Well, I imagine that anyone who wanted to be in a city would choose at least three of those colleges over Princeton. I haven’t been to Palo Alto in many years, but even though it was not really urban, it felt more lively to me than Princeton, NJ with easier access to other urban areas. I also imagine many students interested in various professional graduate schools (particularly med school) might mistakenly believe that some of those universities are better choices for their career plans than others even if the rank of Princeton is slightly higher or Princeton arguably provides a more undergraduate-focused education than others. I also think regardless of USNWR, for prestige seekers, Harvard has always and will always have a bigger name across the country and the world than any other U.S. university. I’m sure there are other reasons as well why one might make different choices among those five institutions (Harvard, Stanford, Yale, MIT, and Princeton), but mostly the whole rankings thing does not feel important to me. As far as I know, my daughters did not consider rank in deciding where to apply or attend and neither did I.
You’re absolutely right regarding Cornell’s USNWR ranking at #5 and ahead of Columbia…I stand corrected.
In terms of the legitimacy of the rankings themselves, The Daily Pennsylvanian (UPenn paper) went with these headlines:
" Why Penn dropped to No. 10 in the 2024-25 U.S. News & World Report rankings"
" Penn falls to lowest U.S. News ranking since 1997 while Princeton, MIT notch top spots"
The poll I linked above (I believe around #62) suggested only around 10% of applicants really look at the exact individual rankings. Another 20% looked at rank neighborhoods, but that is already consistent with those Parchment findings, and then there are 70% who don’t use rankings like that at all. And on top of that, around as many people are using N–he rankings as US News these days, and they have Princeton at #10 (behind all those schools and more).
So, yeah, I think the actual influence of US News rankings is often overestimated. Obviously, though, it gets enough clicks for US News to keep doing it.
I don’t know what Parchment is, but acceptance rates and yield are “people voting with their feet.”
It tells you everything that you need to know about what people REALLY think.
The rankings are like Consumer Reports telling you that a car is great and then, in some cases, no one buys it.
Either the people are wrong or the ranking service is wrong.
The good news is that the people and the rankings agree probably 90% of the time. But in cases where they disagree…I think that the people are usually right.
Apparently we’re done discussing USNWR, based on the 2 users who posted after the thread was reopened and who apparently decided that my earlier message and forum rules didn’t apply to them. Closing.
