<p>I was wrong about one thing with The Master’s College. I said it wasn’t in USNews data base. That is because I looked up “The Master’s College” and there were no matches. That is what the school is called on Forbes’ list and I had not heard of it before. But then on The Master’s College’s own site, it touts its ranking on USNews for Baccalaureate Colleges in the West and so I looked up that category and it showed up! :D</p>
<p>(oh and jym, there it is called Masters College and Seminary)</p>
<p>It is ironic that I am even participating on this thread because I honestly DO NOT follow rankings (USNews or even Forbes). But I opened this thread and the link in the OP and did find this ranking and its methodology amusing and unusual.</p>
<p>lol. Just so y’all can laugh along with or at me…I have been on the campuses of 53 of the first 250 schools listed. And I am not an educator and my D is an only child. I think I’ll stop there.</p>
<p>soozie, I can’t blame it all on the kid. Most of it… but not all. As my wife and I traveled around “pre-kid” I’d find myself drawn to campuses. Just always been a place I felt comfortable and energized. Yup. Sicko. ;)</p>
<p>I’m guessing D and I visited over 50, and I’ve probably been to another 50 on my own.</p>
<p>Curm, well that makes sense to me! I thought your D visited 53 schools as a prospective student and that is a LOT and more than anyone I have known! But if you count your adult life and travels, different story.</p>
<p>Soozie, she probably did visit over 50 in her college search from 10-12th grade. We traveled well over 10,000 miles by pickup truck on just 3 trips. ;)</p>
<p>I think that Forbes this year’s ranking is better than last years though it’s still out of whack. I envision that Forbes will fine-tune its methodology and eventually create a ranking similar to USNWR’s but mixing RUs with LACs together. If they can achieve that, it’s probably a good thing since it will break USNWR’s monopoly and make it harder for schools to game the rankings.</p>
<p>soozievt: I didn’t look at the ranking as the criteria seems more geared towards Liberal Arts Education (including Math & Science) instead of Engineering or Technology.</p>
<p>I think the problem with this ranking is that Forbes’s forgot to normalize the data.
See with all ranking scheme the biggest problem is how to compare result across categories. </p>
<p>US News escaped that and created so many different ranking but Forbes attemp to do it but caught in the classical normalization issues.</p>
<p>If you look at HMSP in the top 10, these are ranked to their sizes (Student population)
Rank Name State Cost Total Student Population </p>
<p>2 Princeton University NJ 49,830 7,330 </p>
<p>5 Massachusetts Institute of Technology MA 50,100 10,299<br>
6 Stanford University CA 51,760 17,833 </p>
<p>8 Harvard University MA 50,250 26,496 </p>
<p>So the ranking favor smaller colleges that might be the reason for UCLA to be #71 while CMC in top 10.</p>
<p>I think Forbes’s will get it’s software tuned more and more in the coming years. They need to learn to categorize colleges and then normalize the data before creating a single ranking.</p>
<p>I don’t know about Forbes accidentally or deliberating choosing to not normalize, but this example is such a case of cherry picking. You decided to exclude Yale in your little comparison despite it being tenth and very often included in the HYP/HYPS/HYPSM acronyms because it violates your ‘trend’ too much (being smaller than MIT).</p>
<p>jym, so that our comparison is complete, I have only been to 15 of the Forbes Top 50. I’m guessing FA policies at the schools have something to do with it. Part of our search philosophy included the idea that it was easy to find need-only dream schools and more difficult to find merit aid schools that she’d love to attend.</p>
I think I’ll stop there.</p>