A summary of Columbia’s ranking by year is below. Columbia’s ranking never recovered following the Columbia professor’s scathing review of methodology gaming and providing inaccurate stats, leading to Columbia’s removal from USNWR in 2023 edition. Professor Thaddeus’ analysis of how Columbia gamed/falsified their way to a #2 USNWR ranking is at Columbia and U.S. News
In any case, I wouldn’t assume lowest ranked in USNWR means easiest to be accepted with low stats. There are countless exceptions to that generalization. USNWR ranking and methodology is far more correlated with endowment per student than selectivity. For Cornell, which school you apply to is especially influential on selectivity. For example, Cornell is certainly not the least selective Ivy for a male applying to engineering.
In part because the name isn’t NJ and the major sports are poor etc.
If you’re coming from out west, I’d look less at rank and more at comfort.
Are there significant differences between Rutgers and Oregon or Colorado or Oklahoma, etc.
I’d think not - and large flagships will mainly draw regionally (not all but most). If he has comfort not having many from home it’s ok - but I put little faith that the rankings move the life meter in most majors, especially one like philosophy.
This might depend on whether a student is serious about philosophy (thinking about grad school, etc)… in which case it may matter what areas of philosophy are strong at that school, who the professors are (who will be recommending the student), etc. Back in the day when I was studying philosophy, these things did seem to matter.
Of course it may not matter as much if a student is just looking for an interesting major on the way to something else, like law school.
As in many fields, it gets complicated when a department is ranked primarily for its research/PhD program, and you are choosing an undergrad.
I think standard good advice for kids with an interest in fields like Philosophy is start by looking for generally good reading/writing/humanities sorts of colleges. You might also look at the relative popularity of the Philosophy major (or majors), taking into account the size of the Arts & Science program (like a relatively popular Philosophy major at a college with 2000 A&S students may still have less students than at a college with 10000 A&S students).
Then if you are looking at two colleges that both fit your other needs and also do well in these ways, you can look at departmental rankings as a tiebreaker sort of thing.
At the end of the day, quantifying how much difference this will actually make is basically impossible, although just because something can’t be easily quantified doesn’t mean it isn’t real.
And if nothing else, I think there is an independent virtue to being excited about wherever you are going to college. So if you are looking at comfortably affordable and generally suitable colleges but would be more excited about one for this reason, good enough for me!
Plus that grad student housing they built in UC Village which they have apparently been having trouble filling and thus have been heavily promoting to undergrads. D got emails almost every week towards the end of summer and into fall semester asking her to consider housing there, so as of early September they still apparently had empty rooms.
While USNWR comes in for some (justified) criticism, I do think it can make people aware of schools they might not be familiar with, especially schools in other parts of the country that may not get as much buzz at a given HS. Even though the ranking criteria might be specious or irrelevant to a given student, seeing that it’s in the top 50 or 100 or whatever might prompt them to look at a school that wasn’t previously on the radar.
The highest weighted criteria are variations of graduation rate. A summary is below. Vanderbilt and Rice lag behind, and are likely admitting a larger portion of students who have a significant risk of not graduating on time. Twice as many students did not graduate within 6 years at Rice/Vanderbilt as Duke.
The next highest component is the peer assessment survey where admins at different colleges on the list rate other colleges on a scale of 5=distinguished / 1=marginal. In a previous year (I don’t care about this enough to pay $30 to see the scores for this year), the average ratings were as follows. Again Rice and Vanderbilt lag behind, with fewer admins from other universities rating them as “distinguished.”
Combining the 2 most highly weighted criteria above, the expected final order is Duke, followed by Northwestern, followed by Rice/Vanderbilt. Consistent with this, Rice/Vanderbilt has been ranked lower than Duke/Northwestern in each of the past >20 years.
I agree Berkeley housing availability is better. I feel that my son’s apartment rent is over priced when they renewed for their third and last year there. I have also noticed that prices have dropped.
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