Reply to The Absurdity of U.S. News College Rankings

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The other problem with Gladwell is that he's often wrong.

Forty percent of a school's rank comes from its success at retaining and graduating students within 150% of normal time (six years), graduate indebtedness, and social mobility factors. Graduation rates themselves have the highest weight in outcomes and in our rankings because degree completion is necessary to receive the full benefits of undergraduate study from employers and graduate schools. We approach outcomes from angles of graduation and retention (22%), graduation rate performance (8%), social mobility (5%) and, new this year, graduate indebtedness (5%).

https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/how-us-news-calculated-the-rankings[/quote]

What Gladwell is probably saying is that the objective factors you cite above are correlated with the factors that Gladwell cited.

I think USNWR has probably done some good, but it has probably been easily outweighed by the bad.  By not taking into account cost and providing a rigid ordinal ranking, it has supported the massive runup in tuition and fees and student debt since the 1980s.  The other factor is it encourages gaming of the numbers which doesn't really add value.  Almost all of them can be gamed, and sometimes it is difficult to separate what is gaming vs progress.  UVA was the #1 ranked public for a while and one of its advantages was graduation rate.  Schools like UCLA used to be some distance behind.  Now UCLA, Michigan, etc. have 6 year graduation rates (but not necessarily 4 year) that are pretty similar to UVA.  Was that because UCLA is now a better school, or did it just make it easier to graduate?  GPA inflation, which had started in the Vietnam War era, accelerated during the USNWR era, to the extent that schools like Brown don't have too much room to go higher.[/quote]

Ironically, UVA had a high 4 and 6-year graduation rate specifically due to their easier coursework and domination of easier majors than Berkeley, Michigan, etc. And fewer students studying and working part-time due to having a wealthier student base.

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Schools who don’t have a high percentage of their students in Engineering, typically have higher four year graduation rates. Engineers usually need more credit hours in their majors to graduate. [/quote]

Also many engineering students decide to pursue BS/MS degrees, and take one or two extra years to graduate. Stanford is ranked so low on USNWR because this decreases their % of 4-year graduations. Another reason why the ranking is so stupid.[/quote]

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