WSJ & Forbes Rankings

[nrtlax33]

College rankings only reflects the results of their Methodologies.

Here are the Methodologies for some of the popular rankings …

WSJ/THE – https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-the-wsj-the-college-rankings-measureand-why-they-are-different-1536188749

Forbes – https://www.forbes.com/sites/cartercoudriet/2018/08/20/top-colleges-2018-the-methodology/#29e841853098

U.S. News & World Report (notice that this magazine “Prior to going defunct, U.S. News was the lowest-ranking news magazine in the U.S., after Time and Newsweek.” according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S.News%26_World_Report – https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/how-us-news-calculated-the-rankings

You should evaluate what is important to you.

For example, for WSJ/THE :

…
We look at schools the way parents and prospective students do. We consider the factors most important to them. So we continue to put the greatest emphasis on two crucial factors: the outcomes students can expect from their college education and the resources schools deploy on academics. We also consider the quality of teaching and level of engagement students have with their school, as determined in large part by an extensive student survey. And we look at the diversity of the learning environment.
…
The Journal and its partner, Times Higher Education, took a novel approach when they launched these college rankings three years ago,** focusing on outcomes, teaching and the learning environment**. The goal of the WSJ/THE college rankings is to offer context and insight needed to help make an informed college choice. It’s a decision that often has lifelong implications.

For Forbes:

…We narrowed the list to schools that had sufficient data available from five other sources. Those include two huge data sets compiled by the U.S. Department of Education, the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), and the U.S. Department of Education’s College Scorecard, created by the Obama administration in 2013 to track information about students who receive federal financial aid. We also use information from PayScale, a privately-owned website with a vast amount of self-reported salary data and Niche, another privately owned site that draws from tens of millions of student surveys.

U.S. News:

Most colleges report the data directly to U.S. News.

American Leaders List (15%)

The American Leaders List, is a roster thousands of successful people and their alma maters. We use FORBES databases including the Forbes 400, the Richest Self-Made Women list, the Most Powerful Women list and 30 Under 30. We also count current leaders in public service: U.S. Supreme Court Justices, the President and his Cabinet, members of the U.S. Congress and state governors. In addition, we count winners of the following awards over the last one-to-four years based on the number of recipients for each: MacArthur Fellowship, Nobel Prize, Breakthrough Prize, Lasker Prize, Fields Prize, Academy Awards, Oscars, Tony’s, NAACP Awards, Guggenheim Fellowship, major sport all-stars, Presidential Medals and Pulitzer Prizes.
…
Undergraduate academic reputation (22.5 percent)
…
Student selectivity (12.5 percent)
…
Financial resources (10 percent)
…
Alumni giving rate (5 percent)

It is well known some schools are doing whatever it takes to manipulate their data they report directly to U.S. News. Notice that this is the only ranking which does not care about student experience and instead, it focuses on reputation/money and student selectivity.

[suzyQ7]

Can you help me understand how the outcomes/rank is calculated? There are some schools on that list that are bottom of the rankings but high on the “most efficient”. WSJ methodology is behind the paywall.

[Nocreativity1]

^ U Chicago “whack a mole” team combat this veiled heresy suggesting the disparity in UCs ratings is a result of “manipulation” and a lack of concern for student “experience”. Say it isn’t so!

[nrtlax33]

The Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education College Rankings are based on 15 key indicators that assess colleges in four areas: Outcomes, Resources, Engagement and Environment. Outcomes accounts for 40% of the weighting and measures things like the salary graduates earn and the debt burden they take on. Resources, with a 30% weighting, is mainly a proxy for the spending schools put into instruction and student services. Engagement, drawn mostly from a student survey and with a 20% weight, examines views on things like teaching and interactions with faculty and other students. Environment, at 10%, assesses the diversity of the university community.

When using the “Customize rankings” function, use the “Reset all fields” button to return to the default weightings for Outcomes (40%), Resources (30%), Engagement (20%) and Environment (10%).

The value-added analysis of graduate salaries and student-loan default rates was adjusted for this year’s ranking to improve the analysis, in particular for states with small numbers of institutions. The change will reduce volatility in value-added metrics from year to year and will improve the reliability of the value-added analysis in predicting student outcomes. Previously, the analysis took into account the state in which a school is located. With the change, the analysis will take into account larger geographic groupings based on regions as defined by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. The location of a school is one of many factors considered in the value-added analysis. The change has resulted in significant moves for certain schools. The biggest such move was by Westminster College, in Salt Lake City, which climbed to No. 279 overall from a ranking last year in the range of 501-600. (Specific ranks aren’t assigned to schools whose ranking is lower than 500.)

[nrtlax33]

@Nocreativity1

^ U Chicago “whack a mole” team combat this veiled heresy suggesting the disparity in UCs ratings is a result of “manipulation” and a lack of concern for student “experience”. Say it isn’t so!

