<p>In anything close to the real world most people look far beyond the “Top 15”. That might be truish in parts of NYC and CT but beyond that–not so much. In most states west of the Hudson any good state flagship carries plenty of weight.</p>
<p>That’s true. If one measures success by the ability to reside in a SuperZip (the Top 5% of zip codes by income and education), then those zip codes tend to be dominated by graduates from about 100 Top colleges and universities. I’ve never found exactly which schools are on that list, but you can guess it mirrors many of the lists we are familiar with.</p>
<p>
Thanks for telling me what I seem to think. 
I never said that, I didn’t even imply it, and I am sorry you inferred it. I was quite clear that the people I was talking about are a small but nonetheless significant minority of the people looking at colleges. So there is your first gross exaggeration. I never said anything close to “everyone else”. Second, I am glad you think consumers are not often irrational. Were that it were so. Take any Marketing 101 course and you will be quickly disabused of that notion. Pet rocks, anyone? Housing bubbles? Bernie Madoff? And those were supposedly sophisticated, wealthy people. Why weren’t they suspicious of 25% returns in a 3% market? History is full of silly fads and dangerous irrational lemming-like behavior.</p>
<p>
There are plenty of places that compile the kind of information you are talking about without ranking schools, both online and in print. Stop by your local Barnes and Noble and you will find a couple of shelves filled with them.</p>
<p>
The phrase “who’s taste you share” being key. How does that apply to something like a USNWR ranking system? I see very little evidence that the people that take it most seriously and to an extreme have any insight as to how they came to their conclusions and what it all really means. And for those that say that outside of the elite Northeast this really doesn’t occur, I can tell you that is flat out wrong. I see this all the time from all over. The DC area, Florida, Cali, Chicago, St. Louis, virtually everywhere. Again, it is far from the majority, and many people do use it just like you are suggesting.</p>
<p>But you are making my argument for me. If people are using the data but ignoring the rankings, then why rank at all? If the idea is to find schools that are similar so you can look into them more deeply and find schools you might have otherwise missed, then why not group schools as such, present the data in charts and lists and whatnot, and all of you that desire to save time and enjoy the convenience of such (perfectly rational!!) get exactly what you want. All I am saying is that there is no value in the ranking of the schools, and it has indeed led to a fair amount of irrational behavior and the odd phenomenon of shame when your kid isn’t going to a top 10 school. For most of us? No, of course not. but if it is even a small minority (and I think you all underestimate how much this and other ill effects do happen) that wouldn’t have these issues at all if they just didn’t rank the schools, then why rank them? You seem to be arguing that it is OK because you ignore the rankings anyway. Well, a lot of us ignore a lot of bad things because we know better. That doesn’t make the fact that they exist right.</p>
<p>Oh, and one last point. It is well known that many schools have done a lot of things that are less than noble to move up in the rankings. Well, if people are not using the rankings themselves in any meaningful way, then this behavior is irrational. But you said that people are rational. This seems like a contradiction.</p>
<p>On another note entirely, where will your daughter be heading off to school? Exciting times!!</p>
<p>I feel I should make one more point I am sure I have not made clear. I have no argument that when you look at the factors that most people would probably use to say a school is great, the HYP schools would come out on top. Highest academically achieving students, money, resources, faculty honors (although here there is always the question of how much contact undergrads really get with the most highly regarded faculty members. Sometimes they do but a lot of times there is very little), excellent programs, etc. That was never the issue for me per se, although I still hate the wording of “best” college but acknowledge its value for marketing purposes. But what I will argue with completely is that the factors and modeling that puts those schools in the top 10 or so is then valid to rank schools beyond that number. We all know that there are many things that apply to Harvard and Stanford, et. al. that don’t apply to any other schools. So beyond my previously stated complaints, this is really a serious issue, and clearly a completely invalid premise on the part of USNWR. Ergo since everyone knows HYP schools are what they are, the rankings really do have no meaning. And since the vast, vast majority of college bound seniors won’t be going to HYP schools, despite some of their and their parents’ delusions, this is indeed a significant issue. Unless you really believe almost no one takes the rankings seriously, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.</p>
<p>All ratings are just a tool. Yet I get the feeling that if you had your say, because some people abuse the tool, you would ban it for everyone. That’s a little like saying hammers are useful, but because some people bonk other people on the head with them, they ought to be banned. What next, Big Gulps? Oh, wait…</p>
