I was too lazy to look it up, but the Merced article posted above lists last year’s ratings.
I’ve long remembered this thoughtful post about UC Merced from a couple of years ago:
Running a bit counter to academic rep are:
Those are head-scratchers, IMO
It’s also interesting to see the disconnect between the admission rate and the rank, for certain schools. For example, both Northwestern and Northeastern have the same 7% admission rate, but they are in very different places in the rankings. Jeffrey Solingo did a great job explaining Northeastern’s evolution, but seeing some of these “selective” institutions further down the ranks (and vice versa) is very interesting for me, as a parent with a senior.
Selectivity is not an important part of the USNews ranking, but academic rep is (supposed to be, or was in the past…) a significant part of it. Northeastern’s academic rep lags far behind Northwestern’s, which may explain the difference in ranking.
Some people are suggesting there might be a data issue with Middlebury, but I also think all those schools fit the description of academically excellent, but not necessarily being super strong on upward social mobility.
ah, that’s right – the newish USNews component. I see.
Thanks for bringing this article up once again, it does explain what drove UC Merced up in the rankings. It also highlights the issues with these types of adjustments to rankings methodologies. My personal opinion is that these weights accurately reflect a University aggressively and successfully executing against its mission, and UC Merced does that incredibly well. However they do not remotely reflect anything that I think comes to mind for most people when they intuitively evaluate the term ‘best college’ and I think that is where the challenge comes in. UC Merced is great at educating and the education that they provide is a quality education but is it comprised of what constitutes ‘the best’? I have my doubts.
I had a very similar education and I am thankful for it. I went to a non selective regional SUNY which when I went there had both a typically higher percentage of ACM certified chemistry graduates in a given year than some Ivies and one of the highest pass rates for the CPA exam of any school in NYS. My brother and I both received a good solid education which propelled us to very successful careers. Our peer group was pretty ordinary, our professors knew the basics well and generally were solid (not exceptional) instructors. It was the typical college experience as lived by the vast majority of kids each and every year. That is exactly what the kids at UC Merced get but there is nothing that points towards ‘best’.
Neither of us were under any illusion that our school was a better school than the Ivies or selective privates because it wasn’t. We were both accepted by superior schools but we went to a school that we could afford.
The latest twist in the ratings game is again trying to drive clicks and discussion. The USNWR rankings aren’t as nonsensical as WSJ but they still aren’t very defendable in many cases. Looking at the rankings for most of them it seems like the internal discussion among modelers goes something like:
Ok, time to rework the model in such a way that:
HYPSM (and Williams and Amherst in the case of USNWR report because they break out) stay at the very top otherwise people will just call us names and write us off as ridiculous.
Create enough churn that people will click, talk and in the case of USNWR buy our premium insights.
And we bite every year 
Maybe there should be points for keeping those who start at the top at the top. I can just imagine the conversation if that was added to the rankings criteria.
All these ROI things tend to favor schools with a large proportion of Engineering and CS majors.
How about basing it on how successful your Humanities and Soc Sci majors are? The success of Engineering and CS grads is fairly predictable, provided they do want to work in their fields of study. It’s much less assured for Hum majors. Their success could be a proxy for ranking the career departments at schools.
After Tulane took the hit last year to #73, they’ve been busy changing the way they do things apparently because they’re at #63… still down from where they were. Maybe their “contribution” check to USNWR didn’t get lost in the mail this year.
This is the reason that Rutgers is ranked ahead of Wake Forest.
I mean, you are not supposed to say this out loud, but I have never been bashful, so . . .
I think it is basically an unstated assumption among professional-class parents that a “good college” means a college that will help their professional-class kids become professional-class adults themselves. And I do think these methodology changes are not necessarily tracking how those sorts of parents and kids are thinking about college choice.
Speaking of which, it looks to me like the only methodology change this year is they used to have 6% that was related to Pell-grant recipient outcomes, and 5% that was related to first-gen outcomes, and this year they made all 11% about just Pell-grant recipients. Their explanation for the changes is:
Last edition, the graduation rates of first-generation students were also incorporated, but they were dropped this year based on clarification about the limitations of the College Scorecard data in some cases.
This may seem subtle, but a lot of the exact rankings among “top” colleges depend on what is happening at these margins, and it appears to me that dropping the attempt to incorporate first-gen measures has helped some colleges relative to others.
I don’t view #20 as a magical cut off point. So many colleges move around in the rankings over the years. There is little to no difference in quality between a school that is #25 versus #20, or one that is #47 versus #40, especially when considering that USNWR ties colleges. A precipitous dropoff might be cause for concern.
UPenn ranked below Northwestern, Duke and JHU makes no sense at all. In fact, Northwestern isn’t even the best school in Illinois…that would be UChicago
Likewise, no way can Cornell or Brown be considered “better” than Columbia by any objective data or stretch of the imagination
Really? LOL
That’s your opinion though. Based on USNWR criteria and calculation, the ranking is the ranking. Anyone can come up with their own criteria and weights to make a different ranking (and many orgs have done just that.)
Again, opinion. FWIW, I expect Columbia’s ranking is suffering because of past lying wrt to USNWR data as well as this past year’s demonstrations and poor performance by its President on a national stage.
This is what people need to keep in mind and completely agree.
Pick a school and go +/- a number of ranks (to be debated but I might argue +/- 10 and the student is going to get an equivalent education at any of them and is going to fall more to the student to make the most of the opportunities given to them.
The rankings take into consideration criteria that at an individual level can be meaningless (if I’m not a Pell candidate how much do I really care about how many Pell recipients a school takes?).
Yeah, barring some sort of data error (which I gather can happen), it is all formulaic.
Which doesn’t mean your personal way of comparing colleges has to match whatever US News is doing this year, or indeed any year.
Merced has a 9% yield.
I would say that “the people” don’t agree with USNWR.