The main reason Univ of Chicago is tied at 14th is due to its low “Engagement” score. Its engagement is ranked at 499th. Notice that engagement, drawn mostly from a student survey and with a 20% weight, examines views on things like teaching and interactions with faculty and other students. Obviously a large number of Univ of Chicago students hate its school. It is hard to manipulate that. (Outcomes 12th, Resources 10th, Environment 141th)

If you watch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYN9h2zYgIQ
and
https://www.today.com/video/mental-health-policies-at-universities-draw-increasing-concern-708889155922?v=railb
(About 6 minutes each.)
and read https://www.chicagomaroon.com/2014/02/18/communitys-role-in-supporting-survivors-of-suicide/

You probably can get some idea why its students hate its school.

[CU123]

@nrtlax33 Since you’re not a student or parent of a UChicago student, and my DD is, I’ll, for one, say she loves the school even though its as rigorous a school as there is in the country, I think you are far from any expert on UChicago. Anyway satisfaction can be directly correlated to grade inflation, the more students that get A’s the more satisfied the student population. If that is what you are looking for then you should use this as your criteria or maybe attend a community college where A’s are easy to come by. Of course you will get the education you so richly deserve.

[nrtlax33]

@CU123 : Congratulations to your daughter. Obviously she is the right student for Univ of Chicago. But Univ if Chicago got a lot of wrong students. In terms of “Engagement” scores, I found that they are pretty reasonable for the top 20 schools on WSJ/THE list.

Rank/ School/ Engagement rank
1 Harvard University 142
2 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 304
3 Yale University 68
4 Columbia University 170
5 California Institute of Technology 601-800
6 Stanford University 52
7 Brown University 6 (tie)
7 Duke University 68
9 Princeton University 501-600

10 University of Pennsylvania 106

11 Cornell University 52
12 Dartmouth College 25
13 Northwestern University 34 (tie)
14 University of Chicago 499
15 Rice University 34 (tie)
16 Carnegie Mellon University 16
17 University of Southern California 6 (tie)
18 Washington University in St Louis 34 (tie)
19 Vanderbilt University 68
20 Emory University 170

[Greymeer]

@suzyQ7 “outcomes/rank”

Sorry, I typed that incorrectly.

It’s actually wsjRank/outcomesRank.

If a school performs to its ranking the value will be 1. The schools listed at the top will be “underanked” by the wsj poll.

U, wsjRank, outcomesRank,
Duke 7 1 → 7
Gatech 60 18 → 3.2
Yale 3 1 → 3
…

My conclusion is that the schools ranked in the top 25 of my “final” totalEff list are “underranked” in the wsj poll conservatively by a sliding factor of up to 2.

Any school that is above a 3 is making efficient use of its resources to provide successful outcomes.

Another way of looking at this is that schools above 3 are underpriced in the “college market” for their results. Schools at the top are way underpriced.

I noticed that caltech was ranked near the bottom. This just means that they use a lot of resources to produce their wsj poll “outcomes” and are overpriced.

[Mastadon]

@publisher

Before UChicago hired Zimmer as President, it was ranked around 15 by US News - the same as its current WSJ rank…

College deans today are obsessed with their school’s number because an excellent one draws the best students. “Prestige at colleges,” explains Jeffrey J. Selingo, author of College (Un)bound, an analysis of trends at U.S. universities, “is like profit at corporations.”

So when Robert Zimmer was appointed president of the university in 2006, he promptly instituted changes that would drive the number higher. (He plays down his personal interest in the rank: “You look at it, and you recognize that people pay attention to it.”)

http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/November-2013/Does-University-of-Chicagos-Slip-in-College-Ranking-Matter/

[theloniusmonk]

“Columbia, Penn, Duke, Brown, Chicago, Dartmouth and Caltech consistently fill the next 7 spots. Rice, Northwestern, ND, JHU, CM, Vany and Gtown consistently then round out as a group the next 20.”

Ok but Chicago is not in the top-10 of the two rankings you posted, indicating little consistency from six onwards.Here are two more:

QS 1-10: MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Cal Tech, Chicago, Princeton, Cornell, Yale, Columbia, Penn (just US colleges)
Money 1-10: Princeton, UCSD, UCI, UCLA, Stanford, MIT, UCB, CUNY, UM, UVA
Times World - Cal Tech, Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Chicago, Penn, JHU, Columbia, UCLA (US colleges)

Another example of consistency though is that Cal Tech is ahead of Brown in every ranking, you cannot put those two in the same bucket. Here’s Cal Tech vs Brown:

CT: 4, 6, 12, 10, 1 (Times, US colleges)
Brown: 7, 8, 59 (gasp!), 14, 25 (Times, US colleges)

Cal Tech average rank - 6.6
Brown average rank - 23

According to your logic, Cal Tech would be clearly superior to Brown, not even in the same universe.

[Nocreativity1]

Theloneousmunk- As previously mentioned I was and will not not look to spark a school vs school debate so I won’t take the bait, but to say that I suspect no overlap between the 8,200 applicants to Caltech and the 35,438 applicants to Brown. Different strokes for different folks so I think the point moot.

