<p>Alex,
It never ceases to amaze me how little you think of students. You must not have known many smart ones at your school. You know, from the paying customer’s perspective, what the student gets in the classroom is a heckuva lot more important than how many faculty awards Professor Smith receives or how many impenetrable articles are published in obscure academic journals. </p>
<p>In my experience, both as a student and as a recruiter, students are practically the only ones who know the real story about what goes on in the classroom. At good schools, undergrads expect a lot and usually they get a lot. And when they are asked, they don’t submerge their interests by defaulting to research reputations (often forged by grad programs). They want a good product in the classroom. </p>
<p>Given the amount of money that college students are spending these days, most students are paying attention to what they receive in the classroom and most can tell good stuff from bad stuff. They can sniff out which profs really care about the students’ interests and development and which don’t. </p>
<p>Student-based rankings are an excellent tool for divining the nature of the experience that prospective students will encounter when they get to a college. Like any other data point, they need substantiation when the prospective student learns about and/or visits the school, but this input can be invaluable, particularly for students interested in finding places where student learning is favored over research activity.</p>