lookingforward

The whole notion of ranking is flawed. These media things create a frenzy, sell magazines, line someone's pockets. I tell my kids to try to figure out "Who's driving the Mercedes?" Sorry, but I feel similarly about "Colleges that Change Lives." Nice way to garner attention for a set of once overlooked schools, by no means the full list of great places. None of this is truly scientific. No matter how they try to explain and justify. The best schools are the best for you- that's the depts, profs, peers, other opps and environment that empower you.

tk21769

The USA has thousands of undergraduate programs. So how do you identify the "outstanding" ones (let alone the very good but not famous ones) without resorting to aids like college rankings, especially if you are a first generation student, an immigrant, or otherwise not very familiar with American colleges ... and assuming you are a good student shopping beyond your local market?

How for example do you identify schools with a high concentration of "peers ... that empower you" without considering factors like admission selectivity? How do you identify schools with professors and environments that empower you, without looking at measurable criteria like class sizes, faculty resources, and financial resources? These are the kinds of factors considered in the US News rankings.

annasdad

Apparently the director of admissions at Yale (which seems to do fairly well in most rankings, no?) considers it possible.

Perhaps he is just savvy enough to realize that rankings are useless because they have absolutely nothing to do with being outstanding or good, but rather that are based on prestige and on factors that have been shown by decades of research to have little or no bearing on the quality of the education available.

To quote further from Mr. Brenzel:

Pizzagirl

There's nothing wrong with the data in the ranking systems (as long as you know what the data is based off). What's "wrong" is the silly CC practice of slicing the tiers so thinly. The rankings ARE good for identifying bands. They just aren't bands where #8 is distinguishable from #13, or whatever.

tk21769

I suspect the Yale DOA is not a first gen or an immigrant, but that if he is, by now he has spent years in the higher education business. And if he does have a mental Roladex of hundreds of "outstanding" undergraduate programs, I bet it includes just about all the ones on the high side of the US News "Peer Assessment" ratings. After all, if it's possible for him to rationally identify "outstanding" programs, and if people like him are worth quoting, then why is that Peer Assessment process (which interviews about 1000 people like him) "crap"? Especially when it produces results similar to the other, numbers-driven 75% of the ranking. People are not so very different from each other that many of us cannot agree on a few criteria worth tracking.

They may be to some, but apparently they aren't to many others. Otherwise they would not continue to be so popular after about 3 decades.

I agree with Pizzagirl.

annasdad

I suspect the director of admissions at Yale is well aware of the challenges of first generation and immigrant students, even though he may well not be one.

Why is it so hard to accept: for 30 years, scholarly, peer-reviewed studies have been looking for a correlation between academic quality - as measured by student outcomes for students with equivalent entry-level abilities - and the very factors that the ratings providers use to rank colleges (whether within the so-called "tiers" or between them). They have been unable to find any such correlation. All the anecdotal reports, "don't you think thats," and statements that "rankings ARE good [for anything]" can't trump that.

bimbop

Here's how I see it. US news and world report's college rankings are not an academic listing, but a prestige listing. One of the major factors in their evaluation is a 'peer opinion' poll where they ask deans of all the colleges which college is the best. This means that the colleges that are known by most of the deans in America (the ivies etc.) will get the most vote. Now, having a prestige list is actually pretty useful. You should use the USNews report simply as a judge of which colleges have the fanciest name. About Forbes - it is just crap. I mean, who cares about average debt or 4 year graduation rate

annasdad

You could start here.

How to make NSSE college scores work for you - USATODAY.com

The factors used in this survey track pretty closely with the factors that research has shown do matter in helping students develop academically. A limitation is that it only reports data for those colleges that voluntarily share it; none of the so-called "top 20" universities do, at least none of those I checked (wonder if they're hiding something?) and participation in general appears to be higher in the central part of the country than on either coast.

lookingforward

How? tk: you read Fiske or PR or similar. Yes they are also profit-motivated, but comprehensive- not a pyramid, not a listing of 30. You check your scores, interests, various strengths at colleges, then go to the college's own websites for detail and an idea of what they tout. These books also list "like" colleges. After that, check depts and course lists. For heaven's sake why use USNWR or Forbes for this? How could one blindly place him/herself via that? What do you learn about Amherst, Bowdoin or Stanford from USNWR? Do you learn if your program is exceptional there? The variety of leadership opps, career-related support, faculty availability? There is no one-size-fits-all.

annasdad

^ good advice. I'd add, if statistics on class sizes, admissions ratios, test scores, etc., are important to you, those are available online from multiple sources.

