wisteria100, I thought USNews weighted admit rate less than 5% in its rankings.
This link says it’s 10%. So not “heavily weighted.”
http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/ranking-criteria-and-weights
“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.”
This is the “get over yourself” portion of the program where it slides into ridiculousness. You can go quite a few slots below “HYPSM+3C+WAS” and the vast majority of peer students are “likely to be very bright.” It’s slicing the bologna way too thin. Really, the kid who wanted to go to Harvard but wound up at Carnegie-Mellon or Tufts is not going to bored by the stupidity of his classmates who are still learning how to add 6+5 when they’ve run out of fingers. There is really little appreciable difference at the highest levels. Isolating a handful of schools and elevating them like that is just silly.
If you took the top 20 research universities and scrambled their student bodies and put them all back, there just isn’t all that much difference. Really. You just have to look at the numbers. AND at the accomplishments, because the kids who were great who got denied from the tippy-tops still wound up somewhere- they didn’t just disappear.
I believe there are actually two benefits to these ratings:
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having ratings that differ from USN help people understand how subjective they can be despite using data, and after a while you can’t help but understand their limited value. So then you have no choice but to look for fit!
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People searching for colleges and scrolling down the list can find ones they are not familiar with and say “Hmm maybe I should check that out”.
perhaps this has been stated before but I like that this ranking is inclusive of both LACs and RUs. I think that’s very helpful for students considering both. No ranking is perfect but I applaud Forbes for taking a different approach.
@Pizzagirl you have a very good point in #155…I’d also like to add on from your second paragraph - on the negative side, we have “some kid who was a jerk to me in high school goes there, and he’s pretty dumb, so his current school sucks”, and “this one girl always had a really bad attitude towards everyone, and I especially detested her, so there’s no way that her school can be any good”.
I just love the idea that Pomona and UPenn have worse students than “HYPSM,” “3C,” or “WAS.” Why? Because they don’t have a cute nickname?
@hebegebe, the difference between HYPSM and an average state flagship isn’t the difference between #3 and #30 but the difference between #3 and #180.
I get the sense that you don’t know how deep academic talent (both on the faculty as well as student side) goes in this country. As I have stated before, all 30 that I consider Ivies and equivalents together offer only roughly 1% of total college places in this country (the US is pretty big and our top privates have relatively small undergrad populations). By comparison, that’s roughly the percentage of places that Oxbridge offers in the UK (so obviously Oxbridge+LSE+Imperial offer more). As a percentage of the population, UTokyo+Waseda+Keio in Japan offer more as well.
Do you come from a country where there is a big difference between the #3 and #30 school? That would be true at a smaller country like the UK, for instance, where Oxbridge, LSE, Imperial, UCL, KCL, Warwick, Edinburgh, St. Andrews, and Durham are conparable to Yale, Princeton, Wharton, Caltech, UMich, UNC, NYU, UT-Austin, W&M, and UCSD with all others being at UCSD’s level or below.
Harvard and Tufts are both nearby, and I know dozens of kids attending one or the other, including my next door neighbor’s kid (Harvard), and one 3 doors away (Tufts). The difference between them is not the kid that just missed Harvard and ended up at Tufts, although that certainly happens often. The difference is that many of the kids admitted to Tufts had little chance at Harvard. This is what leads to a different experience between the two schools.
Note that I am not making a judgment that the higher ranked experience is automatically the right one for everybody who could be admitted. My D is in range for the tippy-top schools (I have no illusions that this means acceptance) but I am trying to steer her towards somewhat lower ranked schools that are a better fit for her, intensity-wise.
Ok, I will fix it for you: HPYSM + CCCP + WASP 
You’re in MA and if you live near Harvard you likely have an inflated sensitivity to Harvard being the greatest thing in the world. In the real world though, any (say) top 30 school is great for anyone’s purpose. There’s lots of academic talent out there. The days of only a handful of schools being excellent are long, long gone. Are you from a country where small differences matter hugely?
Regarding Berkeley, the “someone got a great education there” won’t carry the day. You can obtain a great education almost anywhere.
Berkeley does, as you say, have a world class rep … but you have to be more specific. World class for … what? There’s no doubt Cal is what it is, and that is a world class - truly world class - research university, and they are very, very good at a lot of things.
The student body, however, is not uniformly accomplished.
Full disclosure - I’m a Stanford guy, and I conceded they do some things better than we do. But the talent pool at Stanford - and its equivalents - is markedly deeper than it is at Cal.
The rankings do, and should, take all of that into account.
"The difference is that many of the kids admitted to Tufts had little chance at Harvard. "
I think that slice of the population is smaller than you think. I also think - I know - that there are kids are Harvard who are not who you assume them to be.
