Note that USN’s college guide, which includes its rankings, is available in print.
Much of which can’t be measured - even employability and student outcomes are arbitrary (because you can look at first year after graduation, or allow up to n-th year of graduation, include/exclude those who are idling a year or two waiting for grad school admission, and by then, the magazine won’t have accurate ways to even track that.
In theory, you could try to look at lifetime earnings, but in reality, little of that is related to the original college - and even if that, lifetime earnings might reflect the personal choice that at some point in life there were more important priorities than earnings.
You could just rank by average actual revenue per student by time of graduation. The more people were willing to pay “net”, the more likely they perceived it as a good value?
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Among the top five majors at each school, the ones that are the same or similar, with College Scorecard median pay for graduates who received federal financial aid:
| Major | Boise State | Emory |
|---|---|---|
| Registered Nursing | $73,200 | $78,274 |
| Business / Commerce, General | $52,988 | |
| Business Administration, Management and Operations | $107,945 |
Among other majors in the top five of one and offered by the other:
| Major | Boise State | Emory |
|---|---|---|
| Biology, General | $42,767 | $48,491 |
| Communications and Media Studies | $45,544 | Not Shown |
| Economics | Not Shown | $86,679 |
The above suggest that there may be a “college prestige advantage” in some majors (e.g. business) but not so much in others (nursing, biology).
Student outcomes can also depend on goals. Most would care about graduation rate but for one of my kids I care about how their school’s graduates in their specific field fare with regards to employment rate and earnings 6 months and 2 years after graduation, for the other, the graduate program placement rate at their school for graduates in their specific field.
In other words, the rankings are useless and people are figuring that out.
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I’m not sure if people care that it’s useless. Rankings are popular and they will continue to be.
Colleges seem to care about them so it must affect their business in a positive or negative way.
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Over the last five years, preferences for UCLA over UCB have strengthened within CA, as seen in the relative increase in applications, decrease in admit rate and increase in yield. That’s been reflected in UCLA being ranked ahead of (sometimes tied with) UCB during that period (probably some chicken and egg here too).
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You are talking about UCLA’s popularity among students and related numbers (application numbers, admit rate, yield). This isn’t necessarily evidence of increased academic strength (which is what @prezbucky was talking about). UCLA is a fantastic school that many students want to attend, but UCB still performs better on rankings based primarily on academic reputation and research output, such as US News Global Universities, QS World, Times Higher Education, various subject rankings, etc.
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I’m talking about academic strength, not popularity.
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And academics should be the most heavily weighted criteria.
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Which is probably why graduate program rankings emphasize what the rankers believe is a proxy for academic strength, since that is the primary motivation for choosing a school to study one’s PhD in. But the USNWR undergraduate rankings are meant for a market that is not solely focused on academic strength, since many US undergraduate students choose colleges for reasons other than purely academics.
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But even for undergraduate, shouldn’t academics be the heaviest weighted metric?
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This is a personal preference, so it’s a good thing that there are multiple ranking systems out there. Academic strength is important to many students, but is not necessarily the most important factor for every undergraduate student in choosing a college.
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For some students and parents yes. But not all students and parents focus on that (and not all have the same idea of what good academics means), so USNWR responds to what the market for US college undergraduate rankings appears to want.
How many times have you seen posts from students whose lists of colleges excludes the academically strongest realistic colleges for the students’ intended major, because of other student preferences (e.g. more general prestige, want close to home, want to get away from home, social experience, etc.)?
Those really aren’t two independent criteria, as “academic reputation” from peeler institutions is heavily based on research output. And both measures aren’t really connected to undergraduate educational quality/focus.
In fact, there’s probably a good argument to be made that in most fields, institutional prioritization on research output, securing research grant funding, and training graduate students comes at a cost to undergraduate education, and the higher-ranked the program is in “academic reputation and research output”, the more skeptical one should be about their undergraduate teaching. Of course, if someone is primarily concerned about perceived “prestige” of a program, this may not matter.
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It’s vanishingly unlikely that USNWR will seek to replicate the sorts of global rankings which focus more on the graduate research experience. Those global rankings often don’t even mention LACs for example. Undergraduate student preferences are much more relevant to what USNWR is aiming for.
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It depends on what the student needs and is looking for. Many students want (or need) a school with more focus on undergraduate teaching and professor interaction. However, the school’s academic strength at the graduate level is going to be important for an advanced student who will be participating in research or taking graduate level classes.
Personally, I started my undergraduate education at an academically strong LAC, but had to transfer to a research university, as my interests became more specialized. At that point, the strength of the graduate program became more important to me.
But USNWR rankings of specific undergraduate majors/fields are based solely on peer reputation surveys. And these, of course, are driven primarily by research output (and, in a recursive loop, by the rankings themselves).
USNWR does seek to replicate this type of global ranking in its “Global Universities” list.
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I’d think so. Isn’t that the primary purpose of a college education? OTOH, the strongest college in terms of academics may not be a good fit, or even a good academic fit, for any one particular student. A good academic fit is a college where a student is surrounded by lots of academic peers (I don’t subscribe to the seemingly common notion on CC that a student can always find her/his academic peers at any college).
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