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<p>When I use the term “world class” I mean “well-known and respected outside its immediate geographical area.” I imply nothing about objective quality, either in general or (particularly) as it would affect an individual student with individual needs.</p>
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<p>Indeed, and to give any credibility to a ranking that is influenced by what high school guidance counselors think about a college or how much faculty members get paid is beyond naive.</p>
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<p>Yeah - operating in a state and region where you’re almost the only game in town.</p>
<p>Well, annasdad, California’s public higher education system (the largest in the world, BTW) is hardly the only game in town. We have at least 75 independent, non-profit colleges and universities, too, including Stanford, Cal Tech (highest ranked world research university by the Times Higher education magazine, London), USC, the Claremont Colleges, Santa Clara, Chapman, and Cal Arts (founded by Walt Disney, alma mater of most of the Pixar animators). I don’t know of any other state that has our options. Of course, we have about 37 million people, so we need a lot of options.</p>
<p>Another NC resident who wouldn’t trade. Moved here from Mass 5 years ago and the wonderful affordable public NC universities were a factor…</p>
<p>Nevertheless, California residents who want to go to a private college and stay near home have a lot fewer options, per capita, than do residents of the East and Midwest. In Illinois, with a population about a third of California’s, for example, there are about 60 private nonprofit four-year colleges (excluding another dozen or so that are exclusively or almost exclusively nursing schools), and if you add in those in the states we border, there are hundreds of options.</p>
<p>That doesn’t detract from the excellence of the California public system, which is widely (and IMO justifiably) recognized; but to say that the fact that a lot of people want to go to the public colleges proves anything is nonsense.</p>
<p>And of course in California, as in Illinois, the decreasing level of financial support for the public colleges leaves the question open as to how long the existing system will be viable.</p>
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<p>“Respected” for what? It’s academic quality? Whether you want to call it that or not, unless you are relying solely on “well known” (i.e. simple fame - for which football is the biggest driver), you and/or the other people “respecting” any given school are making some sort of assessment of the acdemic quality of that school - that is ranking it.</p>
<p>You can’t declare which is a “good school” or a “bad school” without some sort of working definition of those terms.</p>
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<p>You apparently missed an important word in my message: “objective quality,” which is what these phony rankings purport to measure.</p>
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<p>I have working definitions: a good school for an individual student is one that prepares that student well for life; a bad school for an individual student is one that fails to prepare that student well for life.</p>
<p>And since no school succeeds with all its students, and no school fails with all its students, to declare a school “good” or “bad” in a collective sense is nonsense - just as nonsensical as to declare one school is “better” than another school.</p>
<p>annasdad – I’m not going to insert myself into the rankings argument, but I really like your definition of a good and a bad school. When one of our children asks whether X college is better than Y college, we answer, “The best college is the one that is the best for you.” More than likely, each of our children will have a different “best” college.</p>
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<p>Well, then I guess Univ. of Illinois can’t be considered “World Class,” because to do that it would have be regarded by a lot of people as better than a lot of other schools.</p>