<p>@tk21769 The Princeton Review tries to measure student satisfaction with a mix of self-reported and school-reported metrics. Its ratings are dubious but perhaps not nonsensical. e.g. Top LACs like Reed, Swarthmore, Williams, as one might expect, have the highest academic ratings. The top universities have slightly lower academic ratings, because of class sizes, TA use, etc. (For some reason, Princeton scored lower than Harvard and Yale, both of which tied with Chicago this year. The ratings have a fair bit of noise.)</p>
<p>Here’s my shameless plug: I think that the Alumni Factor rankings are worth a look, which is why I keep posting on the thread I made about them. The company surveys a few hundred alumni from each of fifteen-hundred schools per year about their college experiences, correcting for age, gender, statistical outliers, and other differences in the schools’ samples. (Presumably, the alumni do not know that their responses are to be used to rate their colleges.) The top 227 schools are ranked. The results are neither out-of-the-blue nor predictable. </p>
<p>cf. Ranking of alumni satisfaction with intellectual development: Reed, Swarthmore, Chicago, and Yale are in the top twenty, along with not-so-usual suspects like Sewanee: University of the South, Centre College, and Kalamazoo College. SLACs do much better than universities, and small schools do much better than large schools. The results aren’t shocking for those who have looked at books like Colleges That Change Lives and Looking Beyond the Ivy League. </p>