The Claremont schools are really well known . . . . and hard to get into. I’m not in California though. Hard to believe that CA people wouldn’t know about them.
Forbes’ methodology and its final list are going to reflect Forbes’ values. Forbes is a business magazine. It naturally values maximum success in making money over success in developing academics or scientists.
There is nothing wrong with that, I guess.
@VeryLuckyParent, considering that Forbes ranks 600+ colleges, who exactly are Somalia and Bangladesh and who are the Canada and Sweden that they are ranked above?
A college that is #60 is still in the top 10% of colleges.
Being outraged that JHU is ranked #60 (or whatever) is akin to someone being outraged that someone ranks Belgium as the 20th best place in the world to live rather than 4th.
@blossom had the best comment!
But the rankings do rankle schools because rank = real dollars. Alumni seem to care and alumni donate and help with networking. From the standpoint of admissions, applicants perceive often that the higher ranked the school, the happier a person will be in life. This is not true, we all know this! But this is a strong supposition. The golden ticket mentality of college admissions.
Schools care. And smaller lesser-known schools tout these and other rankings. Northeastern, Vandy, Uchic, GW and other schools have gamed USNWR ranking to pull in dollars. Money comes from alumni and from freshman who are happy to be attending a highly ranked school, thinking that ranking equates with better instruction and the golden ticket of life. For USN&WR a school may rise because of new buildings . . . and not better instructors.
To my mind the Forbes ranking has been useful because it does put the little schools in the same group as the big schools. That helps me find some parity among the various options, no matter how roughly done and flawed.
Forbes ranking also is an attempt to make the school accountable for outcomes rather than just inputs. USNWR mainly accounts for inputs and the outcomes are largely ignored.
Another outcomes attempt at rank is payscale’s, based on income directly after graduation and some years out.
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Make of it what you will, but these discrepancies are sufficiently wide that it ought to make at least one of the rankings suspect. Or perhaps both.
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Why? They don’t pretend to measure the same thing or to define “best” in the same way. Comparing these two lists, you get pretty much exactly what I’d expect, lots of overlap, but not exactly the same schools in the top 25 (or 50 or whatever) and not necessarily in the same order or relationship to each other.
I’m using the various lists I see as one way to help make sure that nothing is overlooked on what I’m calling my master list (the list of ALL the schools my son should look into from reach to safety). Someone reasonably credible considers it a very good school, it’s in my son’s desired geographic area and there’s nothing about it that makes it a clear non-starter (eg, Juilliard for my completely non-musical, STEM kid)? On the list. Can the lists really be useful for much more than that sort of thing?
Some of the discrepancy between Forbes and US News washes out if you separate out research universities from LACs, as US News does. Then Forbes’ list of top research universities looks like this:
- Stanford (#4 in US News)
- Princeton (1)
- Harvard (2)
- MIT (7)
- Yale (4)
- Brown (14)
- Penn (9)
- Notre Dame (18)
- Northwestern (12)
- Columbia (3)
- Dartmouth (12)
- Tufts (27)
- Chicago (4)
- Georgetown (21)
- Boston College (30)
- Duke (8)
- Cornell (15)
- Rice (18)
- U Virginia (26)
- William & Mary (34)
- Caltech (10)
- UC Berkeley (20)
- Michigan (29)
- Vanderbilt (15)
- UCLA (23)
- UNC Chapel Hill (30)
- U Rochester (33)
- WUSTL (15)
- Wake Forest (27)
- Carnegie Mellon (23)
Note that among the top publics, UC Berkeley, UCLA, and UNC Chapel Hill are all about the same on Forbes and US News, with UVA (+7), William & Mary (+14), and Michigan (+6) all doing quite a bit better on Forbes.
Among privates, some do better on Forbes (Brown +8, Notre Dame +10, Tufts +15, Georgetown +7, Boston College +15) while others do worse (Columbia -7, Chicago -9, Caltech -11, Vanderbilt -9, WUSTL -13). A little further down the list, Carnegie Mellon (-8), USC (-9), Johns Hopkins (-13), and Emory (-16) also fare worse on Forbes
I note with interest that the 2 schools highest-ranked in USNews among those who drop a lot in the Forbes rankings (Columbia and UChicago) both do not publish Common Datasets.
