a big chunk of its faculty? Did it go into massive debt overnight? Did Northwestern suddenly hire five hundred new professors to teach undergrads, all at the forefront of their fields? Hardly.</p>
<p>Rankings are completely useless in differentiating between schools of roughly comparable quality, and skew students’ perceptions of higher education itself. Higher education is not like a ladder, or a pyramid, or any other vertical structure. It’s a broad spectrum of intellectual and social opportunities, all attractive in their own right.</p>
<p>For example, Harvard is not better than Brandeis for everyone.* If you’re a Russian Jew who wants to learn more about her own culture and is attracted to the large Jewish presence on Brandeis’s campus and the unique Brandeis-Genesis Institute for Russian Jewry, and likes the atmosphere better than Harvard’s… then it makes no sense to go to Harvard. US News, however, would never take these considerations into account. The very paradigm that USNWR enforces is incompatible with this sort of thoughtful evaluation. Choosing Brandeis over Harvard does not compute; Harvard is number one!</p>
<p>In reality, you can achieve anything anywhere. Some schools offer more opportunities than others, of course**, but that is irrelevant if what you’re looking for is one particular opportunity, or if you need a certain type of environment to thrive.</p>
<p>I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with choosing, say, Yale or Harvard over UPenn or Pomona; it makes sense to me, in fact. But when it comes to making these choices, make them for the right reasons–and college rankings are not a valid reason.</p>
<p>And be aware that someone else might make a different choice, and that’s okay.</p>
<p>*The Brandeis-Harvard conundrum is taken directly from CC’s annals.</p>
<p>**Although if we’re talking about USNWR’s top 100 universities + top 100 liberal arts colleges, they are all adequately prepared to meet the needs of even the most ambitious student, in my opinion.</p>
<p>Not put USC over Michigan. That’s what I’d fix.</p>
<p>I asked the same thing, until I realized what Ghostt points out. I’m a humanities-geared person. Are MIT and Caltech better choices than a reading- and writing-geared LAC? Definitely not. Do I want to deal with a massive grad school population at a top university like Columbia, or do I want a small community focused on only the undergrads like an LAC?</p>
<p>It’s the lack of regard for things like personal preference, specialties and strengths in certain fields and majors, etc. Once you step away from the numbers, the rankings really take a backseat.</p>
<p>To reiterate what almost anyone else would tell you, college rankings are most of the time arbitrary. USNWR does a bad job at not taking into account personal preferences. Some students want small class sizes, other students want famous faculty; some students want a school with a large endowment and lots of alumni support, other students want a school that cares about its students more than its brand name. The list could go on and on. I think we shouldn’t be too hard on the rankings, they can give useful insight into a school’s overall reputation, but they sometimes lead to ridiculous scenarios such as someone being afraid to attend #17 Rice because it is ranked lower than, and clearly inferior to, #13 WUStL.</p>
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<p>Actually, as discussed in another thread involving a high school student who was taking university sophomore level math as a high school junior and is likely to major in math when entering university, those schools that are undergraduate only probably won’t have enough math courses to keep such a student interested (students of that type are likely to want to start taking graduate level math courses as juniors or even sophomores in university). But that is not really dependent on (overall) rankings as much as whether a decent graduate program in math exists at the school.</p>
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<p>Well, the basic problem with that is that many - almost certainly most - undergrad ‘programs’ do not easily map to a particular job opening that most employers have available. Let’s face it - most history majors are not going to become historians, most poli-sci majors are not going to become political scientists, most psych majors are not going to become psychologists. The same is true of many (probably most) available jobs. Millions of people work as salesmen, but there is no corresponding major in “sales” - the closest analog probably being psychology. Yet I’ve encountered successful sales reps whose majors comprise a wide spectrum of majors, and many who never even graduated from college at all (or in some cases, even high school). </p>
<p>Hence, what does it matter how reputable your particular undergrad program is if you’re not going to pursue that program professionally anyway? For example, for the vast majority of poli-sci majors who are not actually going to work as political scientists, who cares how reputable their poli-sci program is? Neither the employer or the student is likely to care. The employer is far more likely to care about the overall strength and, especially, selectivity of the school. </p>
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<p>While I understand the point you’re making, I have to question just how applicable it is to most people. Unless you’re sure you want to become a professional scholar/researcher of Jewish Studies - something that only a tiny handful of people will ever become - then you may actually be well advised to choose Harvard over Brandeis. </p>
<p>Let’s be frank: most incoming freshmen do not really know what they want to do. They do not really know what they want to major in, and indeed the first few semesters of college are designed to allow students to try different majors. Furthermore, as stated previously, most students will end up in careers that are not closely related to their major anyway. To be perfectly honest, for most people, college is just a 4-year pit-stop where they build a social network, perhaps stoke a serious relationship, and experience some intellectual development and personal maturation through living away from their parents before they move on to their professional lives. </p>
