Again, niche bases its ratings on STUDENT reviews. I don’t understand why people even question its credibility or take it seriously, unless they are a student. If I were a student, I would consider the niche rankings to be the best.
Regarding the use of parking as a component in Niche rankings:
“I couldn’t find s parking space. I spent an hour driving around. It made me late for the rally protesting corporate polluters.”
@Lindagaf I think the comments by students or their ratings of individual aspects of a college (food, academics, and yes, even parking) are helpful. But an overall rankings is flawed because how do you possible weigh all those, not to mention how they can be easily skewed by small number of very positive or very negative reviews?
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Yes insane dreamer, that is my point. The niche rankings are useless, so why is there a whole thread about them?
The Niche methodology is explained here:
https://colleges.niche.com/rankings/best-colleges/methodology/
And here:
https://colleges.niche.com/rankings/methodology/
All the sub category methodologies are laid out as well.
I don’t feel the Niche rankings are useless. Like religion, to each their own. Take what you want and leave the rest. And any other cliché you would like to add.
@khanam I think you might be missing the point of the Niche rankings. They’re meant to rank the overall college experience, not just the academics. That’s why they consider things like campus food and dorm quality; those are very important to a student actually living at a college. For example, University of Chicago is ranked so low compared to typical rankings because, even though the academics are top-notch, a lot of students don’t find that school particularly fun. The opposite is true for UT-Austin.
@Marakov29 Fair enough but then they should not combine it with academic rankings. They are way over-emphasizing quality of life aspects at college. No one makes decisions on where to go to college having given that much weightage to aspects like dorms, food, parking etc. If those were material in selecting colleges, Yale’s yield would be incredibly low. Yale’s quality of life aspects are very bad with the campus in a higher crime incidence area. Same with USC. I honestly think their methodology is too much of a hodgepodge to be worth anything.
@Marakov29 - how are they over emphasizing quality of life?
What percentage of the rank is it?