Regarding separating LACs vs including them, there are a few relevant issues. One is whether the ranking criteria is appropriate for college type. For example, a student evaluating a music conservatory is probably interested in a different set of criteria than a student evaluating a tech college. It’s not appropriate to rank them using a common set of criteria.
The WSJ/THE rankings include criteria that are not meaningful for evaluating LACs, such as publications per faculty. LACs usually do extremely poorly in this category. For example, the performance ranking of research publications at Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities - Wikipedia includes a good mix of publics and privates, but I didn’t see a single LAC. Liberal arts colleges generally do not offer doctoral programs and do not focus on research + publications. They have a different mission. It’s not appropriate to use measures that emphasize research or doctoral programs to evaluate LACs and other colleges that do not offer doctoral programs.
This touches on a key problem with college rankings in general. Individual students value very different criteria from one another when comparing colleges. There is not a single universal set of criteria that all students value with the same weightings. Earlier in the thread, someone mentioned that Florida has a good benefit/cost ratio. Cost is certainly a key factor that is critical to many/most students when comparing and deciding between colleges. However, cost is highly variable from one student to the next, so an Internet/magazine ranking list cannot use this important criteria well in their rankings. Florida’s relative benefit/cost compared to alternative colleges will vary widely depending on whether a student is in-state vs out-of-state, low enough income to get great FA vs full pay, good enough student to get great merit scholarships, etc. Florida may be a great deal for one student, while a HYPSM… type private may be far lower cost than Florida for another.
WSJ’s weightings are as follows. I doubt there is any student who would choose anything similar to these criteria and weightings when comparing colleges, making the output of this formula near meaningless for nearly any particular student who is comparing colleges. Some familiar names of colleges may appear at the top of this list, but that doesn’t mean the formula is meaningful or useful. Far more useful would be for students to evaluate and compare colleges in the criteria that is most important to them, including things like cost for the particular student, quality/availability of particular student’s desired major, near the particular student’s desired location, etc.
WSJ/THE Ranking Formula Weightings
Estimated Value Added Salary – 12% (inaccurate, no control for major distribution?)
Graduation Rate – 11% (primarily a measure of admitting wealthy top academic kids who are likely to graduate)
Finance per Student – 11% (hurts publics and others without high endowment per student)
Student Faculty Ratio – 11% (no control for major or class size, student may mostly see huge lectures in a popular major at a college where S:F ratio is low)
Academic Reputation – 10% (survey that doesn’t separate undergrad from grad, probably favors well known colleges with excellent grad programs over smaller LACs)
Research Papers per Faculty – 8% (not appropriate for LACs and other colleges without doctoral programs)
Median Debt Among Students who Take Federal Loans – 7% (penalizes colleges that admit many lower income kids… very different from net cost)
…
Most, if not all these categories, would appeal to many, maybe most students and parents. These families don’t analyze the rankings or try to find fault with them as done on c/c. Salary, finance, graduation rate, academic reputation are all important. Yes, affordability is one, reputation usually two, location 3, that’s the only one not on the list.
If you see a ranking like Forbes and see what’s it’s based on, you’ll accept it. Only if the rankings seem out of whack, will you really get into the details.
I’ll say it again, most people don’t look at the rankings to find fault with them, but rather to use them in the college search.
Exactly. Rankings can only capture elements that are broadly appealing. They aren’t authoritative nor are they applicable to a given applicant’s requirements. A long time ago, they were useful for me to get even a vague lay of the land. I wanted a medium to large university setting and I was extremely fortunate to grow up in Indiana. That gave me two very different flagships. Neither selective at the level of a UC, UVA, UMich, etc so for me they were true safeties, but they were very good for what they did. They were in the Goldilocks zone. Other people have flagship options they either find lacking or an admissions crapshoot. I was lucky.
To go anywhere else, I needed to find something better/different enough than these two schools to justify private/OOS tuition costs. The school didn’t need to be “ranked” higher than Indiana, but the rankings did help me organize my search in sorting prospects.
