| If you're so confident that the Forbes ranking is defensible, rollins, why don't you post this same link in the Duke forum or in the MIT forum and ask for reactions. See if you can defend its reliability to people in those forums, with Duke and MIT out of the top 10 and ranked behind SMU. Good luck.
I wouldn't be championing Forbes ranking system even if Washu had been placed in a shiny top 10 or top 15 spot because it's obvious from the minute you get to SMU and Samford that the whole thing is bogus. Even fans of colleges that placed well were commenting on other threads that Rate My Professors and Who's Who are downright silly as sources for information to rank universities. This ranking has been posted numerous times on various other forums and it's been blasted left and right.
An earlier poster on this thread commented that USNWR ranking categories have nothing to do with quality of experience in the classroom, which is just wrong. Faculty resources --- salary, benefits, class-size ratios --- affect the classroom experience. Financial resources, endowment, the money available to build new buildings and expand programs have an impact. Student selectivity --- the SAT/ACT levels and percentage of top GPA earners who make up the student body --- has an effect on the quality of the classroom experience.
Faculty Resources Rank:
Washu 7
Georgetown 38
UVA 36
Selectivity rank:
WashU: 6
Georgetown: 19
UVA: 26
Financial Resources rank:
WashU: 4
Georgetown: 35
UVA: 57
Those are areas that affect students and their college experience. What does Forbes have? A survey tally of Rate My Professor? What a joke. |