<p>To put it starkly: what if you turn down Harvard for Brandeis for the better Jewish Studies intellectual experience, only to later find out that you don’t really want to pursue a career in Jewish Studies? You might then want to reactivate your old Harvard admission letter. But you can’t, as you already turned it down. Your only chance of entering Harvard now is as a transfer applicant or a graduate school applicant, both of which are far from assured. You may never have the chance to study at Harvard for the rest of your life. </p>
<p>Put another way, it is almost certainly easier to transfer from Harvard to Brandeis should you find that you dislike the former, or to go from Harvard undergrad to Brandeis grad school, than vice versa.</p>
<p>It’s not just USNWR that’s wrong; it’s the whole concept that colleges can be ranked that’s wrong. This just happens to be the first and best-known of these silly reports.</p>
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<p>I would only change one thing: delete the rank. Make the database sortable on whatever feature you want – size, cost, program, location. Then you’d have a list that’s useful for something besides ego-boosting. Of course that will never happen, since it’s the ranking that sells magazines.</p>
<p>@sakky,</p>
<p>The poster in question had visited both Brandeis and Harvard and expressed unequivocal preference for the former’s student body and campus vibe. If you have issues with this, PM her to tell her she made a mistake.</p>
<p>USNews is wrong because college rankings are all wrong. There is no rigorous, objective way to compare insititutions as widely varied in design and purpose as US colleges. Trying to rank say Caltech compared to UCLA as “National Universities” is like trying to rank a Corvette compared to a cement-mixer truck as “Motor Vehicles.” </p>
<p>Comparing apples to oranges is easy compared the task of ranking colleges. USNews tries hard. Their ranking system is as good as anyone’s and probably better than most. So if you MUST rely on a ranking theirs is a reasonable place to start. But be aware that it’s a very flawed tool.</p>
<p>It took them nearly twenty years to acknowledge affirmative action, and then only in the most glancing possible way (with the help of sidebars.) It will probably take them another twenty years to acknowledge economic diversity, queer acceptance and other access issues.</p>
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<p>I don’t have issues with the choice of the poster in question. Rather, I have issues with generalizing from her experience. Again, how many 17 year olds really know what they want to do? What if you change your mind later, as young people are wont to do? </p>
<p>Put more starkly, if incoming students always knew what they wanted to do, then why not have them declare their majors from the very first day they step foot on campus, with no opportunity for switching at any later point? That would surely be more efficient for the school as it would be able to precisely allocate appropriate resources for each major without having to reserve any slack for students who might later want to switch in. Nor would the student experience be harmed because the presumption is that students would always correctly choose the major they want from the very first day. </p>
<p>Look, I personally know even some middle-aged people who have decided to change careers. For example, I know one woman in her 40’s who recently quit her highly successful business career to join a doctoral program in order to start a career in academia. If even middle-aged adults sometimes want to change careers and intellectual interests, is it really so outrageous for young people to do the same? And that they would benefit from the flexibility to do so?</p>
<p>Regarding how employers look at colleges–apart from a handful of top tier investment banks, law firms and technology companies, your future employer will roughly rank colleges as follows: Impressive (“name” schools-you know what they are), Very Good (will include regional universities that have produced lots of existing employees, regardless of quality of the school), Decent (meaning the hiring person has heard of the college, quality is irrelevant) and Means Nothing to Me (the hiring person hasn’t heard of the college, though it may be quite excellent). Welcome to real life.</p>
<p>Personally, I’m a fan of the (“flawed”) rankings, and don’t consider them “wrong”. They serve a great purpose very well: magazine sales. Sure, allowing a self-sort would be nice, but USNews chooses not to enable that feature.</p>
<p>I like the rankings because I like the competition it creates. Competition is the American way and it generally benefits the consumer. The only problem I have with USNWR rankings is CalTech’s inclusion in it. You can’t major in Humanities at CalTech, unlike every single other university on the national colleges list. CalTech should be number one on a list of tech/math/science colleges, not national universities.</p>
<p>Bay:</p>
<p>Not sure that is true. Caltech lists English, history, philosophy and poli sci as possible majors (aka “options”), (or am I reading its website incorrectly?).</p>
<p>[Options</a> of Study - Caltech Caltech Undergraduate Admissions](<a href=“http://www.admissions.caltech.edu/learning/options]Options”>http://www.admissions.caltech.edu/learning/options)</p>
<p>Ah, it does appear that humanities majors are an option at CalTech. Sorry for the misinformation. I looked at Collegeboard:
[College</a> Search - California Institute of Technology - Caltech - Majors](<a href=“College Search - BigFuture | College Board”>http://collegesearch.collegeboard.com/search/CollegeDetail.jsp?collegeId=4214&profileId=7#)
which indicates that 98% are NOT humanities majors, and a CalTech student’s statement in an old thread who stated that to her knowledge there were no English majors at CalTech. I should have said that virtually no one majors in humanities at CalTech, and therefore the majority of college applicants will not be interested in applying there.</p>
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<p>You can’t major in engineering at UChicago (at least, not until the new engineering institute is formally launched). So does that mean that UChicago should also not be included in a list of national universities?</p>