Before I started, I didn’t know there was a school called Washington in Missouri and I probably couldn’t point to Brown or Carnegie Mellon on a map. It was an initial organization tool more than anything else. It was pretty easy for me to find the ten most appropriate private universities and another 4 publics to add to Indiana: Wisconsin, Michigan, Miami of Ohio and UNC.
15 schools before sophomore year to spend two years exploring. I went back to look at other schools “just in case”, but never added anything else and I never scrutinized the rankings. It was a nice way to start digging into the process. That’s all.
Restaurants were compared to college rankings earlier in this thread, so I’ll continue with that comparison. Suppose WSJ or other website made a “best restaurants” rankings list, which is based on the output of a formula similar to below: Is this ranked restaurant list going to be a good tool to help me choose at what restaurant to eat?
Restaurant Ranking Formula Weightings
13% – Restaurant’s spending per customer
12% – Customer to restaurant employee ratio
11% – Number of times restaurant appears on survey asking selected persons to list 15 quality restaurants
10% – Number of times restaurant is mentioned in articles or other relevant publications
9% – Financial health/debt of restaurant
8% – Survey questions asking customers if they’d recommend restaurant to friend
7% – Survey questions about waiter interaction/communication
6% – Survey questions about restaurant cleanliness
…
While some customers find some of these criteria relevant; the formula doesn’t account for important factors like whether the restaurant is in my desired price range, serves the type of cuisine I want to eat, and is in the area where I want to go; so the output of the formula wouldn’t correspond well to at which restaurant I’d have the best experience. The rankings criteria are also biased towards well known, high sticker price restaurants, that have been in the area a long time; which will dominate the higher ranked restaurants on the list. So looking at the ranking list, I’d miss a lot of newer or less well known restaurants that may be a much better fit for the unique combination of criteria that is important to me in a restaurant.
While the ranking list may introduce me to some quality restaurants that I haven’t heard of, there are countless other options to find quality restaurants that I haven’t heard of besides a list based on the output of this formula. For example, a more effective option might be to use Google or other Internet search to find a lists of restaurants in my desired area that serve my desired cuisine/meal. I might then narrow the list down by visiting the restaurant websites, including looking at the menu + cost. Next I might look up the top choices on Yelp, searching for keywords related to the menu items that interest me, and other relevant comments. Etc.
It’s a similar idea for colleges. The post above mentions wanting to find colleges that were better/different enough than the local flagship to justify the higher cost. Maybe you can find some names of quality colleges on the WSJ/THE college ranking list, but there are countless other ways to find college names of quality colleges besides this ranking list, that aren’t biased towards a particular type of college. For example, there are search tools that can be used to get a general list of colleges in desired sticker price range (NPC for better estimate), that offer desired major, in desired location, etc. Which of these colleges is “better” or “different” from the flagship is subjective and likely has a strong dependence on planned field of study and individual values, so it would require more detailed review of the colleges, including things reading more about the college on their website. Which one is ranked higher on WSJ/THE may be correlated with “better”, but it would likely be wildly inaccurate measure of which is better, with a huge number of major discrepancies.
The restaurant survey results that you listed may not help one decide where to eat, but may help one decide where to invest if considering investing in this industry.
I would rather have access to extraneous information than access to no information.
Sure, but the search will just give you more rankings - Yelp as you mentioned, trip advisor, open table etc… And those are all biased lists and some of them take money to promote one restaurant over another.
Rather than Google search for ranking lists, I meant a Google “restaurants near me” or similar type search that shows all restaurants that appear on the selected map area and has filters to only list restaurants within a particular price range and particular desired cuisine type(s), as a first step. Then from there going to more detailed research about particular restaurants including reviewing the menus on restaurant web pages and searching Yelp reviews for the particular restaurants, including keyword search related to desired menu item.
For colleges, there are also many ways to discover new colleges besides looking at ranking lists with biases, including a search function on the CollegeConfidential website at https://www.collegeconfidential.com/colleges/ . There are also many tools to research colleges besides ranking lists, far more than are available for typical restaurants.
No search is perfect. Restaurant ratings aren’t perfect. College rankings aren’t perfect. All flawed. All biased. Use them as a starting point and put the work in to find what you’re looking for.