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][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This page is exactly what’s wrong with rankings.  Quibbling over Duke, Georgetown, Columbia is nonsense.  There is no way anyone can credibly say any of these are “better” than the others.  They are just different, with different areas of strength and different weakness.  Many of the supposed strengths and weaknesses are just value judgments.  There is no actual science behind college rankings and we should all just ignore them.

And, to the poster who keeps chiming in that it helped them cull down the 3000+ colleges, you could absolutely do that without any ordinal ranking.   [/quote]

Why is the blame on the consumers seeking information instead of the subterfuge by the schools by trying to block public information about admissions processes and graduate outcomes?

These schools basically are telling us, “Forget about rankings and pick a school that makes you *feel* good.” I’m sorry, but when people are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for each child, that’s crap.

Frankly, the most honest information is probably coming from the Department of Education College Scorecard. It’s incomplete information since it’s only based on those who took out federal student loans, but it’s at least better than the fuzzy platitudes of the schools. It’s funny that, as far as I’ve seen, the schools that have so much zeal in criticizing the US News rankings rarely point to any other alternative like the College Scorecard (lest they find about the amount of student loans people are taking out for how a whole lot of schools and/or majors that have pretty terrible income prospects).[/quote]

First of all you, mischaracterized what I wrote. I never said or implied you should pick a college based in “feelings.”   I believe in facts and want as many good ones as I can get.

But overall college rankings aren’t facts and I’ve yet to see one that is. USNWR is opinion.  By far its biggest factor is its “reputation” score, which is what other college administrators report knowing about a subject college. For 99% of colleges, most other college administrators know only where they’ve fallen in prior rankings.  So they are self-fulfilling opinions.

Second, how in the world can you possibly assign an overall score to a college that isn’t necessarily values driven.  Different applicants value different things.  So it’s necessarily opinion and values based.  Not science.

Again, if someone wants to build a sortable database of all the colleges, CDS reports and fact books etc, I’d love to use that.  But assigning a single reductive score to a college is oversimplifying a complex process.  It caters to our lazy instincts.

[/quote]

In a way, isn’t that what OP solved by posting a combined ranking list? Schools that do well consistently across a wide range of criteria used by these different rankings are probably really strong overall, right? Sure, putting all eggs in something like US News is a bad idea, but what about 8 independent rankings that look at different factors?[/quote]

you’re ignoring my second point:
They are ALL subjective.  From the factors they use (e.g., USNWR’s “reputation score”), but even the relative weighting of objective factors from all the rankings is itself subjective.  How did they decide to weigh % of profs with terminal degrees?  How about classes under 20?  Why 20? Why not 22? or 25? Or 17?

How do they decide to weigh attrition and graduation rates?  
How about athletics?  for some kids, that is a big plus, for others, a big football school is a detriment.
Location?  Someone may love an NYU campus, others may hate it.  Some may love Dartmouth, some may find the remoteness stifling.
Test scores (especially in an environment where most are not submitting—that tells you very little about the actual student body).

[b]Again, if someone wants to load all of this into a sortable database that we can manipulate and research, I’m all for it.  But assigning a reductive ordinal ranking to an entire college is a folly.  They just aren’t apples to apples comparisons.[/b]

[/quote]

+1 We actually did buy a sortable spreadsheet that I found super useful in figuring out ideas for the kids to look at. It doesn't include USNew's dubious "reputation" score but all the other stats that get made publicly available.

https://www.diycollegerankings.com/diy-college-rankings-spreadsheet-lp-2/?utm_source=PRODUCTS&utm_medium=Best%20College&utm_campaign=College%20Spreadsheet
[/quote]

This looks like a useful tool with lots of useful data EXCEPT it only includes admit rates for men and women.  No admittance rates for URM, 1st Gen, white, etc.  Are these data just not available?  As a parent of 2 white DD without a single hook, but with the older one certainly having stats that should qualify her for a T50, I need to know those numbers to understand her safety school options. And then we can start whittling down. It has % attending of sub-demographic groups, but that is not the same as the admittance rate.  [/quote]

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