<p>A student can graduate from Whitman better educated than if he had gone to Brown, and vice-versa. It’s why all the rankings should be taken with a grain of salt. It so depends on who your professors are, your department, whether you want a theoretical or practical curriculum, etc. If your standard for comparison is east coast prestige, then your list would just be a personal bias but not very informative to someone looking for the right college for them. Whitman (for example) is a top notch school and yes, students there have turned down prestigious east coast schools to go there. There are so many excellent schools there’s really no way to assign a straight numerical value. Malcolm Gladwell’s piece in the New Yorker last month explains beautifully why all the rankings are so capricious.</p>
<p>The rankings are not about students but about colleges and are made by some criteria… Of course and there will be Whitman students “better” than those of Brown or those of other top colleges…but when you compare schools, among the other factors, u compare the AVERAGE student…and I cannot believe that the average Brown student is so less qualified than Whitman’s - 29 places below…
So, it is without a doubt than forbes rankings are quite biased…</p>
<p>You can’t measure quality through measurements of quantity, no matter who is doing the assessment. They all have a bias. And they are all by their nature too 1 dimensional.</p>
<p>you have a point…Afterall, a ranking is just a ranking… however well-made rankings present a rough image of the college reality… the fact that harvard is number 1 and princeton 2, doesn’t mean that princeton is not as good as harvard…but you cannot compare the college number 188 with the top ten colleges…</p>