The 25 Most desirable Rural Schools - Newsweek

[LasMa]

<p>Another article from that same issue of Newsweek:</p>

<p>[Can</a> You Trust College Rankings? - Newsweek - Education](<a href=“http://education.newsweek.com/2010/09/12/can-you-trust-college-rankings.html]Can”>http://education.newsweek.com/2010/09/12/can-you-trust-college-rankings.html)</p>

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Imagine a magazine that claimed to rank all of the year’s music releases in descending order of “quality.” No. 1 might be the latest album by a popular hip-hop artist; No. 2, a Beethoven symphony; No. 3, a movie soundtrack; No. 4, an R&B collection. What an obviously silly idea! But it gets worse. Suppose the basis for these rankings turned out to be an arbitrary mathematical formula dreamed up by the magazine editors, and the data used to compute the rankings all came from the record companies themselves.</p>

<p>You would throw the magazine in the wastebasket. Yet that, in essence, is a description of the most popular college rankings. They gloss over crucially important variations in the curricular, pedagogical, philosophical, and social characteristics of different schools. They rely on a magazine editor’s guesswork about the factors to consider and the relative weights to assign to those factors. And they depend on information—much of it unverifiable—that is supplied by the very institutions whose ranking will supposedly determine their reputations in the marketplace

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