<p>Lol, it’s ridiculous. Michigan has so many departments ranked in the top 10 (only Stanford can boast better), and it still doesnt crack top 25 because it’s public? also: Berkeley at 22? What is going on?</p>
<p>actually this drop in rankings has nothing to do with acceptance rates. usnews changed their formula last year, and actually almost everytime they change the formula, it’s designed to lower the rankings of elite public universities, but they claim it’s to become more “objective”. they have lowered the importance of peer assessment score, which was actually one of the best indicators of academic reputation. The faculty resources, alumni giving rate score formulas are atrocious. I’m simply not going to care about these rankings anymore, it was a stretch for michigan for be simply top 25, now its just ridiculous with michigan at 29.</p>
<p>US News is biased against public schools. It’s so perfectly clear. For example, does Notre Dame have as many elite grad departments as UMich does? There are quite a few schools in the Top 25 that make you scratch your head. Berkeley has many strong departments too … it doesn’t deserve to be #22 either. </p>
<p>why do people take rankings so seriously? biggest waste of time and thought. Its like people on CC are just a bunch of mindless sheep flocking whichever way the rankings tell them to go. Just go on the college life/admissions subforum, its so immature.</p>
<p>^ It’s because the US News rankings create a general perception of the strongest universities to the public. On the forum here, WE know that Michigan is way better than it is ranked by US News. To the high schooler applying to colleges, Michigan will seem weaker because if they look at the rankings, it will be a turn off to a highly qualified student.</p>
<p>Giants, the only public that jumped us in UCLA. And other publics are not doing well either. Cal dropped from 21 to 22 and UCLA and UVA dropped from 24 to 25.</p>
<p>^^^USC is a private school and to be honest, I dont trust their numbers. It had already been proven last year when they cooked their engineering grad school numbers on NAE faculty which resulted in them going ahead of Michigan. After that error was corrected, they are now once again ranked below Michigan in that discipline</p>