USNWR College Rankings 2018 - Reactions?
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Anonymous
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Are out tomorrow... but getting a jump on the topic.
Predictions for those rising (and falling)? |
Anonymous
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Predictions?
SMU big gains. Northeastern continues to rise. |
Anonymous
| UVA will drop by 5. |
Anonymous
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Okay, can I just say that the US News is an awful ranking?
I don't get the hype- there's so much wrong with it that I don't even know where to begin. Well, actually I do. Peer assessment. Asking school officials to rate each other on a simple 1-5 scale and using that as 22.5% of the ranking. It doesn't measure anything about institutional strength and favors schools in the Northeast where the top ones are concentrated and know each other. Peer assessment also contributes to a self-fulfilling prophecy in that schools tend to rank others based on their US News rank, so in a sense, more than a 1/5th of the ranking is self-serving. Alumni donation rate is supposedly the proxy for alumni satisfaction, even though it is more of a private school, new England thing. Furthermore, donation rates are more a proxy of the strength of the giving office to market and receive donations than anything else. The faculty resources measure looks into meaningless things like professor salaries (if you search them, they are so close to each other among peer schools that the difference is minute) and puts far too emphasis on the percent with a terminal degree. You could have school A with 100% professors with a PhD and school B with 97.3%, and that could play out to be a #1 vs #30 component difference, even if school B brings in leaders in the field who don't necessarily have a PhD (yes- this does happen- think famous writers and musicians!). Selectivity isn't as much of a factor as it should be- it's one of the least important. Honestly, it's the best metric for the strength of the student body, so why is it so underemphasized? You have a grad over/underperformance metric which is weighted nearly as high as selectivity. Schools like Caltech and Mudd are given extremely high predicted graduation rates. They do exceptionally well, especially for rigorous STEM schools, but they underperform relative to what is predicted. So you get them losing all the points here whereas places like Bates (which is as expensive/endowed as Mudd but has far lower graduation rates/selectivity) get a hefty overperformance boost. Have you wondered why Caltech and MIT did worse than expected? This is the biggest reason. US News says nothing about student outcomes- where they go after college, how they fare in fellowships and grad school, what their salaries look like, and so forth. While there's a general correlation between the top at the US News ranking and the top performing for this, such a notable omission means not getting a feel for what is truly meaningful for a lot of college applicants. |
Anonymous
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Sorry for the typos/grammar mistakes above- typed on my phone.
Ultimate point- don't let US News be your only source for thinking about schools. Their methodology and your set of priorities will most likely be incredibly different. |
Anonymous
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Sewanee will inch forward!
Rhodes not far behind!! |
Anonymous
but almost all the ranking bodies come up with a very similar list of top names - not a whole lot of difference between them. |
Anonymous
| Well, I'm not really talking about the top 10 colleges; you're right that they consistently excel in most rankings. More referring to statements based almost single-handedly on US News, like "USC is worse than Emory" simply because Emory is in the top 20 and USC is outside of it. Students overwhelmingly pick USC over Emory: http://www.parchment.com/c/college/tools/college-cross-admit-comparison.php?compare=University+of+Southern+California&with=Emory+University |
Anonymous
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How U.S. News college rankings promote economic inequality on campus
http://www.politico.com/interactives/2017/top-college-rankings-list-2017-us-news-investigation/ |
Anonymous
When I was in college in the Boston area in the late 1980s Northeastern was a fourth tier commuter school. It has gamed the system more transparently than any other school. |
Anonymous
And still sucks. |
Anonymous
| William and Mary drops a lot. |
Anonymous
Students rejected by UCLA and Cal pick USC. |
Anonymous
Definitely true for in-state kids, however I'm not sure out-of-state applicants care that much, |
Anonymous
Actually the campus is now quite appealing and they offered DC a lot of merit money. They still have a commuter ethos with everyone doing intensive internships, which isn't a bad idea imo. A real problem is that you can't take classes across departments above the 100-level. If they fix that, they might really start attracting more kids. DC went elsewhere. |