An argument can be made that Caltech belongs with HYPSM in tiering. Hope that concession helps.

[nrtlax33]

This year is the third year WSJ/THE ranks colleges. Please do not underestimate WSJ/THE. The Wall Street Journal is the largest newspaper in the United States by circulation. According to News Corp, in its June 2017 10-K filing with the SEC, the Journal had a circulation of about 2.277 million copies (including nearly 1,270,000 digital subscriptions) as of June 2017, compared with USA Today’s 1.7 million. US News is owned by media proprietor Mortimer Zuckerman who owns New York Daily News. US News has no circulation.

It is well known US News rankings are manipulated by some well-known schools and its methodology is highly subjected to manipulation. Please read it methodology to see if you like it.

Faculty resources (20 percent): Research shows that the more satisfied students are about their contact with professors, the more they will learn and the more likely they are to graduate. U.S. News uses five factors from the 2016-2017 academic year to assess a school’s commitment to instruction.

Class size is 40 percent of this measure. Schools receive the most credit in this index for the proportion of their fall 2016 undergraduate classes with fewer than 20 students. Classes with 20-29 students score second highest, 30-39 students third highest and 40-49 students fourth highest. Classes that have 50 or more students receive no credit.

Faculty salary (35 percent) is the average faculty pay, plus benefits, during the 2015-2016 and 2016-2017 academic years, adjusted for regional differences in the cost of living using indexes from the consulting firm Runzheimer International. U.S. News also weighs the proportion of professors with the highest degree in their fields (15 percent), the student-faculty ratio (5 percent) and the proportion of faculty who are full time (5 percent).

Our experience is that the most famous professors in a university are usually the worst teachers … if they teach any undergraduate course. Schools like Harvard have much more graduate students than undergraduates. If you count those professors who have no business with undergraduates as “faculty resources”, it won’t make any sense. Yes. My advisor on this list (top 10 – https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-engineering-schools/eng-rankings) did not teach undergraduates and had no business with undergraduates whatsoever. My spouse’s advisor has a Ph.D. from Caltech and told us many times he definitely does not recommend people go there for undergraduate. Mixing graduate school resources with undergrad quality is one of the biggest flaws in US News methodology … That is assuming you like its other indicators. Read https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/how-us-news-calculated-the-rankings carefully.

[WildestDream]

Paywall for the 2019 rankings…

[nrtlax33]

Not sure when the free version will be updated … the free one has not been updated.

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/wsj-the-us-college-rankings-2019-harvard-holds-top-spot

[prezbucky]

I love these rankings threads because they give me an excuse to wheel out my tier rankings. aren’t you lucky?! haha. These are based on my perception of overall academic strength at the undergrad level, student/alumni satisfaction, and endowment.

Private universities:

Tier 1:
Harvard
MIT
Princeton
Stanford
Yale

Tier 2:
Caltech
Chicago
Columbia
Penn

Tier 3:
Brown
Cornell
Dartmouth
Duke
Johns Hopkins
Northwestern

Tier 4:
Carnegie Mellon
Emory
Georgetown
Notre Dame
Rice
Vanderbilt
Washington U

Tier 5:
NYU
Southern Cal
Tufts

Tier 6:
BC
BU
Case Western
Lehigh
U of Rochester
Tulane
Wake Forest

[jym626]

Its a true shame that people get so wrapped up in “rankings” , which just perpetuates the issue.

[AlmostThere2018]

Wow, you really don’t like LACs or publics @prezbucky! :0

[prezbucky]

Those are my private U tiers, as I said.

[Carino]

https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahhansen/2018/08/21/grateful-grads-2018-200-colleges-with-the-happiest-most-successful-alumni/#10a50b851a0a

@nrtlax33 According to this Forbes’s ranking, UChicago is #21 of the 200 colleges with the most grateful, successful, and happiest graduates.
(Harvard #30)

[nrtlax33]

@“Cariño” ": Unfortunately according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_magazines_by_circulation, as of June 30, 2017 based on data from the Alliance for Audited Media, Forbes is ranked 85 with a circulation of 928,464. It seems not many people are reading Forbes even on the monthly basis.

Those rankings really do not have much meaning. Only some schools which are aggressively manipulating a particular ranking are panicking now… it seems all their efforts have been wasted and due to the manipulation, they got a lot of wrong students who end up in the mental hospitals.

Hey! it looks like Caltech has the lowest “engagement score” among the top 20 … my spouse’s advisor’s statement which was made more than 20 years ago is right .

Did you read the article linked by @Mastadon at #48:

And while even a minute change in rank may get some people chattering, many point out that going to a top five school—though a source of pride—is still only one part of a student’s decision to attend the U. of C. “Kids who came here for the rankings, they’re the ones who are walking around miserable,” says David Federman, a 2013 graduate. “The quirk factor is still what marries you to this school.”