Meaning that 85% FA including 59% Pell, and 86% domestic minorities including at least 60% URM are not the “right people” for some prospective students and parents?
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If it were open to international students, I think you would have some super affluent students in China, India and elsewhere, bid up MIT and Caltech.
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Yes, that is my exact point.
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When did top 25 turn into top 20?
Interestingly, in the Chetty study, the two lowest Ivy-Plus colleges in terms of Relative Attendance Rate for the Top 0.1% were Chicago and MIT. Among Other Selective Private Colleges, the four lowest were Caltech, Rice, CMU, and Hopkins.
Obviously plenty of Top 0.1% still attended these colleges. But they were apparently not the favorite choices (for the record, the top two among Ivy-Plus were Dartmouth and Stanford, and the top four among Other Selective were USC, Vandy, Georgetown, and Northwestern).
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I had never heard of the “T20” prior to starting to research colleges again in support of S24. But apparently it grew out of a period in which the US News National Universities top 20 was largely made up of a relatively stable group of private universities, although either Cal or UCLA would sometimes get on the list. And Georgetown and Emory were also sometimes in or out.
But it looks like between 2004 and 2023 inclusive, there were 19 private universities that were always in the top 20 somewhere. And apparently at some point some kids and even parents started calling those the T20, along with some wiggle room as to the 20th.
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The US News rankings matter.
No other ranking get responses like this. No other ranking causes some of our most selective universities to cheat and rig numbers.
To me, on a personal level, I would be fine if all rankings disappeared…but they won’t.
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Some publics…the ones that struggled with Pell’s and “social mobility” are still getting creamed. Examples are LSU, Arkansas, Ole Miss, KU, Kentucky. These are all excellent R1’s. Schools like UNH, which does very well on “social mobility”, are rewarded. Virginia Tech has been richly rewarded.
Michigan sits at "21"again. It just must be a horrible school 
…
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I don’t disagree that the schools you named are all fine schools.
But, if social mobility is important/part of the ranking methodology then schools in states that have chosen to not fund Pell grant students will not be ranked highly in ranking systems that value those metrics. Being an R1 institution doesn’t matter if the poorest students in their home state can’t afford to attend.
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They all do well at supporting them financially…it is graduating them that is a much different story and where the problem lies.
The graduation rate is directly tied to the affordability issue (and lack of funding for low income students.)
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If every institution is excellent, then no institution is excellent.
And many people get so caught up with “top 20” or “top 50” that they forget that there are around 3,000 four year colleges in America. So even “merely” the top 2% takes you all the way to #60!
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US News appears to have ranked 1025 universities (this is not including colleges).
Using a standard 5-level scale (excellent, good, fair, poor, bad), this would imply something like 205 “excellent” universities, and another 205 “good” universities. I note in some ways this is conservative, because US News already filtered the list for various criteria that would arguably eliminate at least “bad” and maybe “poor” institutions as well. But for the sake of argument we can assume excellent only includes the top fifth, as opposed to top fourth or top third.
OK, so according to US News, LSU was #179, Arkansas #189, Ole Miss #171, and Kansas and Kentucky were both in the tie for #152. I would suggest this means it would be fair to say US News classified them all as “excellent”.
Alternatively, there are 146 R1 universities. All of these institutions were on that list. That’s really not a quality rating per se, but it again underscores that these institutions are in a relatively small, select class within the broader pool of research universities.
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I was actually composing a pretty similar post as you were writing this!
Yes, there is a very distorted picture some kids and parents get when almost every college-bound kid they know is going to, say, a US News top 200ish research university or comparable LAC. They can lose sight of the fact that is already a very select group, and that in fact many kids are going to go to different universities and colleges, or indeed start at community colleges, and still end up with successful professional careers.
I think part of it too is the unfortunate mindset that college admissions is an opportunity to prove your worth as a kid relative to other kids, to show you were smarter, more ambitious, harder-working, or so on. So if they are looking at colleges that are either not selective or have selection criteria they think of as easy for them to satisfy, they deem them as not good colleges because enrolling at them will not prove anything to the rest of the world about how they were a better kid than most.
Of course that is a really self-defeating mindset. And if you instead think of colleges as opportunities to get a good education, then there is no particular reason to believe such colleges cannot satisfy that goal for many of their students.
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Yes, the name of your college is often mainly reflective of how well you did as a high school student and what your parents could afford to pay.
I disagree with that implication. Do you think MIT and Princeton would consider the #204 university to be a peer institution?
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No, but that is implying many more levels than five. In fact, the concept of “peer” institutions really isn’t suitable for strict rankings, because A and B might be considered peers, and B and C might be considered peers, but A and C might not be considered peers. But nothing about that hypothetical tells you which, if any, of A, B, or C should be “ranked” the highest.
So the concept of “peers” is really only useful if you start with identifying one specific college and ask which colleges might be considered peers of that specific college.
So, I think it is fine to say MIT only has a small number of peers. That simply does not imply there are only a handful of “excellent” universities and colleges. It really just means that MIT specifically only has a small number of peers.
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…which was arbitrary to begin with.
I guess everyone is different. If you personally feel that the #197 school is on the same level with Harvard & Stanford, I don’t think we can have a constructive conversation.