It’s like department rankings - people will say - oh Georgia Tech is best. So therefore it is.
But look at the methodology - it’s a survey of academics on who is best. No selectivity, no career outcomes, no SAT scores - nothing - just - who is your favorite. In essence, it’s a popularity contest. Same for b schools, etc.
It’s a sham - but they’ve done a FANTASTIC job in branding themselves as the determinant (in many cases) of prestige. And therefore they drive the schools people apply to. If they said U Kansas was ranked high (i.e. popular) instead of IU Kelley, we’d be hearing a lot about KU instead of IU.
Methodology:
In spring and summer of 2025, deans and senior faculty rated the academic quality of peer programs they were familiar with on a 5-point scale: outstanding (5), strong (4), good (3), adequate (2) or marginal (1). Individuals who were unfamiliar with a particular program were asked to select “don’t know.”
Each qualifying school or program was sent two peer assessment surveys.
An average peer assessment score was calculated for each program using a trimmed mean, which removes the two highest and two lowest scores to reduce the impact of outliers. Programs with at least 10 ratings after trimming were then ranked in descending order based on this score.
I agree the methodology is both sloppy and incomplete, but you are assuming a popularity contest which is not how actual academics roll.
They attend conferences- they see what colleagues from around the country are producing in terms of scholarship and research. They read the relevant journals in their field, so they know who is developing publishable ideas. They compete for grants- and so when they don’t get one, they read the precis of the team that DID win the grant, and realize whose intellectual output is more significant or more relevant or more potentially meaningful than their own.
And they get grad student applications. They see which universities are the true training ground for the next generation, and which ones are willy-nilly stamping out grad school applicants with zero quality control. And they mentor post-docs from other institutions- and see who is emerging from where.
There’s a lot to criticize here. But nobody is voting for Cal Tech because it’s anyone’s favorite (it’s a prickly place if you are a scientist at another institution). But if you’ve got a grad student on your team who came from Cal Tech who is pretty much twice the scientist and three times the researcher of anyone else in your department- and this isn’t a “one off”- this is consistent over the last 20 years of your academic career– you might be justified in concluding that Cal Tech has a solid and well deserved reputation for training scientists. Even if it’s not your favorite, and even if you know you’d have hated every minute if you’d gone there.
Unless you know what’s in the mind of each person getting it, you can’t really say that.
I have no doubt it’s - who I feel is best (if I were being surveyed).
I feel doesn’t mean they know anything. Perhaps it’s reputation or they wrote a paper with someone at that school or something else. The bottom line is - there is little to nothing in that ranking that should impact - why a student should choose that school. And yet that’s exactly why kids are applying to those schools.
It’s an anecdotal, qualitative, and I feel ranking - and nothing more no matter what one wants to believe.
But there are affordable options (state options) in Pennsylvania, just not Penn State or Pitt. Same in many states. There are a dozen schools that are cheaper for instate tuition than CU-Boulder or School of Mines, but often it is ‘Boulder or bust’. Even if tuition is set at a state level (it isn’t in Colorado), it is much cheaper to live in Pueblo than in Boulder.
So that puts us back to the question of this thread…is prestige most important? Certainly more people recognize Penn State over Slippery Rock, so are students choosing on prestige? Do they just want to go to College Park and watch big time sports?
I know it is true in Colorado as one can get a CU engineering degree from Colorado Mesa, but I don’t know many students making that choice (to go to Mesa rather than Boulder) even though Mesa is much cheaper. Same degree, different cost, location, experience.
Yes, those applicants may not be driving down yields elsewhere, but they may be driving up yields at their in-state universities.
“National” private colleges and universities typically have a far more limited effect along those lines. Arguably it might still apply to some faculty kids and alums and such, and obviously recruited athletes are in their own special category. But ultimately, for at least most of their unhooked admits, they are not going to have much “home advantage”.
Do you know any actual professors? Who teach at universities, who conduct research, who collaborate with scholars from all over the world and attend symposia, are the keynote speakers at conferences?
Because your posts always sound like you are describing Little League coaches critiquing the other team’s pitcher, not actual faculty.
Yes, it’s qualitative. And it’s a shame that the same darn 30 schools roughly populate the top 30 rankings year after year. But to take my Cal Tech example- it would take a ton of QUANTITATIVE data to persuade an actual working scientist that a physics grad from Eastern Genovia State had gotten the same education as a physics grad from Cal Tech.
To play devil’s advocate, I think college administrators (that is who actually gets the survey) are at least in a position to know who they typically compete with in terms of attracting admits, which is what your revealed preference idea is fundamentally about. I agree it would be better to do it directly IF you had the data to do it that way, but absent that, I think this sort of peer reputation survey is a better proxy than most, if not all, of what is actually available to the public.
