<p>Why not let people decide for themselves whether or not the rankings are flawed?</p>
<p>Methodology of WSJ Rankings:
"Traditionally, college rankings have focused on test scores and grade averages of kids coming in the door. But we wanted to find out what happens after they leave – and try to get into prestigious grad schools.
We focused on 15 elite schools, five each from medicine, law and business, to serve as our benchmark for profiling where the students came from. Opinions vary, of course, but our list reflects a consensus of grad-school deans we interviewed, top recruiters and published grad-school rankings (including the Journal’s own MBA rankings). So for medicine, our schools were Columbia; Harvard; Johns Hopkins; the University of California, San Francisco; and Yale, while our MBA programs were Chicago; Dartmouth’s Tuck School; Harvard; MIT’s Sloan School; and Penn’s Wharton School. In law, we looked at Chicago; Columbia; Harvard; Michigan; and Yale.
Our team of reporters fanned out to these schools to find the alma maters for every student starting this fall, more than 5,100 in all. Nine of the schools gave us their own lists, but for the rest we relied mainly on “face book” directories schools give incoming students. Of course, when it comes to “feeding” grad schools, a college’s rate is more important than the raw numbers. (Michigan, for example, sent about twice the number as Georgetown, but it’s also more than three times the size.) So our feeder score factors in class size.
How did colleges react to our list? Some were quick to point out that it was only one year of data, and many said they didn’t track their feeder rates closely. “I have no way of verifying this,” a spokesman for Cornell said. Others said they didn’t think this was an important way to judge schools because so many factors play into grad schools’ decisions. Still, the colleges in our list did not dispute our findings and neither did the grad schools.
Not that they necessarily want it out there. “We keep a lid on this data,” says Mohan Boodram, director of admissions and financial aid at Harvard Medical School. Otherwise, “high-school students will think they have to go to certain schools.”</p>
<p>Now, point out the flaws.</p>