<p>LOL. Love the last line. For the record, I am against banning the Big Gulps. And no, I wouldn’t ban the rankings ever. I am a free market and free speech guy all the way. That doesn’t mean in the least I can’t cry to the rafters how flawed and misused (by some) I think they are.</p>
<p>I know my posts were long and so you might have missed it. Where is your D going to school this fall? Or maybe you didn’t miss it and just don’t want to say, which is fine of course. Everyone feels differently about what they want to share in public. I am just curious, nothing more.</p>
<p>It is well established that thin, attractive, successful persons (TASPs) don’t drink Big Gulps. Let’s assign Average Daily Beverage Portion Size (ADBPS) a 22.5% weight in ranking TASPs and see where that takes us. Well divide the other 77.5% equally between Annual Income and the Body Mass Index. If Gwyneth Paltrow doesn’t wind up in the top 10, we’ll reassess.</p>
<p>^^^Excellent! I especially like Gwyneth Paltrow as the Ivy League standard in the annual TASP ranking issue of People Magazine.</p>
<p>Any ranking that puts Gwenyth at the top other than the Most Annoying People Ever Ranking is obviously a flawed scale. STILL mad she beat Cate Blanchett in 1999. And no one EVER watches Shakespeare In Love more than once. Although she does have a certain charm in the Ironman movies. But she smells in real life - really! I would say it’s the smell of self-righteousness, but I think it’s really just poor hygiene.</p>
<p>Should we beat up on her for kid naming as well? Nah, back to the topic I think. Fun stuff though.</p>
<p>“For example, WashU and JHU, 2 of the 3 elite privates which I have noted do not seem to give their grads much of a push in those few professions where brand seems to matter most, underperform in Forbes compared to USN (Emory is the other one, but they were excluded by Forbes because they lied).”</p>
<p>Yes, I’m sure the kids at WashU’s highly regarded Art school are devastated that they can’t get onto Wall Street.</p>
<p>For fun I compiled the various rankings of the USNWR Top 30 research universities. The last column is their new ranking based on the average (among this list of schools).</p>
<p>School USNWR ARWU QS THES Ave NR
Harvard 2 1 2 2 1.75 1
Stanford 5 2 3 4 3.5 2
MIT 7 4 1 5 4.25 3
Princeton 1 7 10 6 6 4
CalTech 10 6 10 1 6.75 5
Chicago 5 9 9 9 8 6
Yale 3 11 8 11 8.25 7
Columbia 4 8 14 13 9.75 8
Penn 7 15 13 16 12.75 9
UC Berkeley 20 3 25 8 14 10
Johns Hopkins 12 17 16 15 15 11
Cornell 16 13 15 19 15.75 12
Duke 7 31 23 17 19.5 13
UCLA 23 12 40 12 21.75 14
Michigan 28 23 22 18 22.75 15
Nortwestern 12 30 29 22 23.25 16
Brown 14 42 47 52 38.75 17
Carnegie Mellon 23 52 57 24 39 18
WUSTL 14 32 86 42 43.5 19
UNC CH 30 43 54 47 43.5 19
USC 23 47 125 70 66.25 21
Rice 18 92 136 65 77.75 22
Vanderbilt 17 49 181 88 83.75 23
Emory 20 101 141 80 85.5 24
UVA 23 101 132 112 92 25
Dartmouth 10 151 119 126 101.5 26
Tufts 28 101 204 80 103.25 27
Notre Dame 18 201 224 90 133.25 28
Georgetown 20 301 189 160 167.5 29
Wake Forest 23 301 329 180 208.25 30</p>
<p>@Pizzagirl:</p>
<p><em>shrug</em>
The strength of an arts program isn’t something that I care about. If you do, that’s your problem. Everyone has their own rankings.</p>
<p><em>shrug</em> The strength of placing into investment banking isn’t something that I care about as a measure of “goodness” of a school. Yet for some reason that’s always touted on CC as though it’s a universal measure of strength. Why is that? </p>
<p>@Pizzagirl:
Because that’s one of the few industries where the brand and network of your school could make a big difference.</p>
<p>You could say exactly the same thing for, let’s say, theatre or engineering.<br>
There are certain brands and networks in those fields too. </p>
<p>They just happen to be different brands and different networks, that’s all. </p>
<p>@Pizzagirl True, but undergrad doesn’t matter as much for engineering as it does for stuff like IBanking where top companies don’t even recruit at some schools. To be fair, engineering schools do have pipelines (like UDub’s with Microsoft and Stanford/Berkeley’s with Google) but it doesn’t seem to be as tough to get into the top company in your field from a mediocre school if you did engineering as it would be if you did business. I don’t know about the arts; maybe it’s the case that there’s a huge gap between RISD and Juilliard and majoring in Art or Music at some non-flagship state school that’s not a big name, but CC doesn’t seem to be aware of that. So CC mostly looks at business and fields where getting into the top 30 schools make a tremendous difference when making overall rankings. That said, yeah I do get the vibe sometimes that CC posters consider liberal arts and fine arts to be somehow less legitimate fields than engineering, business, physics, etc.; it seems to be a common attitude outside CC as well, unfortunately, but it’s not the main justification for how some CC users look at rankings in terms of MBB recruitment.</p>
<p>But that’s precisely what I’m asking. When did banking placement become a “marker” for overall quality, and why that specific field? Why is it assumed that banking placement should be a marker for kids who aren’t into banking, but theater and engineering aren’t markers for kids who aren’t actors or engineers? </p>
<p>Who died and made banking king?
And don’t get me wrong, there’s not a thing wrong with becoming a banker. It’s just so odd how it has this mythical status on CC. </p>
<p>More people who care about finance are on CC than other types of people, is my guess. Not sure why you care so much what other people think.</p>
<p>Ha,I’m the last person to care what other people think. </p>