Forbes Best Colleges 2015

Data10
Wed, 12 Aug 2015 06:14:11 +0000

In 2012, Forbes ranked Chicago 4. Now on Forbes, Chicago is ranked 20, and last year it was ranked 24. Duke is ranked 22 this year and was, in prior years, ranked at 104. This is at best, inconsistent. At worst, it is laughable. Brown above MIT? Come on.

Meanwhile the US News rankings have had little movement since 1983. The public universities rankings have deteriorated greatly, but this is also because they’ve been so heavily defunded by local state senates. Meanwhile, Chicago was ranked 6 in 1983, and is now ranked 4, in a three way tie, which really suggests a position of 4 - 6. So there has hardly been any movement in the rankings, except to show some brutal realities where universities like Illinois and Michigan have been attacked by their state governments. There is little wonder why people pay little heed to Forbes.

Both lists assign arbitrary weights to criteria in a way that is unlikely to align well with what you or I value, giving the list little meaning. For example, if you were deciding what makes the best college, I doubt you’d say it’s 18% 6-year graduation rate, 7.5% rate my professor score, 7% highest faculty salary, etc. When you make minor adjustments to these weightings, you’ll get a very different list. With some weightings, Brown will be above MIT. With others MIT will be above Brown.

I’d suggest focusing on whatever criteria is important to you, rather than the weightings that USNWR, Forbes, or some other website chooses. I particularly dislike both of these rankings because they do not make it easy to see the individual subscores that show how the ranking was derived (not free at USNWR). When I was deciding on colleges, I made my own weighted rankings that included things like available major selection, section of country, size of student body, and various other criteria that are not used in typical rankings. As I recall my rankings came out something like below. I’m sure many on this site would say it’s ridiculous to rank Cornell above Harvard, but if you are planning a career in engineering and live in upstate NY, then it makes more sense.

~1. Stanford (~tie)
~1. MIT (~tie)
3. Cornell
4. Princeton
5. Brown