So it’s the Consumer Digest ranking, taking “academic performance and quality of education” and “nonresident tuition” into consideration but without figuring in financial aid. On the private school end, like many other rankings the usual suspects show up on the top. But the public college ranking is raising eyebrows if you’d expect the best known ones would come on top like on the privates side. Where are UCB, UVA and UMichigan and the like?
Ive never found any college ranking to be helpful as such, beyond identifying masters universities, liberal arts colleges and national universities.
However, rankings which provide numbers, such as % living on campus, % recieving aid, #'s of Greeks and size of classes, * were helpful* when we were developing a list.
Truman State can easily do well on many cost measures, since it OOS cost is quite low, and it has stats-based merit to lower the cost even more.
We did not waste any time and never checked the college ranking. Rankings will not show which college is a good match for your kid, why bother?
Well, my intention of bringing up this is not to highlight the pecking order of colleges but to point our the peculiar way Consumer Digest looks at the value of public universities. So basically it says Truman State is a better value than UCB in terms of “academic performance and quality of education” relative to the cost. Does that make sense to you? Do you agree?
If you are full-pay everywhere, it might, depending on how you weigh certain things like cost. As you should know, you can come up with any sort of ranking of schools in any order depending on how you weigh certain things.
Yes, what rankings factor in and how much weight is assigned to each factor can result in drastically different results. In that sense, as long as they are not making up data, every ranking “makes sense”. I think in this ranking, only OOS tuition is considered “cost” and it seems that Truman State came out as the best value to out of state residents, which means it provides the best ratio of academic performance/quality of education vs Cost for OOS residents.
I know that many “burned” like the flies flying to the light when using ranking instead of tedious and long research to see which college actually fits them the best.
“Truman State is a better value than UCB in terms of “academic performance and quality of education” relative to the cost”- this general statement may mean absolutely NOTHING to a specific kid. What kid gets out of college and how much family pays for the college depends MOSTLY on the kid and not the place. Do not get too much out of this type of general statements. Instead, spend time researching several colleges under consideration that already match several of top personal criteria on the student list of criteria for choosing colleges. PERSONAL list, not somebody else’s advice.suggestions/ranking. After all, ranking is somebody else’s combined opinion, measured by results achieved by somebody else, not your kid. This is not a theoretical suggestion, it is my experience. And after all, YOU may choose not to use this advice, again, decision should strictly be yours.
@MiamiDAP: Not everyone has the capacity to collect and compile all the data they need or know what data they need to collect to make informed decisions. Some people need a starting point to narrow down their search initially. No one should take any ranking as the gospel or take say number 13 and number 16 literally, but it doesn’t hurt to look into the methodologies of popular rankings or rankings that factor in or give a heavier weight of the metrics you care about and with a balanced approach. Eventually, everyone WILL have a personal list. And believe it or not, most likely they rank their list of colleges too. That’s where the talk of first choice and preferences comes from.