Rank these Eastern colleges... 1-5 please

carolyn
Sat, 19 May 2007 16:34:51 +0000

I was just reading “The Best Northeastern Colleges” (2007 ediition) by Princeton Reveiw. This book ranked U. Rochester’s “academic” rating at 65. After all I’ve heard about U. Rochester (you folks as well) I just don’t get this.>>

Always pay attention to the methodology whenever you look at “rankings.” In the Princeton Review’s case, the “methodology” is that they “survey” students of the individual colleges. The surveys are not necessarily statistically accurate (like US News’ peer reviews, PR doesn’t tell you how many surveys were actually counted - one? 100? 1000?). So, there’s a lot of wiggle room for bias and inaccuracy. As someone else said above, take rankings like these with a very big grain of salt.

And, as the answers to your question shows, ask any random group of people for their opinions, and you’ll likely get a lot of different answers depending on individual experience, knowledge, and perspective. It’s not just the group of schools you mentioned – try asking people to rank the Ivy league schools and see what happens.

The best “ranking” is to come up with your own criteria, decide on each criteria’s importance, and then compare the differences yourself (i.e., class sizes, depth of departments, faculty backgrounds, fiancial aid, merit scholarship opportunities, etc.). Ultimately, what matters is how YOU and your child rank the schools based on your own research and specific needs/interests/desires.