https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/23/us/us-news-college-rankings-change/index.html
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Looks like this’ll be a big change. I wonder what other factors they’ll need to tweak to avoid too much disruption at the top of the rankings.
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We’ll find out if usnews has the power to change the narrative, or whether they just follow the national mood. I think they are certainly taking risks here.
If this actually happens, I’ve got money on Berkeley and Michigan moving comfortably into the T20 rather than just teetering on the edge as they are now. Alumni giving and class sizes unduly hurt public schools.
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I am not sure people take the usnews rankings to heart. They just use them only as a starting point. For example, Berkeley was somewhere between 8th and 10th on my son’s list for a variety of reasons. For CS. Where they are actually ranked #1 on many lists.
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People do, otherwise colleges would not advertise high rankings. I mean, Niche rankings are even worse than USNews, and colleges use those as well.
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https://www.usnews.com/info/blogs/press-room/articles/2023-05-19/u-s-news-announces-survey-distribution-date-and-outcomes-focused-updates-to-methodology-for-upcoming-best-colleges-rankings is the statement from USNWR itself.
Would the most likely to drop colleges be those who gamed the rankings in the criteria that will no longer be used, such as the colleges where class sizes of 19, 29, 39, and 49 are much more common than in a typical distribution of class sizes?
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Small class sizes are one of the key things that increased tuition buys at private schools. Why shouldn’t it count in the rankings if it is a key metric of educational quality and outcomes? (And if it isn’t, why do the honors programs at public schools aim for that?)
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This suggests that lists did matter for you as they do for many.
As I said, the lists are a starting point. And then you take a closer look to see if you agree or not. For example, bowling green state university will not even be in consideration for CS. It is not on any list. No one will sift through 3000 universities before making their own list.
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Notice how they didnt include legacy admissions as part of their adjusted criteria.
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It’s important to remember that USNWR created these ratings as a marketing tool to save their publication from extinction. They aren’t a scientific measurement and should only be used as a rough guide.
But people often don’t, and instead put way too much emphasis on rankings vs getting to know each school. I’ve seen students pick a school that is barely 6-7 spots ahead of another school “because of its higher ranking”, without regard to whether that school is indeed a better fit for them.
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I’ll be curious to see what the list looks like. At the top there will be some shuffling but I don’t expect the names of the schools to change much - maybe just the order they are in. I don’t take the specific order all that seriously - any of the schools in the top 50 are great and will offer a great education. They are, of course, all very different in terms of size, vibe, location etc. which is what people should be looking at - not at whether #30 is better than # 12.
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Ideally, there would be separate rankings for public vs private schools because they are fundamentally different.
Public schools are state institutions that are mandated to serve a much wider range of students, receive funding only (or mainly) to provide aid to in-state students, typically don’t have large marketing budgets to market the school all around the country, etc.
Private schools, on the other hand, are businesses and can operate as they please.
Using the same factors and weights for both types of schools, mixes apples with oranges.
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I was looking at the rankings of two of DS24’s likelies yesterday and compared two that he has visited and decided to apply to another college that has been sending him a lot of emails and is similar in many (not all) ways.
I really couldn’t see why the two he has visited were ranked below the one that was emailing. I have a friend who attended the school he did not visit, and we did not visit based on what the friend told him about their experience. It’s not an indictment of the school, but it was not what I would have expected of a T100 school. That’s the sort of information that the rankings miss, and why we only rely on them the way that most schools rely on standardized test scores.
I read the article and I don’t think there is any reason to believe that the changes discussed therein will reflect this important information.
As a father working with S on the college search and admissions process I never looked at State schools differently than Private. I looked at them in terms of what programs they had, size of school, quality of education, cost, etc etc… all the things one would normally look at and hopefully be criteria in the rankings.
I would hope any ranking would consider cost, though to what extent is a viable question, and a lower cost state school would get a boost in their ranking due to that.
As someone earlier said I suspect the revised calculation/criteria might reshuffle some of the schools up or down a couple of spots but unlikely to kick someone up or down double-digit spots.
It’s unfortunate that some folks get so tied up in the T-10/20/30 ranking thing. A colleges data ranking is a good data point but one of MANY.
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That one is tough. Many of the privates are cheaper if you need FA but more expensive if you are FP. Some schools have various levels of housing (or allow students to commute) or dining while others have everyone getting room and board. It depends so much on each student’s situation. I prefer, to the extent they are rating them at all, that they stick to metrics that are more consistent across the student body.
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Did the old system make distinctions based on class sizes of 29 and 39 ? I thought that it just focused on classes under 20 students and classes of 50 or more students.
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Right - which is why it’s an OK metric among many. Many of which are going to be a personal metric (net cost for your DS or DD). I don’t know if USNWR is using Gross price or some sort of Net average price but in any case it’s going to be different from one kid to the next.
If a kid gets a full merit scholarship to a school ranked 60 all else equal it’s probably a better deal than full pay at a school ranked 25, but that’s my opinion. 
Note that when the rankings first appeared in 1983 they were part of a feature story typical of the magazine at that time. The topic did not reappear in the weekly publication for another two years. In 1983, U.S. News & World Report, as it was then known, was the third most popular weekly newsmagazine in the nation.
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