Forbes Best Colleges 2015

tk21769
Tue, 11 Aug 2015 14:06:34 +0000

The “swings” noted above really aren’t that wide, and the ones that are relatively wide (~15 - 20 positions) are relatively few.

Engineering strength should tend to increase the Payscale salary scores.
State schools with strong engineering (Wisconsin, Maryland, Illinois, Texas), and LACs with engineering programs (the service academies, Bucknell), are among the schools that Forbes bumps up by 10 positions or more over US News.

Two of the 9 top RUs that get bump-downs in the Forbes ranking (Chicago and Emory) don’t have full-fledged undergraduate engineering programs. A 3rd, NYU, does not make the USNWR list of top 50 RUs for undergraduate engineering.

However, 6 other bumped-down RUs do have more-or-less strong engineering programs. I don’t know why Hopkins, WUSTL or GaTech would get hammered (relatively speaking) in an outcomes-focused ranking.

But whenever you change the ranking criteria, you’re going to get a few schools that move up or down more than the others. To me, the take-away message from comparing the US News and Forbes rankings is that they do point to pretty much the same set of top schools, and very often assign them nearly the same positions (+/- ~5 positions). So for the most part, the two different sets of criteria are mutually corroborating. A couple of other rankings (Parchment, stateuniversity) also point to pretty much the same set of top ~20 schools. To get a very different list of top schools, you have to shift to a very different set of criteria (like the finance-focused criteria Money magazine uses, or the social justice criteria Washington Monthly uses). Even then there is a lot of overlap at the top. Rich, well-endowed colleges have more resources to buy the best of everything, so they tend to show up high in many rankings.