<p>Several things stand out with the Forbes ranking. First off, the report takes into account success of the graduates. Since the purpose of the service academies is to train officers and all graduates enter active duty that should be equal between all the academies. However, WP’s high ranking would indicate that maybe things are not equal. WP officer retention is actually much lower than either USNA or USAFA at this time and the Army is actually offering incentives to maintain retention. It kinda seems that WP officers resigning their commission and going on to lucrative civilian careers disproportional to the other academies is causing USMA to be ranked higher. Not hardly fair.</p>
<p>They took into account post graduate programs. USNA discourages this practice since the Navy goal is to get officers into the fleet. That USNA leads the SAs in recent years in the prestigious fellowships doesn’t seem to matter. Another unfair comparison.</p>
<p>What really amazes me is that one of the major factors was student evaluations of their professors on a voluntary online rating service. Just how scientific and objective is this? Also, students evaluating the professors for the final Forbes ranking might be akin to what we down South compare to the fox guarding the henhouse. Along the vein of no one ever flunked out of a liberal arts program and had to take engineering, note that very few of the Forbes top ranked schools are known for their engineering programs. Are engineering professors not as good as the liberal arts ones? Or maybe harder and suffer lower student evaluations? Another useless comparison, I would guess.</p>