If an institution acts like it has something to hide, most likely, it has something to hide, but the beauty of using outcomes-based criteria that isn’t self-reported is that the results are what they are and you can’t dress it up or massaged.
In an effort to be helpful- here are some suggestions on useful ways to deploy the rankings in conversations with your kids:
Scenario A- bright and talented daughter who is in-state for UVA and has the stats for UVA has decided to apply early to a tiny college in New England to follow her BF since “this is true love and we were meant to be together”. It will be useful (and statistically accurate) to show D that tiny college is ranked 200 places behind UVA- and costs a fortune- and that therefore she might consider applying to tiny college regular decision PLUS applying to UVA and a few other places.
Scenario B- your son wants to major in museum curatorship, and the only affordable program he has found is a directional state U 1,000 miles from home where he will get merit aid which brings the OOS school inline with your own state flagship. It will be helpful to show your kid that he is cutting the salami way too thin on museum curatorship, since your own state flagship (where he will also get merit aid) has a phenomenal Art History department, a well regarded two course seminar on historic preservation, team taught by the chem/materials science department and the history department, and a boatload of graduate level courses in his chosen foreign language, and travel abroad fellowships focused on art history and civilization out the wazoo. Oh- and it’s ranked 250 places above the museum curatorship school. win/win.
Scenario C- Your kid loves basketball. Has always loved basketball. Not enough of an athlete to play at a top basketball school, but enough of a student/scholar to get into a college which will meet all of his academic needs (and then some) BUT not enough of a basketball player to make the team. If he applies to college ranked number 432 in the country he can play basketball (no scholarship however). If he applies to college ranked number 24 in the country- a better academic fit according to his teachers and guidance counselors- he can WATCH basketball, play at the club level, and get a degree in his areas of interest. You might want to sit him down with the rankings and the methodology and allow him to figure out just how much it means to him to play basketball vs. everything else.
I don’t think it’s helpful to use the rankings to wonder why college A is number 9 on one rating system but number 11 on another. Nor do I think it’s helpful to arbitrarily decide that any college which isn’t in the top 20 is worth applying to. But as a mechanism for forcing a conversation with your kid to clarify what he/she is looking for in a college- can be very useful.
I live in So Cal…only 1 hour away from the Claremont schools. I get a lot of blank stares…but on the other hand, if someone has heard of them, they are impressed I have two kids there!
And until about 5 years ago, I would have been among those who had no idea…and I’ve lived here most of my life!
I don’t have any problem looking at things from different vantage points. As a scientist however, I’ve been taught that if something can be replicated, then you are approximating truth. I understand the score cards are different between Forbes and US News, but I’m looking for some “truth” in regard to which schools are “best.” The fact that there is such wide discrepancy is a little vexing. In the end, I acknowledge that its good we’re not all alike and looking for the same thing in a college. As my father used to say, that’s why Baskin Robbins has 32 flavors. I do agree with the poster though who states that the Forbes list is meant in part to be provocative trying to rank all schools with one yardstick, large research universities with the small LACS. I do have a problem with the Forbes list changing so much in a year. I don’t believe the components that make up the rankings change that much in 12 months, so why so mercurial? Again, it makes me suspicious with so much movement from year to year that Forbes is not approximating any "truth " or anything that can be replicated, in regard to who’s on top or the bottom consistently.
@preppedparent, is a triangle more beautiful or an oval? Which one is the truth?
With all rankings, they jigger the components slightly every year so that there is movement (in order to sell more magazines). But where are the big movements that you see? Keep in mind that in a country as big as the US with as many schools as it has, a move from #50 to #60 just isn’t that big. That’s a move of what? 93rd percentile to 91st percentile?
Furthermore, yes, comparing LACs and research U’s is tough, but then again, how would you compare a school like Caltech with UMich? Even though they are both RU’s, Caltech is tiny, private, heavily concentrated in STEM, is in sunny SoCal, and doesn’t have any sort of sports or Greek culture while UMich has both, is gigantic, public, is in frozen MI, and has majors ranging from Interarts Performance to Movement Science to Ancient Near Eastern Studies.
And then keep in mind that even though USNews classifies Caltech as a RU, Harvey Mudd as a LAC, Cooper Union as a regional college, and they don’t seem to put Rose-Hulman in to any category, all four of them are probably more similar to each other than any of them are to UMich. So why not just have one big list anyway?
