The Absurdity of U.S. News College Rankings - Per Malcolm Gladwell

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Berkeley grads hold onto the global rankings as if their lives depended on it. Can you imagine the inner turmoil and angst if Berkeley were to fall down the global rankings, too? Never seen a group of more insecure alums in my life. And that insecurity often reveals itself in nasty ways.

I laughed so hard!! It's true. Almost as if global rankings are a proxy for graduate school but the Berkeley undergrads don't seem to care.

[Anonymous]

Critics of Gladwell usually have sacred cows he’s skewering.

[Anonymous]

Gladwell’s comment is obvious, not insightful. Would anyone in the US not expect wealth, whiteness, and education quality to correlate with US college rankings? Educated and wealthy parents naturally live in communities with excellent schools and stress the importance of education to their kids. Since whites have most of the wealth in the US, whiteness is correlated with these US educational outcomes. Moreover, this correlation holds the world over, save whiteness and replace it with a country’s dominant race/ethnic group.

[Anonymous]

It's strange that a bankrupt magzine has so much sway on the higher-education systems.

That US NEWS ranking University of Florida much higher than Univ of Washington should make people think twice. Instead, people just take the ranking as if god-given.

[Anonymous]

Anyone who has ever worked in a university knows that these rankings are garbage. Our university is regularly playing around with various policies that will gain us more points on the rubrics used. There's a meausre that looks at the percent of courses taught to undergrads by full time faculty, so even if most courses in a department are taught by TA's, they will do things like put a full time professor down as the 'professor of record,' etc.

There are all kinds of ways to game the system. They sometimes hire their own grads as temp employees over the summer so that they can claim that "all our recent grades are employed" even if they are employed in six month fake jobs that end as soon as the stats are compiled.

THere was someone a while back that did a similar 'reputation survey' with university presidents -- but they included programs and schools that didn't exist (i.e. saying that a prestigious school had a medical school or law school even if it didn't). Yup. University presidents ranked those programs are "very well regarded" even though they didn't exist!

Not saying you want to ignore them entirely but please for the love of God don't go into debt to go to the "number 27" school when you have a free ride at the "number 30" school. That would be ridiculous -- and yet people do it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It's strange that a bankrupt magzine has so much sway on the higher-education systems.

That US NEWS ranking University of Florida much higher than Univ of Washington should make people think twice. Instead, people just take the ranking as if god-given.

Those are the obvious ones but other than those, the rankings are pretty solid relative to their actual prestige.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The world rankings are more logical and respected globally.

This is simply not true. The global rankings are even more nonsensical, and one of them, QS, is notorious for its British bias.

The global rankings do a good job of what they are for: ranking reputations of universities globally.

No one thinks that Vanderbilt or Duke are more reputed institutions than UC Berkeley, but the undergraduate rankings incorrectly ranks it as such.

The National Universities ranking is a misnomer. It should obviously be renamed to indicate it ranks based on undergraduate studies specifically.

Uh, yeah, no.

And no one thinks University of Washington and UC San Diego are better universities than Duke and UPenn.

Quite clearly they do, otherwise they wouldn't be ranked higher on a global reputation ranking, would they?

Their higher ranking is based off of their stellar medical schools, which quite obviously stellar enough to boos the schools, particularly Washington up quite high.

If you think medical research by institutions isn't important or should not be considered, you are an idiot.

[Anonymous]

^Anyone who is surprised at Duke being ranked lower than Washington or UC San Diego does not understand that Duke is essentially an unknown school globally. No one wants to attend a parochial town in a red state for 4 years of undergraduate or 6 years of PhD., or for a lifetime as a professor.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Berkeley grads hold onto the global rankings as if their lives depended on it. Can you imagine the inner turmoil and angst if Berkeley were to fall down the global rankings, too? Never seen a group of more insecure alums in my life. And that insecurity often reveals itself in nasty ways.

Weird, most likely from a private school grad that is unheard of outside their respective region and is raging due to Berkeley providing to Nobel faculty at <$15k/year tuition while their "T20" private doesn't at $55k+/year.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Berkeley grads hold onto the global rankings as if their lives depended on it. Can you imagine the inner turmoil and angst if Berkeley were to fall down the global rankings, too? Never seen a group of more insecure alums in my life. And that insecurity often reveals itself in nasty ways.

This statement needs to be restricted to a certain group of Berkeley grads, namely the undergraduates. We all know that global rankings put emphasis on graduate school research, and in that sphere, there are very few schools that are better than Berkeley.

Of course, Berkeley Ph.D. students have every reason to mention the global rankings, because that is an accurate representation of their achievement. A Berkeley Ph.D. student is more elite than a Duke or Vanderbilt Ph.D. student, and there's no way to argue against this.

Where I agree with you, are those insecure undergrads who mention the global rankings as if it's a representation of their eliteness. They take credit for something they don't deserve, i.e. the elite nature of the grad programs at Berkeley. They are nasty indeed.

What exactly have the undergrads at a given university done to "deserve" the higher ranking?

Much of the ranking is a result of hundreds of years of entrenched reputation and donations. It has nothing to do with the students actually attending the school.

[Anonymous]

This is the Berkeley undergraduates alumni that I am aware of, a very limited list, not to mention their graduate students alumni


Steve Wozniak (apple cofounder)

Robert Mcnamara (politician)

Michael Milken (junk bond king)

Masayoshi Son (softbank cofounder)

[Anonymous]

Cool story, bro.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's strange that a bankrupt magzine has so much sway on the higher-education systems.

That US NEWS ranking University of Florida much higher than Univ of Washington should make people think twice. Instead, people just take the ranking as if god-given.

Those are the obvious ones but other than those, the rankings are pretty solid relative to their actual prestige.

Don't act like you would've heard of Chicago, Vanderbilt, Rice, Washington University, Northwestern, or even Duke and Hopkins outside of the DC Area had it not been for US News.

The top 10 of USNews is a strong indicator of national and worldwide prestige. The ranking after 10 becomes
useless as a measure of prestige excluding the Ivies which will always hold sway due to being Ivies, not being ranked between 10-20.

The fact that Chicago went from >15 to top 3 (or where ever it is now) within 20 years shows how idiotic the rankings are even for prestige - schools don't rise in prestige so quickly at the top because prestige is entrenched. U. Chicago has always had strong graduate departments but that its often ranked ahead of Yale, Caltech, etc. or ranked alongside Harvard today is simply a result of ranking manipulation.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:He's got a bee in his bonnet about elite colleges.

He did a whole thing about how Bowdoin sucks because their food is better than Vassar's, meaning they spent more on that than financial aid.

Without, of course, doing any financial analysis of the procurement and preparation methodologies of the dining services. So he has no idea. Didn't stop him from making the correlative claim.

I do find him entertaining, but his BS is no better than any other entertainment that claims complex topics are simply illustrated.

That episode of his podcast made me so mad - I still think of it to this day. Why can't you have good food AND good financial aid? Why don't we want kids eating better food? It was such a false dichotomy. Such lazy thinking!!

The thing is, when he is wrong, he is really, really wrong. But sometimes I agree with him, which is when I start to wonder if he's wrong, then, too.

[Anonymous]

All rankings have bias and some may emphasize something that are not what you care much. For most of the parents on this board, they are seeking information about schools for their children going into colleges as undergrads. From that perspective, the US News rankings are still the more relevant as the reference for an undergrad experience you may expect.
Rankings like QS are just poor indicators for undergrad experiences.