Pizzagirl

They're available from USNWR. I see no reason not to use the USNWR data and focus on those particular metrics that are of importance to you. Personally, things I cared about included - test scores, graduation rates, class sizes and faculty ratios, and % of students living on campus all 4 years. Don't really care about alumni giving rates, and acceptance rates and yield were only of moderate interest, since those reflect the popularity and tastes of high school seniors, which is of little consequence to me.

tk21769

Many popular schools aren't reported. Correct, none of the Ivies show up, but many public universities are missing, too. My state's public flagship isn't reported.

One of the most selective schools I can find is Middlebury College (USNWR #4 LAC). I looked up its NSSE scores along with those of several other LACs that have a wide range of selectivity and US News rankings (Claremont McKenna, Grinnell, Kenyon, St. Olaf, Centre, Bennington, and Earlham). Middlebury has the highest score among them for "level of academic challenge", but the lowest scores for "active and collaborative learning" and "student-faculty interaction". What does this really mean? Maybe Middlebury has more distinguished professors who are busier with research. Maybe Middlebury gets stronger students who need less help. Maybe its students are more competitive. Really, I don't think it tells us too much. These 8 schools have composite "Senior" averages between 55 (Grinnell) and 62 (Centre), which appears to be too narrow a range to very clearly differentiate them. So maybe that is the take-away message. Perhaps USNWR exaggerates the differences of schools that in fact offer very similar learning experiences, at least from an "engagement" perspective. This is assuming that the NSSE sampling is consistent from school to school, and that students at different schools apply similar standards in answering the same questions.

I also tried averaging and comparing scores for some Big Ten schools (Michigan, Wisconsin, UIUC, Minnesota, and TOSU). These scores, too, are tightly clustered (46.7 to 51.7, which is somewhat lower in every case than the LAC averages.)

zephyr15

Re Rankings in General

As Mark Twain (or possibly Disraeli) said: "There are lies, damnable lies and statistics"

Greybeard

I think it was Samuel Clemens who said that. He's probably the most underrated writer in literary history. Twain is usually rated much higher, but Clemens outranks him for my money

drax12

USN's tries to concentrate on pre-college students who are looking for colleges that meet their specific criteria and who are enamored of rankings via its mix of variables that place the colleges in their various tiers, some of these variables of which keep a natural pecking order. Movement up or down one or two spots by one college would send the fans of this publication in a frenzy, especially on this board.

The problem is, as someone pointed out above, statistical inputs portions can be manipulated to give a college a better face to this publication than would be warranted. There is no standard way of reporting standards of admission within a college’s CDS, USN’s source for this data, so comparing the various colleges’ admissions statistics would be like comparing proverbially stated apples and.... Alumni giving and class sizes can be similarly tweaked to give a college a better face to this publication.

I think Forbes is just trying to shake things up a bit. I've always felt there's at least a bit of an irreverent air to this publication, and I think this is no different with its ranking system of colleges. There is no natural order of things based on past rep or some sort of peer assessment that would lend more stability and a natural historical rank, although things have obviously stabilized because its statistical inputs would have less variation from one year to the next. I’m sure when this pub’s rankings first started there were volatile changes and large movements up and down.

As someone pointed out, Forbes' ranking tries to concentrate on students as finished products of colleges as opposed to trying to gather in the pre-college set. So I’m not sure what demographic to which the Forbes’ ranking appeals, but I, at least, like this attempt. There are certainly some schools that prepare students for corporate world, law, or medicine better than others, and it isn’t necessarily about SAT’s or even class rank. A lot of this, I would imagine would be a higher level of rigor, which I think is important in preparing student for the real world, something to which USN would never begin to measure. (And unlike USN’s, I feel class rank, ie, gpa, has much more significance than SAT’s because of the longevity of accomplishment, with grades being much more, rather than the ephemeral feat of scoring high. This has led to the various ascended ways of reporting SAT's to rank higher within USN's selectivity variable, for those colleges that want a better lot in life.)

My point, I guess, is there is no perfect ranking system because Forbes does have its flaws also. But to say as some do here that USN is the standard of ranking is entirely wrong. USN is just a bunch of gunk inputted, with no standard of review, no standard of authority to question funky statistics, etc. USN is therefore pure garbage.