Santa Clara scored much higher on “Salary Impact”: 86th vs 208th.
Neither scored well in “Student Experience” (242 for BU, 322 for Santa Clara)
@simon3 thats funny. I have kids who attended both of these colleges…and had a very positive student experience.
Oh well.
In my opinion, the only ranking that matters is the one the prospective college student makes for schools under consideration. Believe it or not, our kids never saw or read any rankings for their colleges before deciding where to attend. It just didn’t matter to them what some random outside group thought.
We are in CA so most people haven’t heard of Rose-Hulman, maybe this will help when I tell them where my son goes to school. 
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Re BU and SCU and student experience…betting it’s because no football teams!
Here comes the PR
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The list seems laughable, at least on the surface!
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I think like any list, it depends on the criteria. Most trust US News but likely have no clue what goes into it.
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I note salary impact is relative to a predictive model based on student demographics:
Salary impact versus similar colleges (33%): This measures the extent to which a college boosts its graduates’ salaries beyond what they would be expected to earn regardless of which college they attended. We used statistical modeling to estimate what we would expect the median earnings of a college’s graduates to be on the basis of their demographic profile, taking into account the factors that best predict salary performance. We then scored the college on its performance against that estimate. These scores were then combined with scores for raw graduate salaries to factor in absolute performance alongside performance relative to our estimates. Our analysis for this metric used research on this topic by the Brookings Institution policy-research think tank as a guide.
My guess is a lot of the cases where salary impact is striking people as surprisingly low, or high, is because of how that demographic model works.
Like, the BU model might have predicted a pretty high salary based on just the demographics of BU students, such that the observed salary was not so favorable relative to that prediction.
This ranking is wild. WSJ says they weigh outcomes/salaries more heavily this year. If you compare to the 2023 list, it’s really something. New Jersey Institute of Technology is #19, but was #177 a year ago. BYU is #20 now and #138 a year ago. Johns Hopkins is #99 but was #9 a year ago! I am an disgusted WSJ subscriber right now. This is an utter embarrassment and clearly motivated by political and financial gains in ways I don’t even care to unpack. My kid goes to a T20 in both lists, but this is a freaking joke.
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I believe they didn’t do rankings last year, so the comparison is to two years ago.
In any case, given how much they changed their methodology, I am not surprised that the list changed considerably. What was political about the methodological changes?
In total agreement. I just checked GW, Tulane, Miami and Syracuse, which tend to fall in the same band under US News.
Under WSJ:
GW - in the 50’s
Miami - in the 90’s
Syracuse - in the 100’s and
Tulane - in the 300’s ???
None of this makes sense.
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And how can any of these have better outcomes than the displaced ones…?
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Thank you! UF is ranked higher than Caltech? Interesting.
Yes, lots of interesting comparisons! Seems crazy, and I’m a Gator! 
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USNWR rankings also appear to be designed to resemble the informal popular college rankings among the general public (or at least those interested in “good” or “prestigious” colleges), so they “just look right” among that market for rankings.
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Correction: Apparently U. Chicago is 37th and UIC is 55th. But I don’t have the actual list so maybe someone else can confirm.
The WSJ list has so many head-scratchers that its fair to question its credibility as well as the wisdom of its revised methodology, which from what I can tell isn’t explicitly defined.
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Does this demographic comparison control for majors chosen by the students?
Actually - maybe it’s not wrong and the others like US News are.
I don’t know the criteria but because it differs from what people think - doesn’t make it wrong.
Of course, rankings are only as good as the criteria used to develop them and thus will be subjective.
Hopefully every family chooses the right school for them - and then that school is #1.
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