Wowo, here I thought that USNews has produced the most useless ranking possible, and then WSJ goes and proves me wrong.
Oh, so many things wrong with this rankings system. So, where should I start?
The WSJ ranks all colleges as though they were the same. It’s like ranking oranges and lemons together and ranking the lemons lower because they are sour.
Ranking Liberal Arts Colleges lower than research universities because their faculty produce fewer research papers is ludicrous. This is especially ridiculous because about half of the publications or more that are produced by research universities are being produced by grad students and post-docs. Of course ranking LACs lower than universities because they have fewer programs is in the same category of nonsensical rankings.
Counting the number of publications in Elsevier. Oh my. I guess that publications in the most prestigious journals Science and Nature are not considered important enough for ranking colleges. Elsevier publishes 2,500 peer reviewed journals. Seems like a lot until one realizes that there are today, 28,000 peer reviewed journals out there.
Of course, they are also rewarding quantity over quality. So colleges in which the faculty churn out articles that meet the minimum standards for the journals with the highest acceptance rates will be ranked higher that colleges in which the faculty are publishing the most influential articles out there.
Then there is the issue that they are dividing publications between 2013 and 2017 by the number of faculty who are presently at the college. Aside from changes in faculty numbers, the fact that many, or most, of the publications are actually produced by grad students and post-docs, who are not counted, means that this metric is bogus.
Then there is the laughable “value added by the teaching at a college to salary”. That reduces the rankings of the colleges which have the highest proportion of students who end up with PhDs, have careers in fields which actually help people (well, except for MDs), etc. However, colleges which send lots of people to be hedge fund managers will rank high.
As always they inquire about “reputation” from college administrators, and then claim to be getting this data from " a survey of leading scholars", never mind that most haven’t published a scholarly or scientific study in decades.
Then, of course, there is their use of “faculty”. Do they mean TT/Tenured faculty, or contingent labor? Colleges in which adjuncts are used extensively usually have a larger number of “faculty” on their lists. So this is also rewarded in the rankings
There is the requirement to “Has more than 1,000 students”. Too bad, Harvey Mudd College, you may provide one of the best engineering educations in the world, but WSJ does not consider you worthy of ranking.
On one hand, it’s good that forests are no longer being cut down to print these rankings, since they’re mostly online. On the other hand, this means that, since they cannot be used for toilet paper or starting fires, their usefulness has been reduced to 0.