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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Dumb list. Oh wait, my kid’s school is number one? This is a great list. [/quote]

If you have quirky, bringer creative kids it’s an interesting list.  I have one at Oberlin who loves it, and a 2022 grad looking at Oberlin, Vasser, Wesleyan, Bard, and Barnard.  If nothing else, it tells me my kid is on the right track, given that we haven’t been able to do visits yet.  But, I like it that they thought outside the box on methodology to get at something that’s hard to quantify.  Forbes, Niche, USNWR, this list.  They all measure something dofferent. You have to look at what they measure and see if it’s valuable to you. [/quote]

Nobody disagrees with that.  In fact, it's a great objective.  But don't you think the headlines can be in line with that goal?  Like "top LACs to foster creativity" instead of the misleading one used?[/quote]

It’s titled an “academic influence” rating, and the article sets out in a clear language in a couple of paragraphs what they measured.  So ???  They are very up front about what they are measuring. To me it has some value— more so than say the Forbes rankings. But, to people who think of college as an ROI issue, it probably wouldn’t. [/quote]

Do you think "academic influence"  equates with the following:

[i]we rank the best colleges and universities based on what we call Concentrated Influence. Concentrated Influence takes the combined influence score of a college or university’s top academic influencers (including faculty and alums) and divides it by the school’s total number of undergraduates.[/i]

If you had basic reading comprehension of what you replied to, you'd see I don't have a problem with how they rated it - just that the Oberlin headline is misleading because it could easily be mistaken for reference to USN or some other more prominent ranking.  All the headline had to say was "Oberlin ranked #13 in academic influence by 'academicinfluence.com" and there is no problem.  [b]It's dishonest IMHO[/b].  This is a unique ranking based on a single subjective criteria.

As for the methodology, if you want to choose Oberlin because Sinclair Lewis and Thornton Wilder went there 100 years ago, well that's just fine.  It's a great college regardless.

https://academicinfluence.com/people?school=Oberlin%20College[/quote]

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