I’ve seen on niche that there are certain ranking indicators about how disappointed students are at certain schools. For example at College of the Holy Cross, 35% of students surveyed would not choose to attend this school if they could do it all over again… are there any other lists similar to this on niche or on college confidential??
Holy Cross is in Worcester. Need I say more?
Niche also ranks colleges with the most attractive guys and most attractive gals.
The problem with surveys like Niche is the small sample size.
Here are some indirect measures of customer satisfaction, which have a large sample size:
http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/ranking-criteria-and-weights
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Average first-year student retention rate (voting with your feet) Average alumni giving rate (voting with your checkbook)
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However, retention and graduation rates need to be considered in context of the college’s selectivity. A college that is not that selective will have lower rates because a greater percentage of students are not capable of handling the academic work and flunk out or drop out while barely passing.
Then those students are disappointed.
Niche also gives LIU a B+, while they have a 7% graduation rate.
I only trust Niche for things such as diversity or party scene. It’s not a good academic tool.
Holy Cross also consistently breaks the 50% mark in alumni giving, putting it in the top tier of liberal arts colleges by this measure.
Early in D’s college search I looked at niche for a few things and found such bizarre ratings that I wouldn’t give it much credence.
I lump Niche in with RateMyProfessor - in both cases the ratings are virtually useless, but if you read the comments with a healthy degree of skepticism you can find some useful anecdotal information.
CollegeResults is much more reliable source for metrics that can be considered relevant to student satisfaction (freshman-sophomore retention rate, outbound transfer rate, 4- 5- and 6-year graduation rates, median debt rate, etc.)
I think the freshman retention rate is probably a better indicator of overall student satisfaction than a blog. (and for what its worth 94.8% of Holy Cross freshmen return).
I disagree about Ratemyprofessor - it has saved me (and a lot of my friends) several times. It is pretty useful, at least at my school.
Ratemyprofessor is a useful tool to find easy professors who do not expect much from their students.
Definitely, but sometimes also high quality professors who may challenge you.
Also, let’s admit it: not everyone is in college for the sake of learning (whether or not that is okay is a topic of another discussion).
Then those students are disappointed.
Depends on what the definition of ‘disappointed’ is in this case. Some students might be very happy with the learning environment and social scene in a college and are just unable to keep up; they may be technically “disappointed” that they cannot continue at the school for whatever reason, but that doesn’t mean that they are disappointed in the school itself.
RMP seems to depend entirely on the population of the school. Some schools have higher RMP participation rates (more students use it) and so the scores/ratings are more valid. And some schools have very low RMP participation rates and so RMP is less useful there.
On Niche, Holy Cross only has 459 rankings. Even if you assumed that all 459 of those students are current students at Holy Cross, that’s still only about 16% of the student body. But we can’t assume all 459 of these students are current students or even students at all - it was really easy for me to make a fake account pretending to be a Holy Cross student and start a survey on Holy Cross (I didn’t complete it). Niche also encourages you to come back and fill out the survey more than once, which really just creates an echo chamber.
@yikesyikesyikes I don’t think we are actually in disagreement. RMP is useful, and I said so, but without the comments you have no way of knowing whether a professor got a low rating because they’re a terrible teacher, or because the student had some other reason to dislike them. Similarly, some professors get high ratings because they are genuinely great professors, while others get high ratings because they don’t challenge their students at all. The comments are where the real meat is.
Perhaps many aren’t thinking about what that question asks. If I applied to 10 schools and attend 1, if I could do it all over again would I still pick the same school I attend?
You will always have some students who didn’t get in where they wanted to go. And others who hear from their friends about a college experience that seems better than their own. Then there are some students, and they even can be ones who got in early decision, that are not thriving at college.
It’s almost like buying a car. Would you buy that same brand again? That same model? You might like it, but now like another even more.
Yes, I agree that the comments are very important.
Online rating like niche and ratemyprofessor (and this forum I strongly suspect . . . ) is that they tend to pull in the extremes. In other words, the highly motivated for one reason or the other will go online and rank something, maybe from joy or for an overwhelming sense of helping people or for maybe payback toward some professor that perhaps gave them a bad grade, deserving or not. These are not random samples. And that doesn’t mean there is nothing to learn from the comments! But they tend to miss the middle perspective . . . .
Comments on niche and RMP can be very useful but be sure you sort by date, newest first. My son looked on RPM when trying to decide between first year tutorial profs. One prof had a middling overall score but the comments went back 10+ years to when he/she had first started teaching. All of the low ratings were from 10 years ago, they steadily improved, and ratings/comments for recent years have been outstanding.
On niche, I remember looking at one small, very well regarded school and seeing some dire comments about many aspects of the school and its culture. Reading more closely, all of these negative comments were posted on the same day. In that context, it was clear that they were posted by a single disgruntled student.
For smaller schools in particular, rankings on these sites are very sensitive to extreme opinions.