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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Is top 30 the new top 20? [/quote]

Oh FFS. Splitting hairs on rankings that are meaningless to begin with is beyond stupid.  Any tiny amount of critical thought could point you to several fatal flaws in the USNWR ranking methodology.

1.  20% is based on peer assessment.  Basically a popularity contest.  How many college presidents know [b]anything[/b] about 99% of the colleges they are “assessing” other than where they’ve been in prior years’ rankings?  Hint: not many.    It would be like ranking restaurants by asking restaurant managers what they think of restaurants they’ve never been to.  And this is by far the single biggest factor.    So if College A rates College B highly because College A’s president sent them a nice Harry & David’s at the holidays, that alone moves them up several spots, without having ANYTHING to do with academic excellence.  
2.  Weighting of graduation rates.  The biggest factor in graduation rates is not the academics at the school, but non-academic factors of the students.  Students from non-upper classes struggle to stay in college for predominantly financial, non intellectual, reasons.  The rankings basically punish schools for not filling up with UMC and wealthy applicants.
3.  Endowment.  So much of today’s endowment dollars go to “amenities”.  To attract UMC and wealthy students (see #2 above), you need to built swanky dorms with luxury amenities.  Again, this may enhance a student’s “experience”, but has no bearing on academic excellence.

There are, what, 3000+ colleges in the US?  There is no methodology that could possibly accurately rank them, not even taking composites of USNWR, WSJ, Forbes, etc. They basically measure the same things with different weights.  Any attempt to do this is folly.  Trying to rank order, e.g., Dartmouth and UChicago and Duke based on what USNWR says about them is asinine.  They are different institutions with different strengths and weaknesses that appeal to different candidates.  I don’t know why we can’t just leave it at that and stop obsessing over which one is “better” or “best”.  [/quote]

All of USNWR is basically "popularity" amongst other schools.  I can only imagine the behind the scenes negotiations between schools----Ill vote for you if you vote for us.

Just look at the Engineering rankings for undergrad---all of the big schools and well known schools come out at the top---because obviously everyone has heard of GATech and UIUC and Stanford, MIT, etc.  But most have not heard of WPI Rose Hulman and other excellent smaller schools. So those schools are "underrated" because it's a popularity contest.

So obviously the big schools are great schools, but the ranking system by popularity ensures not much will change[/quote]

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