<p>Not only that US NEWS WORLD REPORT rankings are notorious for not providing explanations for its specific weights in each sub-factors that it employed in ranking, (e.g. 25% for peer review and somewhat percent for endowment, It is significantly likely US NEWS played around these weights to produce rankings that feed the satisfaction of so-called “common sense”, ivy league being top and dropping public universities like Berkeley on the bottom, ignoring what’s really happening in education and research capabilities of universities)
But I also encountered a wiki-entry for how and why universities are planning on boycott the ridiculous US NEWS ranking. See: <a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_college_and_university_rankings_(2007_United_States[/url])”>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_college_and_university_rankings_(2007_United_States)</a></p>
<p>It’s saying university presidents (including Stanford) are refusing to cooperate with US NEWS for submission of peer reviews in their ranking, for it "
1, imply a false precision and authority that is not warranted by the data they use;
2, obscure important differences in educational mission in aligning institutions on a single scale;
3, say nothing or very little about whether students are actually learning at particular colleges or universities;
4, encourage wasteful spending and gamesmanship in institutions’ pursuing improved rankings;
5, overlook the importance of a student in making education happen and overweight the importance of a university’s prestige in that process;
6, and degrade for students the educational value of the college search process."</p>
<p>Summarizing, US NEWS is for sure the one ranking that deserves total banishing.</p>
<p>A better ranking, I would recommend, is the Washington Monthly Ranking. The overall ranking result may be as controversial as that of US News, however you can check individual rankings of each subcategory by yourself, and they are really consistent with other rankings, informative as well to those who are blinded by US NEWS bombardment recent years. (e.g. Caltech ranks 41th in this ranking, laughed by a lot “common sens-ers”, but it does indeed rank 1st in the subcate of faculty in national academics. This ranking is overall more reasonable in that you can really choose a factor for yourself (instead of by others in the US NEWS case) and assign different weights and eventually have your own ranking the matters the most to you.</p>
<p>…how about we just stop trying to ‘rank’ something that is, by most accounts, impossible to rank. </p>
<p>Simply collect meaningful data on a range of relevant topics and publish that… let people decide for themselves what is and isn’t important because at the end of the day that’s all that matters.</p>
<p>that’s exactly what I suggested. Ignore the ranking they provide but look into their data, and decide for yourself/ Problem with US NEWS is, they provide no data, yet believe their misleading ranking is “better than none,”</p>
<p>I never did buy in much too rankings. There are too many political factors involved whether they admit it or not and trying to objectively measure things that are so subjective is frought with misgivings to begin with. </p>
<p>Just flip a quarter as too which of the most expensive schools on earth can be #1 this year and be done with it. </p>
<p>The, of course, we can slice and dice the “rankings” so that a particular school can be the best public in the northwest southeast left coast without merit aid but with good dorms so that nearly everyone can be top 25 in something. </p>
<p>I use common sense. </p>
<p>The truest measure of any education is what you can do with it the minute you leave campus. By that standard I got a mighty fine education at my local CommCollege and then transfering to a state public. I worked hard. I studied. I got an internship. I went to grad school. I passed the national exam after college for my field that proves I knew the minimum to be in my field. Etc. etc. </p>
<p>The colleges I went to were not top tier, although, looking back on it in some ways they certainly are recognized for being pretty good especially my high school and the CC I went to. So, to make a long story short, I worry more about programs and value than rankings.</p>
<p>Well, then, don’t pay attention to the rankings if they aren’t of concern to you. I think they provide useful data, and anyone who thinks that there are meaningful differences between, say, #5 and #15 is an idiot anyway.</p>
<p>Rankings are a “use at your own risk” proposition. I think they’re helpful in a general sense, especially if a student is looking for several schools with a similar student profile, but many of the factors that help a student choose a good fit aren’t even considered in rankings, US News or any of the others.</p>
<p>frazzled, That’s very true. The biggest problem I have with rankings is as described in the article that it drives gamesmanship. If as speculated, it forces colleges to send out “invitations” to apply to kids who have only slim chance to get in.</p>
<p>The rankings don’t “force” students to do anything, and they don’t “force” colleges to do anything. It’s information. Take it or leave it. The end.</p>
<p>It is information. You don’t have to agree with how they weight it, and you don’t have to treat it like it’s sacrosanct. I found it useful to have teacher/student ratios and acceptance rates. Yeah, I know teacher / student ratios can be manipulated, but still, better than nothing. No one forces you to treat it like the Second Coming, any more than you’re obligated to buy a Volvo for safety because it’s at the top of Consumer Reports.</p>
<p>And you can find teacher/student ratios and acceptance rates as well as many other factors employed in the rankings in other places, including each school’s common data set, collegeboarddotcom, and, I’m pretty sure, right here on CC in the College Search section. It’s not that hard to find endowment info, either. You can’t find the peer review stuff except in rankings, but I think that’s somewhat suspect anyway.</p>
<p>It’s convenient to have it all in one place, which is how USNews is helpful even for folks who genuinely don’t care what each school’s rank supposedly is.</p>
<p>I’m past that stage too, Iglooo - blessedly! But you can see all that stuff in columns in the US News version and I was always too lazy to make up a spreadsheet. You’d need to do more clicking to get it all on one page otherwise, I think.</p>
<p>They are what are used when one is using terms like “3rd level” schools, top 25, top 100, for the most part, so yes, it behooves a person to know what the rankings are. But they do change year to year so the terms are not exact. Top 25 really means top 35 at any given time and schools on the border line can not quite be ine category described. But, the rankins are often used in placing schools and candidates.</p>
<p>I don’t trust the US News Rankings and it is sad that people blindly swallow their rankings.</p>
<p>As others said, US News bases its rankings on factors such as wealth and prestige rather than how they actually educate their students. US News tries to instill into our minds that there is a top 3 (Harvard, Yale, Princeton) when there actually is not.</p>
<p>Ranking without a context is useless. Different categories have different rankings. For example, for Computer Engineering, I would go for Caltech, UIUC, CMU. For Law I would go for Harvard, Yale. For Accounting, I would go for UT, UIUC, not Harvard or U Penn…For doing STEM cell research, I would go to UW Madison. For Analytical Chemistry, I will go to UNC or UT. For going into International relations, I would go to Harvard, Stanford or G-Town…etc, etc.
For kids who are yet to decide what to do with their lives, yeah, you may trust the published ranking for general directions. And, as mentioned by others, the ranking is only directionally correct at best.</p>