WSJ Rankings 2025
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Anonymous
You seem to be the only person who is upset... |
Anonymous
Thank you! Glad to see VA Tech on the list, DD is freshman at VT in Electrical Engineering this school year...... 
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Anonymous
You can’t get upset at something this detached from reality. Pity? Sure. Upset? Nah. Just nah. |
Anonymous
Everyone else has heard of Top 50. "Half of the colleges in the top 50..." https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/the-2025-best-colleges-in-the-u-s-princeton-babson-and-stanford-take-the-top-3-spots/ar-AA1q11zY |
Anonymous
How many posts have you written on this thread? |
Anonymous
Babson at #2 is a typo, right? Bentley? San Jose State? |
Anonymous
This makes three. How about you? |
Anonymous
You, again? Good grief. |
Anonymous
I'm not the one claiming this list is "trash" or "clickbait, but nothing more" - and then returning over and over to reiterate how stupid I think the list is. Oh, while simultaneously pretending not to be quite upset. 
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Anonymous
Returning over and over? I posted once, then replied to two criticisms of my initial post. This makes four total, three of them responding to your insane posts. Sounds like the one upset is you, I guess because the list is being mocked? Are you a graduate of Babson or Bentley? |
Anonymous
Middlebury, Grinnell, Carleton.. nowhere.. LOL |
Anonymous
I recovered my Wall Streef Journal account and figured out why this list is so weird: - It’s been a bad summer for web traffic and ad sales. A weird list that generates angry traffic beats a good list that gets fewer views. - Roughly half of the results are based on a *student survey*, even when the team was creating statistics on what seem like factors that should be based on hard, common data set data or alumni surveys. Example: learning opportunities and learning opportunities. The “character building” factor seems to be based on a proprietary set of survey questions that isn’t available online, or at least was hard to find online. - Some of the more concrete numbers were calculated in unusual ways. Example: 94% of Washington University undergraduates get their bachelor’s degrees within six years, but it got a 71 on that indicator in the WSJ rankings. That’s because the team adjusted the graduation rate to adjust for the test scores of the freshman and the percentage of freshman with household income over $110,000 per year. So, due to the adjustments, that indicator punishes schools with a lot of high-income-family students with high test scores, even though going to a school with smart rich kids might generally be considered a good thing. MIT gets dinged hard on that factor for the same reason. |
Anonymous
These descriptions continue to get crazier and crazier - is THIS is how college rankings have always been created? If so, my god. |
Anonymous
First, news websites need hits. No one is asking the reporters if these lists make any sense. Hits are God. No stupid lists means no reporters. Second, I think one thing that happened here is that the WSJ team (apparently, maybe including one of more people here in this thread), came up with the adjustments to try to make certain indicators (example: graduation rates) more fair than usual. But the problem is that the adjustment algorithms weren’t well-designed and are too hard on schools with rich, smart students. Third, it’s hard to tell how the surveys worked, but the WSJ probably should have figured out a way to calibrate the data by comparing student positivity with some objective school statistic. Example: The WSJ shows Elon University having a higher learning opportunities score than my alma mater, Washington University. Both Elon and Wash. U. have higher learning opportunities scores than Yale, UC Berkeley and the University of Michigan. I’m sure that many Elon students get a great education, but maybe they’re simply very positive people and Yale students are much more critical. Otherwise, it’s hard to see how Elon could beat Yale, Wash. U., Berkeley and Michigan on learning opportunities. Maybe I missed something, but I think the income impact factor is another problem. I think the WSJ team adjusted that factor for incoming student test scores and the cost of living in the college’s state, but not for major mix or gender mix. One way to adjust for that would be to base the income factor solely on the income of math majors, to filter out any differences caused by what majors students pick. You figure, any school in the top 500 must have a few math majors, and that’s both a STEM topic and one of the liberal arts. So, both the engineering schools and the liberal arts colleges should have math major data. |
Anonymous
That does sound crazy. The student you are describing should be gunning for Stanford. |