Reply to With US News Being Challenged by Top Schools, Does it Make More Sense to Combine Rankings?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Ranking college makes no sense at all. What is the point?[/quote]

Coming from a different country, rankings have been useful in understanding the college landscape. Of course they're not meant to be the only consideration, but they help give a general sense of where things stand. I never would have known, for example, that Rice is a very good university.[/quote]

But there are many other very good universities not on the lists you are limiting yourself to, and that fact that there is a list is making you think the education form Rice is better than a school on a different list or ranked lower, etc.[/quote]

Can you name a few?[/quote]

One of the biggest problems with rankings is that it makes people fixate on the order of the list when there really isn't any meaningful difference between say #15 and #35. And, for USNWR, a significant part of the rankings is "peer reputation" which really is just a reinforcing of the ranking USNWR already provided (no college admin really knows all that much about colleges they didn't work at or didn't attend) and things like expenditures and alumni giving which are just measures of how wealthy is the school.

I like that NYTimes ranking tool posted above. If you want an idea of some strong schools academically, one factor is "academic profile", a combo of incoming student test scores (quality of student body) + graduation rate (effectiveness of the college in keeping/graduating students) + student-faculty ratio (how much faculty attention you might get, although acknowledging that colleges can game this metric by counting faculty that don't actually teach).  Putting no other filters in place, with 100% weight on academic profile, the top schools are:

Cal Tech
MIT
U Chicago
Princeton
Duke
Yale
U of Penn
Rice
JHU
Williams

Do you want a more diverse student body, not nearly all wealthy kids? Adding weight for economically diverse, the top tier becomes:

Cal Tech
U Chicago
Stevens Institute of Technology
MIT
Cooper Union
U of Southern California
Northeastern
JHU
Carnegie Mellon
Harvey Mudd

Concerned about the cost? Add weight for low net price. That gives a list of mostly public colleges, especially CUNY system.

You can also limit to schools of different sizes, locations, acceptance rates. How about 100% on academic profile but with acceptance rates of >25% to get schools that might be reasonable targets for an excellent student?  Case Western, Kenyon, Brandeis, Reed, U of Rochester, U of Richmond. Are those too small? Add >10K students and you get GWU, U of Miami, U of Florida, Pitt, U of Georgia.
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