<p>The #1 school for each individual student is the school that that student will thrive at. Perhaps the rankings would just do better if they were to categorize schools as being most selective, highly selective, selective, etc. Then let each student decide for themselves. A student may not really care about an institution spending tons of money on LED TVs in the classroom and having an immaculate looking campus. Perhaps that student is only looking for quality of education and academic fit. And the whole issue with peer assessment is an absolute joke. It encourages academic inbreeding and discrimination.</p>
<p>PsychoDad10 , well put
but I want a school with lots of clean modern bathrooms and air-conditioning in the dorms. other than that I do not need a 50 story all glass state of the art gym that cost 2 billion dollars to build.</p>
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<p>People are always mocking schools for having expensive gyms and climbing walls. Personally, I think the Gym very important. A healthy body promotes a healthy mind, and a high quality Gym is much more likely to promote people actually using it than a low quality college gym, or no gym at all. I am tickled pink that my daughter’s public directional university has a huge state of the art gym, with a huge climbing wall, as well as a brand-new huge Student Union building. (What it doesn’t have is a money draining football team). The school also has some good, modern dormitories. This is money well spent for the health of the student body, and to bring a sense of college community to the student body. The school is a great school, with average SAT for college Freshman over 1200, and 50% of the class or so in the top ten percent of their high school classes, also has relatively small classes for a public University . . but ranks only in the 400s by US News. Who cares. My daughter joined a sorority, which promotes scholarship, is having an absolute blast and the school is far less expensive to attend than the US NEWS top schools.</p>
<p>Where is this school with a $2 Billion gym?? Oh you meant far less than that really, OK. In most cases the actual budget impact of such things is very small spread over 20000 students.</p>
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Hm, I seem to have heard that before…</p>
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Yep, there it is! How refreshingly original. </p>
<p>Yet another article that bashes the USNWR rankings but fails to add any novel criticisms. Yawn.</p>
<p>The problem isn’t with the rankings. There are many college rankings out there, and USNWR just happens to be the most successful – much to the envy of other news outlets. If it closed its doors, there’s other rankings more than willing to take its place. The real problem is with people who take the rankings too seriously, people who let the rankings determine where they apply to college or who let rankings determine their self-worth. One wonders who is more foolish…the fool who creates rankings or the fool who reads them. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>U.S. News can’t hurt you unless you let it hurt you.</p>
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<p>Exactly! But if USNews “hurts students” what does that mean for all of the other rankings out there? :rolleyes:</p>
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<p>Its rankings market success is likely due to the fact that its rankings tend to track closely to popular notions of what colleges are “better”, while “filling in the blanks” for colleges that someone may not know about. Of course, it is a feedback cycle, where the rankings themselves influence popular notions, and tend to entrench them (since the “better” schools tend to attract more applications, so they can be more selective, which improves rankings).</p>
<p>One problem with the hospital analogy is that, in a hospital, the health of patient A has a fairly remote relationship to the quality of care patient B receives. In a college, however, students are taught communally for much of their undergraduate careers, and what they learn and do in college is profoundly influenced by other students. So the academic ability of one’s classmates can have a meaningful effect on the quality of one’s education. It’s not the only factor – and it’s not captured perfectly by SAT scores or high school GPAs, Lord knows – but it’s certainly a factor worth considering.</p>
<p>You can’t have a ranking system without having some sort of Platonic ideal institution implicit in the ranking formula, and without accepting that if your rankings are successful you will be encouraging colleges to look more like that implicit ideal. While I am not thrilled at some of the effects of the USNWR rankings, I shudder at the thought of academic quality being thrown out the window in order to achieve a better 4- and 6-year graduation rate, or better job placements, or more “clean modern bathrooms.” Personally, I can hardly imagine a better undergraduate experience than I had, and in four years I’m sure I never saw a clean, modern bathroom.</p>
<p>skiblack: I’ll agree with you about the gyms. Modern gyms with fitness centers are often the social centers of many colleges - at times, they seem to have replaced the ole’ student union.</p>
<p>^^^And I would much rather see a high quality fancy gym facility which serves the entire student population than see $$$$$ going towards gym facilities which only support those officially in ‘athletics’.</p>
<p>Also, is a student gym really that expensive? Yes, there is capital cost of equipment, but it is not like a bunch of weights, benches, bars, etc. needs a lot of maintenance; labor costs may be lower than commercial gyms by hiring students with work-study eligibility.</p>
<p>The bathrooms were clean, but they weren’t modern. And that was on the bottom of the list of things I care about. I think having a good gym handy is a good thing. Too many kids get no exercise at all while they are in college. My dorm sat on top of seven squash courts, and the ease of using them meant that I learned to play squash and played reasonably regularly.</p>
<p>"College rankings hurt low and middle-income students. "
There were many good points made throughout the passage, and this one could not have been more true. The fact that there is actually a “ranking system” in place for colleges simply gives them an excuse to raise their tuition sticker price if they score “high enough” (which is biased due to certain predominant factors). Of course, for the ones that could afford it, this is no problem. But for the vast majority of others who are seeking a cost-effective education, they are officially out of luck.</p>