And not to harp on the American Leaders list but it also seems to generally ignore education such that the President of Harvard or the dean of Yale Law probably isn’t there but the organist for the Philadelphia Orchestra is. Also it has a lot of bias as a number of the lists it uses are Forbes created opinions, “30 under 30”, “Self Made Women”, etc.
@Dolemite, considering that educational success of alums is already well-covered in other categories (PhD production and prestigious scholarships), I don’t have a problem with that.
@PurpleTitan , that is exactly my point. Since my 2 Ds graduated from a well-known public high school in the area, I am very familiar with where their classmates had applied. I do not recall any of the better students applying to Bucknell/Lafayette/Muhlenberg.
Also, you need to update your database as Pitt Med is a top 20 Med school and Pitt has other strong Health Sciences streams other than Nursing. My D1 attends Pitt SOM.
BTW, I live in NYC now and work in the Bay area. So I have a feel for what colleges are highly recognized as you do. So again amused where Forbes ranks some of the UCs including UCSD, UCI, etc
@i012575, medicine isn’t an undergrad field in the US, so Forbes shouldn’t consider them in undergrad rankings (and I don’t either). I also think that basing impressions off of where a small set of HS kids apply is problematic.
And while UCSD is a STEM powerhouse, there’s nothing special about UCI (nothing against UCI; it’s as good as many other publics).
@PurpleTitan I disagree with it being “well-covered”. It just seems “leaders” is defined differently in the various fields to conveniently fit an agenda.
@Dolemite, again, the “American Leaders” is a Forbes subcategory, just like “PhD production” and “prestigious scholarships”. It’s not standalone. So if you add academic leaders to the “American Leaders”, the academic categories would be even more heavily weighted. In any case, even if you did that, I wouldn’t expect the rankings to change, really, at all. The academic leaders list probably maps even better to the Forbes overall rankings than leaders of any other industry.
They could have just used Who’s Who in America which covers a wider array of industries and if you browse the CCAP Research you can find a paper where they analyzed the 2008 WWiA. Not sure why they didn’t do the same thing instead of making a new arbitrary list.
@Dolemite, Forbes used “Who’s Who” before. The “American Leaders” list is their approximation because there were allegations that people could get on to “Who’s Who” just by paying.
Seems like they can’t win.
Nothing is perfect but they could have done better. They could have included the same industries as WWiA to be more thorough.
@Dolemite, anything could be done better. As determining any criteria is subjective, this doesn’t seem like a worthwhile nit to pick. BTW, even if you add sports figures on a per capita basis, I doubt you’d see much movement.
I’m pretty sure if they used WWIA, the knock against them would be - that they were using WWIA.
All I will say is that my school is CRIMINALLY underrated…as are a bunch of NC publics.
^Gross negligence or just extremely careless?
They just don’t know what they’re doing. So many schools criminally underrated it’s insane.
There’s 8 pages debating graduation rates that count 5% in their criteria and I’m picking a nit on a item that’s almost a quarter of what they base their rankings on.
LBad96, how do you “know” your college, or whatever other colleges, are “criminally underrated”?
Because let’s face it. Very few of us are really in a position to know how good some other college is. We draw our impressions from “my friend went there and she’s pretty smart, so it must be good.” Or “I always heard it was good” or “a smart guy I know went there.”
I haven’t been to all of the USNWR top 20 campuses - most, but not all. How do I really “know” the others are good? Because other people tell me they are, and they always appear on top lists, and so they must be. And frankly the ones I have been to? Aside from my own, they were visits. You get a feel – it’s easy to tell Party-On U from Serious Academic U – but that’s still just based on the Feels.
Even someone who may have gone to undergrad at one school, grad at another, and sent a kid to to third won’t have a complete view, since they were focused on their own area / discipline.
@3rdXsTheCharm said:
I think it does matter, not because of prestige, but because of peer group.
IMO, what your child learns at college depends more upon the peer group than it does upon the prestige of the college, mainly because teaching quality and college prestige are poorly correlated.
The selectivity at HYPSM+3C + WAS means that most peer students are likely to be very bright. Your child will learn a great deal in class because the entire class can have richer discussions in the humanities, and move further and faster in STEM. And outside of class, the learning continues in the hallways and in social settings.
As you start going down the list, the percentage of very bright students drops. A student can still have outstanding intellectual peers, but in a state flagship the HPYSPM equivalents might be the 100 students in the Honors College out of the 6000 students in the class. Classes in the honors college can still be highly enriching, but learning drops markedly in other classes.
As a data point, my daughter did research at two colleges last summer. Interestingly one was ranked in the top 5 and the other in the 30s. Although both professors came from top-5 colleges, the quality of the graduate students she worked under was worlds apart.
US News rankings are weighted heavily towards acceptance rate, which is an easy factoid to ascertain and digest and it is very objective. Many applicants love to spew this data and while gaining acceptance to a school with a low acceptance rate is prestigious, is doesn’t equate necessarily to quality of the education. Acceptance rates can also be ‘played’ by the college.(think Chicago aggressively trying to court more applications) Forbes takes the selectivity out of the picture and tries to assess on what happens once you are in. Something to be said about that
That’s a new one for me. Which is that (or those)?
CalTech, Columbia, UChicago.