Rankings lag?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The rankings are sillier than ever. Read an article about the changes in 2019-2020 where USNWR started de-emphasizing graduation rates and retention rates in favor of the number of Pell grant students. It’s fine to track and share the number of Pell awards. But this info is not particularl helpful if you’re trying to assess to assess how well a school performs academically. It’s just silly.

yes agree. We use the pre-2021 USN rankings for our kids as a guideline only, as well as QS. Key factors for us over the years: Retention rates, class size, faculty research/prestige(married to a prof who has taught T100 and a T10 I have learned how it affects undergraduate opportunities) endowment per student and yes SAT from pre-TO data. The latter is useful to have a basic non-perfect estimate of where your kid stands. All three of our kids are different minds and different personalities. Some students thrive on being a slight underdog in the classroom, others are crushed by it. Others stagnate if they are in the top few percent. Some students are not affected by class size, others are. When you have multiple kids you see the differences in their strengths and their learning styles.
The Pell -grant and other info does not matter for the quality of the institution from a student perspective. I say this as a former pell grant kid who went to an ivy and married another pell grant kid I met in grad school. The fact that my ivy takes far more low income kids now has not made it a better institution of learning.