2015 US News Rankings are out
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Anonymous
Germany, not France or HK, is the model to follow. |
Anonymous
The Niche rankings are more comprehensive and less focused on "Ivyness". https://colleges.niche.com/rankings/best-overall/methodology/ |
Anonymous
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The Niche rankings are a fine addition to the information available to parents and students. It utilizes IPEDS data in its academic rankings, which is one of the most solid data sets around. That said, it also uses less pertinent data from MUP.
The biggest problem with the Niche rankings is that they over rely on student surveys. These are basically satisfaction surveys, which are not necessarily a sign of excellence or a superior college. I think there is room for all these rankings, as long as parents and students understand what questions are being asked and how the data is being used. Niche does a good job of explaining their methodology, so if student happiness is a major factor in choosing a college, it is a good one to watch. |
Anonymous
Please stop. I'm no fan of of USNews, but Niche ( aka College Prowler) includes criteria such as "hottest girls" in its methodology. Niche makes the USNews formula look downright scientific. |
Anonymous
Most parents could care less about the attractiveness of the student body, but students care. Imagine that. Helicopters down! |
Anonymous
PP - is yor criticism directed to use of student satisfaction surveys as part of the ranking? If so, don't you think student satisfaction is important? |
Anonymous
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The Niche rankings do NOT measure attractiveness of the student body (Stanford would not be first, trust me) the metric in question is:
Student opinions about the quality of the overall experience at the college they currently or recently attend(ed). Includes 121,626 opinions about overall experience from 25,090 unique students. Minimum 10 unique students required at each college. Note: A total of 11,857,508 opinions from 294,497 unique students were used across all of the factors in this table. |
Anonymous
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I prefer Unigo for straight up and honest opinions from students. I have given the link to DC who much prefers it to College Confidential.
https://www.unigo.com/ |
Anonymous
The Unigo rankings are useful for insight into particular issues, but they do not even attempt to do a best overall ranking based on a transparent weighting of factors that are important to many students. The problem with the Niche rankings is that they assume a student is interested in what might be described as a "balanced" college experience: https://colleges.niche.com/rankings/best-overall/methodology/ In the Niche rankings, Academics are only 35% of total ranking; student survey responses on the quality of the overall experience at the college are 12% facilities on campus are 8%and the rest is:Loan Default Rate 6%, Athletics 5% average cost 5% Diversity 5% Local Area 5% endowment per student 4% Guys & Girls Grade 4% Health & Safety 4% and party scene 4% and Private Gifts/Grants per Full-Time Student 3% I'm not sure that the specific weighting would reflect many students actual weighting, but the results are interesting. |
Anonymous
Please do at least a little research before expounding on the "Niche" rankings. Niche, the new name for College Prowler, has been collecting this " data" for years from anybody willing to provide it. Students or not. Trolls or not. It absolutely DID rate "hottest" girls and guys as part of the exercise, along with "Best party schools" and other dubious criteria. I see now they now call it "guys and girls," a strange criterion indeed, but no doubt populated with the old data. College Prowler is the same outfit that created a bunch of fake college Facebook pages to create interest and viewers for the site a few years ago. Then they got caught. This is not a serious ranking scheme, but a shady, rebranded joke of an Internet scam. |
Anonymous
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Here's a report from the New York Times about how College Prowler (Niche) impersonated colleges on line to drive traffic to its site.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/24/separating-real-from-fake-on-the-internet/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0 Here's what College Times had to say about Niche: College Prowler. If you could combine an organized crime group with some annoying as heck telemarketers, College Prowler would be that monster. What used to set this company apart from most college review websites was their full-color guides you could purchase at most local bookstores (although, this part of their business recently died – before Web 2.0 caught on, College Prowler guidebooks had truly “snuck” up on the boring, outdated black-and-white college guides of yester-year.) At first glance, their website seems to be OVERFLOWING with useful data on thousands of campuses – things like “Drug Safety” or “Off-campus dining” have information that you probably won’t find anywhere else. Unfortunately, the source of most of their data is secret and unexplained, as their new parent company Niche.com arbitrarily mixes data from government databases, school administrators, and students themselves, without communicating to visitors which data is which. Yes, they literally allow campus marketing directors to login and update school profiles however they see fit. In effect, the Prowler team has attempted to create a complex website structure aimed at ranking high in Google results and to keep users clicking around the site – which, by the way, you can’t do unless you register a new account and submit more personal information to their marketing team than even the IRS asks for. College Prowler has also been caught committing fraud against Facebook users, and censoring and redacting their “open” scholarship database. In short, the site is a massive ponzi scheme setup and run by Mark Kantrowitz and friends – the guy behind FastWeb (FinAid.Org) – and Prowler’s acquisition by TMP (Monster.com) only seems to have quickened their pace. |
Anonymous
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^^^
Check the date on that article, it is nearly six years old - long past expiration. The Niche rankings are based on data that may or may not be useful to someone. I guess PP has a gripe with someone formerly associated with a predecessor company, but I'm not sure how that impacts the data presented in the Niche rankings. |
Anonymous
It's the same company using the same data! College Prowler just rebranded itself. It makes no sense to reject an article from six years ago, but accept data that is much older than that! If anything is "long past expiration" it's Niche's data! |
Anonymous
Why do you think they are using the same data? |
Anonymous
| Seems that the Niche data is updated every year, not six years old: https://niche.com/about/data/ |