You mentioned Davis, Santa Barbara etc, their peers in the rankings are places like UWisconsin and UIUC who have 30-40% admit rates.
Anyway I’m not sure what your focus on admit rates is, then northeastern should be top 20? We all know these things can be gamed. If the rankings are just supposed to be about admit rates we don’t need them.
UC San Diego, UC David, UC Irvine are three UC schools right around BC, NYU and Tufts. The difference in acceptance rate is startling, to name just one thing.
All equally ranked at #34 are : Boston University, UC Davis, UC Irvine, UF, UIUC, UT Austin, U Wisconsin, Wake Forest
Clearly they don’t just look at admit rates for the rankings.
Damn right! Must be looking at days of sunshine or trees per student.
…or faculty accolades/awards – academic rep.
The schools tied for 34th are either old public academic powerhouses with a bunch of Nobels and across-the-board academic strength (Wisconsin, Illinois, Texas. Washington belongs here too…) or recent up-and-comers (Davis, Irvine, Florida) who are doing well in one or more of the other ranking factors. BU also has a very strong, and old, academic rep.
Being able to easily change your major is essential for a high quality education because no 18 year old should be locked into a major or denied the freedom to explore other options.
Getting the classes you need to graduate in 4 years is also foundational.
Schools that do not provide these things should be punished in the rankings.
For these reasons (and others), I think that the UCs are grossly overrated, but I suppose that it is more a function of the methodologies used by the ranking services.
But these factors are not unique to UCs. Ask anyone who’s trying to transfer into engineering at UIUC, or into Stern at NYU, to name just two examples. And getting into the classes you need is an issue at many publics.
Yes. Any school with these issues should be penalized. But some methodologies gloss over this.
I agree all generic undergrad rankings are inherently silly. Indeed, if I go shopping for an affordable, efficient commuter car, it is not useful to give me a ranking of personal vehicles that also includes motorcyles and pickup trucks and luxury executive sedans and supercars and so on.
I do appreciate some colleges have more flexibility to explore than others, which might be helpful, but that is still like the passenger-SUV/minivan of colleges. And some people can benefit by trimming things they know they don’t need so their college can focus more resources on things they most value.
So why do people care? Well, from what I have seen, many people don’t. Others like me have a sort of intellectual interest in the subject, but would never actually use these things to pick a college.
But then I think some fraction of people do care, because they use them to keep score in peer competitions, including parental peer competitions. And you NEED a generic ranking to keep score in a game like that.
Exactly. The bottom line is that what may affect one kid may not be an issue for another, even within the same school, so doing research - very easy these days with the internet and active college forums on Reddit - to see if school X has pros or cons according to what the individual student wants as an added filter to the rankings (which despite we say here many still use as a starting point at least) makes sense. Trying to tailor the rankings to take account of every single issue is a non starter (…and even if they included every single issue, somebody would be complaining about how the factors are weighted…).
Yeah, I actually think rankings of all sorts are fine in the early idea-generating phase.
Like most people do not know about many colleges before they go through this process, and rankings can help them identify some colleges to explore. And then different rankings focusing on different things is good. Oh, I didn’t know this college had such a strong research program in Neuro. I didn’t know this college did so well in per capita English PhD placement. And so on.
So it is really only problematic to me when you choose one ranking, and then make that the end and not beginning of the process of investigating colleges.
Ive been waiting for this day so I can feel reassured that both my kids are attending T20 schools.
Now I can go on with my life and think long and hard why Im still eating cherry turnovers and not organic kale.
We only used the rankings and different one’s at that to get to know different schools /name’s.
But there is only one school for second chance 1 sec football attempts 
.
Just left Reddit website (and a few others) and a ton of complaints as to why Princeton remained #1 on US News rankings for 15 years. I have my answer.
US News has a ridiculous, Woke methodology, and it is designed to be manipulative to push the institutions they favor up high on the ranking. Many on this board agree that it’s flawed, and many of those are mystified as to why Princeton (a great university) remained #1 for so long. Well, I’m here to shed some light on this mystery. Professionall investigators (detectives, IRS agents, divorce attorneys, et al) looking for connections to solve a case have an old saying ”Follow the money trail.”
