And certain - not all - wealthy people simply prefer to retain some notion of elite status at a college rather than have it cater to the upwardly mobile. Admittedly the US way of “my kid can get in if I donate enough” doesn’t help disabuse of that notion, albeit it only applies to a very small percentage of students.
The thing with rankings is they are one easy list. It takes time to go through all those things you list..if students even know all of them exist in the first place. Wouldn’t it be great to have a one stop database of all of that, the student can plug in an AI command saying “show me the best colleges for these x criteria” and have it spit out a personalized ranking?
Yes. But not AI, please. 
There is clearly some existing data on things like: Outcomes for students with or without Pell grants. Outcomes for students with and without need. Outcomes for students from X county in Y state. Outcomes for students with Z major. Etc. So any ranking like this one that is supposed to be based on outcomes (of whatever type you pick, be it grad rate, salary, how many earn PhD, or whatever) should be able to be customized for things like student’s location, family income, intended major etc.
The NYT did basically this kind of thing in an article a couple years ago (I don’t have the link handy right now, someone can come up with it I expect), but I’m sure it can be made a lot more sophisticated than that.
This is a little random, but all this discussion about high net worth families wanting to maintain their wealth made me think of this article I ran across many years ago about an accountant that helped pro athletes manage their money. There may be an assumption here that people with money come from money and have the ability to know how to maintain it.
I think some of the discussion about status seeking and status keeping is a little off the mark when it comes to the college experience. There are people of means who go to elite colleges, people without means who go to elite colleges and vice versa – people with means who go to flagships or other smaller school schools, and those without means who go to schools that are the most affordable for them. Then there are the parents who bribe their kids with a car if they chose the cheapest school in my mind, which gives the wrong message about college.
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AI already supports this… at least to a point where it is more useful than WSJ ranking for a particular student. For example, I cut and pasted my earlier post about the high achieving BME pre-med kid with lower income into ChaptGPT and asked it to make a ranked college list. The top ranked college was Dartmouth. ChaptGPT liked Dartmouth for this student because it was typically $0 cost to parents at the stated $60k income; offers BME major that is specially tailored to pre-med and pre-med course requirements; has Geiser Biomedical Engineering Early Assurance Program for early medical school admission; and meets the stated personal preference for small classes, small college feel, and good advising better than most. It’s certainly not perfect, but I think personalized AI ranking/list is more helpful in creating a starting point than WSJ or similar ranking.
And a quick Google search showed that about 1.38 million families in the US comprise the top 1% of wealth. Their offspring can’t all go to the top 20 schools, even if they wanted to.
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Do you see all these?
#2 WSJ Best Colleges in America 2 consecutive years
#1 Linkedin for network strength, #1 for Alumni Founders, #1 for alums working internationally, #1 for entrepreneurship, #7 college overall
#1 US News in Entrepreneurship for 29 consecutive years, #1 business specialty school
#1 Money Magazine Best College for Business Majors
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I’m glad you got something useful out of it… When I try this, typically 1/3 to 1/2 of the colleges it suggests for my D do not even fit the criteria I gave it (budget for a full pay student, availability of desired major, etc.). I try correcting it, and it keeps making mistakes. Maybe someday…
What’s really amazing, is by and large, not all but most seem to use US News. The rest are fodder for us, likely not applicants.
I find that I get much better results, if I phrase the prompt in such a way that it uses slow thinking mode where it make take as long as a minute before it creates an output list.
Once again, I stand by my statement that Babson is an excellent school. However, selected statistics will not convince me that it is close to the #2 overall school in the US.
At this point best to respectfully agree to disagree.
I tried AI a while back for this and it had a hard time distinguishing between schools that offer BS Arch (4 years pre-professional ) and BArch (5 years professional)
We also had some doozies come up in AI at work today. Did you know that the US falls under the “Africa” region?! 
Errors in compiling colleges may not be as obvious as that one.
I appreciate how each year you have increased your respect for Babson. Next year, who knows?
Out of how many?
This is part of the problem with these rankings, here is an example where you are comparing a specialty school based on X factors vs the entirety of other colleges rather than just their business school outcomes. The average person will choose Stern or Wharton over Babson if they have that option, just like more broadly the average person will choose Cal or UCLA over Merced despite what this ranking list says.
I only wish that USN would evolve their rankings to include an all college list. Then the complaining would begin again… when Babson does exceptionally well.
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I have no issues with peer assessment. In fact, I think it’s essential for the reason that us news is so prone to being gamed by institutions submitting their own data; the peer assessment is perhaps the only metric that can’t be fudged because prestige and reputation takes generations to build. My issue with US News is the idea that a school like Berkeley — a school with near-mythical prestige that took more than 150 years to build — is all the sudden less prestigious than schools like, let’s say ucla or northwestern, because of graduation rate without taking into account rigor. There should be a disclaimer that says, “this is not a measure of prestige, please see our global rankings.”
I do not disagree with you.
My respect for Babson has been quite consistent on CC. Here is what I wrote last Sept.:
“Babson (a college I happen to like very much)”
”If the survey was entitled “Best ROI (Return on Investment) Colleges” I might feel differently”.
I’ve always liked Babson. Looked at Babson and Bentley with S and was impressed by both (he ultimately decided he preferred a school that wasn’t so business focused but of course that was just his personal choice). FWIW i would have been happy to send him to either of those colleges.
I will stop posting here at this point.
(Edited by moderator to comply with forum rules)
For their kids’ college, they may prefer that the college has the prestige of academic eliteness so that, even if their particular kids get in through development admission or some other hook, the prestige of academic eliteness rubs off onto their kids.
Absolutely… as we even now see some public figures bragging about where they went to school to try prove that they’re smart. But I digress.
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