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[quote=Anonymous]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.[/quote]

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