That said, I don’t think the thing we are trying to measure actually really exists in a coherent form anyway. So “better proxy” in this context is a very limited notion.
Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t suggest people choosing a college actually think in terms of generic prestige/popularity. But if that is how they want to think despite my advice, then they might as well do it in a way that actually uses the most relevant information available on that specific sort of subject.
For those who want to find out which schools educate the best, I would think that nobody would know that more than other educators/deans of schools – they know who’s doing the research, writing the books, perhaps even who has the best teachers, etc.
Test scores and selectivity don’t necessarily tell us which schools have the best teaching. And many (perhaps even most…) outcomes are fairly predictable according to major/vocation and COL, and those largely depend on student choice. Schools with a lot of pre-professional majors may tend to have higher ROI than schools with a lot of Humanities and SS majors – that doesn’t mean their quality of education is better. (Can you tell? I’m not a fan of using ROI to judge the quality of a school. hehe)
There is some truth to what you are saying. But these people get the survey year after year. And when they ignore the survey, US News uses theirs from the prior year. They don’t change their minds. Schools doing great things are sometimes kept down, schools stuck in their old ways are sometimes propped up - not on purpose. US News would do better, but it is not in their best interest. And, parents and students should see it for what it really is.
Having been in that world a bit, I would agree that while what they care about may not be of the highest relevance to someone choosing an undergrad program, it isn’t accurate to say it is capricious. As you are explaining, there are actually a lot of reasons why they are pretty highly attuned to what is going on academically at competing institutions.
And of course if they don’t know for some institution, the survey methodology does not require them to provide a rating (“Respondents who did not know enough about a school to evaluate it fairly were asked to mark ‘don’t know’ or leave it blank, neither of which counted for or against a school’s score.”).
It would be interesting to see what the response patterns actually look like. But given this instruction, my assumption is most of the responses for any given college are coming from other colleges that are competing in some way, such that they actually have a reason to monitor what is going on with them academically.
worth noting that they are not being asked to rate their 5 peer schools. they are being asked to rate 50+ schools (someone fact check me). they are truly not qualified to do this IMO. and even if you think they are… 20% is way too much weight for the power it holds.
Like I said- the work is sloppy, incomplete, has flaws.
But I push back on the notion that faculty ranking their peers is a popularity contest. Popularity is a mostly foreign concept for these people where the competition for entry into the “Academy of X” or winning the Y Medal for lifetime achievement is brutal.
And university Z adding a certificate program in Big Data or AI (which parents desperately want to impact the ratings) is really a rounding error in the grand scheme of things, no?
I note US News actually includes questions specifically about undergraduate teaching quality in its peer surveys. I consider it rather telling that is NOT the information they use in their main rankings. However, they do provide separate rankings based on those survey results:
I actually like pointing people to these when the occasion arises, if for no other reason than they are not simply “the usual suspects” with minor reordering. Of course sometimes those particularly famous/popular colleges are doing quite well, and that’s not necessarily “wrong” in my view, like they could be AMONG the colleges doing a relatively good job with undergraduate teaching. But plenty of colleges are doing much better on these rankings than their generic US News rankings, and to me that is something some people might really benefit from knowing.
Again, the instructions explicitly say not to provide a response for a college if they don’t have the knowledge to fairly assess it.
It is therefore up to each administrator to decide how many other colleges they can fairly assess. I again think it would be interesting to know more about what that actually looks like in practice.
They are not looking at teaching. They are looking at top schools.
Princeton Review looks at teaching I believe - I haven’t looked at their methodology but many on here will put up the rank of best teaching or undergrad experience, etc.
But let’s agree that these education professionals are not so committed to the US News survey that they are doing the proper research when they are unsure. They are asked to rate 1-5. Not sure (without confirming) if they can use decimals. But I know the end avg result is in tenths.
Genrally speaking, I like to see the world progress. That includes colleges doing great things. It is not easy to make a dent in US News without reverse engineering and gaming; schools market to the other schools. It is bothersome overall.
But even with all this, as I pointed out earlier. “Some” progress has been made as has been evidenced by only 1/2 the ivies left in the top 10.
The overall methodology is different than the by major. The overall - whether you agree or disagree - does use quantitative measures. The by major doesn’t.
And to address blossoms point of me acting like they are little league coaches - i think you give people way too much credit. You have a sophistication in how you talk that even 99% of college profs likely don’t have. When you talk to them, they are regular people - with the same issues, challenges and prospects/excitements as the rest of us mere mortals. They also put on their pants one leg at a time.