In this college ranking context, to understand why Princeton held its reign so long look no further than the Billionaire magnate Mortimer Zuckerman, who OWNS US News (among other entities). Although not an alumnus, he has as close an affiliation with Princeton as one can get. For 35-40 years he was the Chairman of the Board and trustee of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.
Although technically independent of the university proper, he was a major benefactor of the institution. The IAS and Princeton University are closely associated and enjoy an intellectual, cooperative, mutually beneficial institutional relationship. So Zuckerman’s chairmanship of the IAS board put him into Princeton’s academic/intellectual ecosystem at a high level, even though his position was technically not connected to Princeton University governance. His decades-long positions fostered significant personal relationships with Princeton University trustees, presidents and faculty.
As investigators always say, “If you can’t find a money trail leading to solving a case, there is usually some type of trail. Find it and Follow it.”
“There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.”
Ernest Hemingway
Has anyone on Reddit pointed out that Mortimer Zuckerman has not served in an official capacity at IAS in 24 years or that IAS and Princeton University are completely independent institutions? If not, I hope no one over there will be making any major life decisions without guidance.
An alternative explanation. USNWR is an organization focused on making a profit. Making millions in revenue each year is the priority, rather than the college where Zuckerman was on board for institute of advanced study being ranked #1. Towards this effort of making millions, USNWR wants their rankings to look right to readers, which means HYPSM need to be on top. However, they need to use a numerical formula to make the rankings look scientific with numbers and stuff, rather than just arbitrarily list the top 5 as HYPSM.
The solution is to choose a formula that emphasizes metrics that are well correlated with endowment per student, as the top 5 nationally ranked colleges by endowment per student are HYPSM. USNWR rankings formula is probably more correlated with endowment per student than any other single metric – financial resources metric is correlated with endowment, faculty salaries metric is correlated with endowment, graduation rate and graduate rate performance is correlated with endowment (top financial aid), etc. Princeton continues to have a higher endowment per student than all peers each year, contributing to why it continues to rank well compared to all peers in USNWR’s formula each year.
However, USNWR also needs to give readers a reason to pay $60 to unlock the new rankings each year, rather than use previous year’s rankings. The solution is to tweak the formula a little each year, so there are a few differences in ranking order each year. The top 5 or top 20 are essentially the same colleges, but the order of a few of them moves around a bit within top 5/20/… This year that change was switching the 5% weighting on graduate indebtedness to a 5% weighting on earnings per major. MIT ranked #1 by the new metric, while Princeton was #8. The impact was enough to swap the order of the 2 colleges, with the formula yielding 100/100 for MIT vs 99/100 for Princeton, instead of the usual 99/100 for MIT vs 100/100 for Princeton.
You lost me at woke methodology. The idea of US news being woke, and a woke methodology favoring Princeton of all places, suggest that whatever you mean cannot have anything to do with what I understand woke to mean.
The entire process is an exercise in false precision.
Absolutely. This model really does seem to explain everything they do quite adequately.
I’ll just note that in a happy coincidence for the US News marketing team, de facto ranking colleges by institutional wealth per capita also ends up coming pretty close to ranking them by popularity among high numbers kids, and thus by selectivity. Again there is no great mystery here, colleges with a lot of financial resources can buy nice things (including as relevant generous aid programs), and lots of prospective high numbers students want access to those nice things, and then those colleges can be more selective.
This natural relationship between institutional resources, popularity among high numbers kids, and selectivity is what I think has made this such an easy game for US News to play all these years. You can think about colleges with any of those as your primary focus, and the US News rankings will generally look reasonable to you.
Obviously we don’t want to wander into unrelated political topics. But just thinking in terms of values relevant to colleges–yeah, the US News is not exactly trying to lead a revolution against established hierarchies. Quite the opposite, it is mostly serving as a mirror, reflecting and thereby reinforcing existing hierarchies.
If you want to see people taking on that sort of thinking, even mildly, you need to look at sources like Pope’s Colleges That Change Lives, Selingo’s Dream Schools, and so on.
Or, really, a lot of the community here, who will try to help kids and parents think more personally and more broadly about college choice.
But US News? Really basically as far away from challenging the status quo as you can imagine.