The True Top 15 US Colleges

phantasmagoric
Thu, 23 Feb 2012 14:12:35 +0000

kpackett,

You haven’t been on CC for very long so I’ll forgive your lack of knowledge on this. The revealed preference study you cite has been debated innumerable times; general consensus is that it’s biased toward Northeast universities. Search the forums for it and you’ll find plenty of discussion about it.

Prestigious schools are most certainly not universally agreed upon. Sure, we can say that Harvard is prestigious, but it becomes mucky once you reach the ‘gray area’ of prestige, wherein it’s difficult to say whether X or Y is more prestigious. For example, which is more prestigious, Northwestern or JHU? The difference in general doesn’t matter, but if you’re going to incorporate it into an overall ranking, you should at least attempt to be scientific about it.

US News is “fair” only in the sense that it isn’t idiotic in the criteria it chooses (rankings like Forbes are considered “idiotic”). I’d allow the US News ranking to be included in a composite ranking, but on the whole US News is pretty controversial.

The fact that you think Forbes is legitimate tells me just how much you know about college rankings. *No one/i takes the Forbes ranking seriously. It includes Who’s Who membership (completely stupid - practically everyone is in Who’s Who), data from RateMyProfessors (which makes no sense, since most universities have their own internal review system, so students don’t use RMP), PayScale data (completely erroneous, since all of it is self-reported; self-reporting = automatic statistical insignificance), and “awards” that Forbes decided are prestigious. None of these makes sense. The resulting ranking also makes little sense.



Would you not deny that saying “I go to Stanford or Princeton” carries more prestige in a conversation that saying “I go to UC Berkeley”?



I never indicated that all top universities are equally prestigious. I was wondering where you got your data re: prestige. For each criterion, you included a linked source, but for #6 (prestige) you don’t even mention where you got such data or how you incorporated it.



But post your own rankings on this thread, phantasmagoric! I am curious about what other people think.



There are literally hundreds (if not thousands) of rankings that have been posted on this site. They’re all flawed and nobody agrees on any ranking. If I had the time and will to make a ranking, there’d still be no point in discussing it, since it always happens the same way. I can tell you now that this thread will end as follows: people will argue about your criteria, they’ll go on tangents vaguely related to the topic (for example, this thread is fertile ground for a multi-page debate on PhD production), the thread will fizzle out once people are bored (or once a mod locks it), and few if anybody will have gained much insight, most likely none. When it comes to rankings, I’ve never seen a thread on this site that didn’t progress this way.