An Outsider's Guide to National LACs

[circuitrider]

Interesting. There’s a parallel concern in this sub-string about the “Peer Assessment” metric within the USNews survey:

U.S. News Anticipates Higher Year-Over-Year Changes in Upcoming Rankings

What metric is that? USNWR doesn’t directly measure “academic quality”, but they includes some measures that are probably correlated such as financial resources per student, faculty salary, and admin “marginal” / “distinguished” survey. If you are referring to the latter, note that the admins are rating other colleges, rather than the academic quality of their own. This is problematic on many levels. I expect few are experts on the academic quality of the 200+ other colleges on the list, so many just go by general feel, which is often influenced by the other colleges’ current USNWR ranking. Some may try to sabotage competitor’s rankings.

Basically, it’s the same question: How many complex institutions can even well-informed people actually keep track of?