Harvard is also really starting to become an athletic recruiting school. Of course it’s not true D1, but if you think you have multiple athletes at the Olympic trials without making some compromises across the board, then you don’t understand college athletics.
In fact, I’m willing to bet Harvard has more “compromise kids” than does Tufts. I’ve been through the recruiting process, and I can tell you Tufts doesn’t budge much for athletes. Harvard does.
@prepparent I don’t put much stock in those world rankings. They focus almost 100% on research output. Stupid.
This is how you derive a ranking that will set the university of arizona well ahead of Georgetown and Duke because Arizona has a really cool telescope.
The world rankings are the dumbest I’ve seen, at least insofar as they relate to US schools. I defer to others on foreign universities not named Oxford or Cambridge.
I didn’t know you were a psychologist Pizzagirl, given your ability to detect my inflated sensitivity to Harvard. How then would you diagnose that I agree with my D’s decision to put Harvard as #6 on her priority list, despite her being in range, having a plus factor there relative to other top ranked schools, and our high school having significant success with admissions?
Let’s discuss a concrete example about one such difference between the two schools. Harvard offers Math 55, possibly the most difficult undergraduate Math class anywhere. This class is challenging even for USAMO-level students, and most Harvard students who start out in the class drop. There are only a few colleges nation-wide that have the concentration of math talent to be able to offer such a class with the hopes that a reasonable number of students can actually finish it.
As a Stanford graduate, I can say, of course, Cal is a rival, but that’s based heavily on sports. They are very different schools, and Stanford’s student talent pool is deeper. There’s little question about that.
Nobody is picking on Cal because it’s public. One thing happening there is a resources issue. The spending per student is much higher at a lot of other schools. Sure, just one measure, but it’s there.
I think it’s a cop-out to just assume there’s a conspiracy against public schools.
“@prepparent, stuff like “world class reputation” and “top university” are really no more than people’s opinions, which will differ. Don’t get me wrong, Cal is a research powerhouse, I agree that it has a world class reputation, and I rate them highly. But does Cal match the Ivies/equivalents in all areas? No. In stuff like average SAT (http://www.forbes.com/sites/schifrin/2014/08/04/top-100-sat-scores-ranking-which-colleges-have-the-brightest-kids/) and per capita elite professional school placement, Cal trails all research U’s that are Ivies/equivalents.”
Exactly right.
One thing you can say for research output, though, is that it is one way to measure the positive impact of a university on the world.
It does not, of course, necessarily tell us how well that school instructs or inspires students.
@hebegebe, Tufts is a good school. I rate them as a near-Ivy: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/1893105-ivy-equivalents-ranking-based-on-alumni-outcomes-take-2-1-p1.html
If you’re going to split hairs among Ivies/equivalents, though, Harvard is really #1/2, not #3, and in terms of top-end talent, by many measures, there’s a greater difference between Harvard and Columbia/UChicago than between Duke/Northwestern. In fact, I think you’ll find that by alumni achievements, there’s essentially no difference between the last 4 schools (if anything, UChicago lags in placement in to elite professional schools). This is why slavish adherence to the US News rankings is problematic. We know that many schools game those rankings (some more than others). We know that Columbia doesn’t count a big chunk of their undergrad population (those in SGS, which has a higher admission rate and weaker stats) in their USNews stats. We know that Columbia and UChicago (and evidently Duke as well, recently) doesn’t publish Common Datasets, which suggests that they have something to hide.
@Pizzagirl you keep making the same point over and over, which doesn’t make it more right. Well, the truth is that while Harvard may be “less prestigious” than UMich in your neck of the woods, in the scope of the current planet, Harvard is a much better known university than UMich. Do I think because of that one is better than the other? I don’t know because I haven’t attended either. Do I think many people would or should care to know? No. But, here’s the difference between the reality and fantasy.
I fully understand that only a few publics are in the top 30 (I happen to think they are under-rated, but that’s another story). However, you are mistaken in thinking that the average state flagship is around #180, as the median ranking is probably much closer to #100, and again, I think many of them are under-rated, because these flagships have state mandates that promote low selectivity.
Yes. The USA.
In all seriousness, I attended a state flagship ranked roughly around #100 for my undergrad, and had a wonderful and free education as part of the Honors College. We had the university’s best professors teach our core classes, with only about 15 students per class. I know many of my Honors College peers were HYPSM level because that is where most of us ended up at grad school. So I know that you can get a great education at many colleges throughout the country.
But as rankings change in meaningful ways, there are differences. And the difference between 3 and 30 (if both are ranked accurately) is meaningful.