This list, like the USNWR list, is good solely for selling magazines/grabbing page views. I feel sorry for the Forbes employees and interns who had to spend time on such a foolish assignment. Squabbling over whether any one school was properly ranked is an even poorer use of time.
Some of the metrics Forbes uses are ridiculous, like ratemyprofessor. Seriously? This is an absolute joke. In an average year I teach about 100 students. I’ve been at my current institution 13 years. In that time, a grand total of exactly 6 students have rated me on ratemyprofessor. None at all this past year, one the year before that. Why so few? Because the university has its own system for student evaluations of professors and courses, a strong majority of the students participate, and students rely on that information in course selection because it has much richer data. So as far as my students are concerned, ratemyprofessor is simply an extraneous irrelevancy. I actually do fairly well on ratemyprofessor, though I do much better on the university’s internal student evaluations, but I won’t toot my own horn here. I can look up and down the ratemyprofessor ratings of colleagues in my department and point to 3 or 4 faculty members who regularly win (student-generated) teaching awards but have mediocre ratings on ratemyprofessor because 1 or 2 disgruntled students filed negative reviews, enough to taint a sample of 4 or 5. I can point to other colleagues who have reputations as uninspired teachers but have very favorable ratings on ratemyprofessor, again because of 1 or 2 reviews from students with outlying views in a vanishingly small sample. Then there are the ratings of former colleagues, some of whom retired or left for other institutions 8 or 10 years ago, whose ratings continue to influence the ratings of my department. This sort of thing is worse than useless, it’s downright pernicious; it can’t possibly tell you anything useful, all it can do is mislead. Any ranking of colleges that relies on such horse manure is itself horse manure.
@bclintonk, if it makes you feel better, the RMP component seems to mostly wash out. I use 3 of the Forbes subrankings (American Leaders, PhDs, and Prestigious Awards) along with another ranking by admission to elite professional schools and come up with tiers that are mostly in line with the Forbes rankings.
In 1985, the Forbes list would have been far closer to the the status quo. Let’s not forget that it was USNews’ decision to remove LACs from the main beauty contest and into their own separate category, that opened up space for non-Ivy RUs to compete with HYPMS. Watching those slots disappear again is what is really making people upset.
To me, the biggest problem with the Forbes ranking is that they claim to be output focused, but have managed to weight the outputs in an odd way to unreasonably boost LACs and underrate schools with a higher degrees of math, science and rigor.
I think that is fine for most cc: posters who know to take the whole thing with many grains of salt. The problem is that average person does not understand that LACs are typically only a great option for students who are planning to attend graduate school shortly after graduation. If you want a major with excellent employability after 4 years, then LACs are not nearly as attractive.
One plus for the Forbes ranking seems to be that it does not seem to be fooled by the schools who work hard to game the USN rankings.
Ha ha, as much as I love my alma mater, there is no way that I would rank it ahead of JHU.
“The problem is that average person does not understand that LACs are typically only a great option for students who are planning to attend graduate school shortly after graduation. If you want a major with excellent employability after 4 years, then LACs are not nearly as attractive.”
@Much2learn, yes because an art history degree from a RU is more valuable than one from a LAC? Career prospects obviously have more to do with the student’s choice of major. If you choose to study philosophy or something, you don’t open a lot of doors for yourself in terms of undergrad education. However LAC students who study economics or computer science have an equal shot of securing a great job straight out of school. In fact an economics degree from a school like Williams or Amherst is highly desirable on wallstreet for example. If you read the articles Forbes posted today, they even mention that Harvey Mudd graduates earn the most in terms of both early and mid career pay.
“Although you might think Stanford or Princeton, ranking No. 1 and No. 3 on the overall list, would be the top-earners, or perhaps the nation’s top tech incubators, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and California Institute of Technology, it’s Harvey Mudd College, No. 59 in the U.S., that is the highest earning college. Graduates from the small STEM-centric liberal arts college in Claremont, CA, are earning mid-career median salaries of $133,000.” -Forbes (Recent graduates are factored into this)
It is absurd to say that a degree from a LAC has a lower employable rate compared to research university.
Thank you @Alamber2. Your statement, @Much2learn, maybe should be reevaluated, that LACs are less rigorous than other schools. shaking head And that what a person earns entering the market is somehow proof of that.
So much wrong with that idea. I’m not even sure where to start.