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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]More educated parents and students aren't blindly following US News rankings any more.  Since their last release was so heavily mocked and with availability of information about a school's outcomes and strength of majors and strength of students academic achievements, US News is a much more minor role player now than in the past.

Parents look at the cost of the school, the name brand of the school, the SAT averages of the school, the acceptance rate of the school and the outcomes of the school a lot more than some outdated magazine.

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All of which are contained in....the USNews rankings! 🙂

It's a likely "first stop" for parents with other research options later. It is what it is.[/quote]

No, it's missing many important factors and Contain some insignificant factors such as how many Pell grant students.
However it's still a nice reference for an initial screening.

At the end every year, we get the actual result of the collective decisions by the students.
The result is reflected in the combination of admission rate, yield rate, cohort quality, retention rate, and graduation rate.
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That's why although USNWR removed factors like acceptance rate, parents and students pay good attention to it, and consider the competitive schools good schools in general.

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All of the top 30 have either low or extremely low acceptance rates.  [/quote]

No, schools like UF, UVA, UCSD, UT have significantly higher acceptance rate than schools like Tufts, BU, Wake Forest, Northeastern, BC as students chose that way.

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Acceptance rate can be manipulated (by inducing more applicants, most of the unqualified), so they correctly dropped it.  It isn't the best indicator of true selectivity and quality of the enrolled student body.[/quote]

Hence I said 1000 times the combination of acceptance rate, yield rate, cohort quality, retention rate, and graduation rate.[/quote]

But continue to include the thing that can be manipulated? And don’t factor in what industry experts think about the quality of education taking place?

The problem with what you propose it can reward those schools where good students flock mostly because of non academic factors like location or dorms.

USNWR isn’t perfect but it’s the best option available and it’s not close. [/quote]

USNWR significantly hurt their credibility when they started implicitly adjusting their rankings first to get a couple of Publics into the top 25 and then by adding social justice factors like economic mobility and Pell grant factors again designed to bump publics. That said the others are even worse.

But in the end it isn't that hard to line out ones that are obviously ridiculous and discount large moves that anyone thinking can see were caused by these adjustments rather than reality. Tufts and Middlebury didn't each drop about 15 spots in 5 years, no public is really a T20, etc. And most of all, you can't be that granular in the first place.[/quote]

There’s this weird narrative that USNWR went too social justice, but the only metrics in 2025 close to what you describe are the Pell grant graduation rate and graduation performance that come to just 11%. That’s it. Nationwide 1/3 of college students are Pell recipients. It’s kind of absurd to not care one bit if 1/3 of a student body is performing more poorly than the rest because of economic factors. Not only do the bottom 1/3 count, but their being miserable would diminish the overall experience on campus for the other 2/3.  I don’t agree with all of their ranks— far from it— but I don’t have to for them to be the best in the business.  They just have to be better than the competition, which they are. I agree it’s odd when a school drops 15 spots over 5 years, but that happens more often and to a far greater extent (I’ve seen over 100
spots!) in other rankings. I agree it’s common for people to take rank too literally, but those who do so ignore the publication’s own advice:

“Many other factors, including some that can't be measured, should figure into your decision… Study the data that accompanies the actual rankings. You should not use the rankings as the sole basis for deciding on one school over another.”[/quote]

They dropped factors that actually matter as well. Avg class size was dropped to help public’s. Pell grant has zero to do with educational quality, but faculty with terminal degrees does; one was added, one was dropped. It adds up to about 35% of the ranking all told.[/quote]

Not sure I follow, but only 11% of the current ranking weighting specifically pertains to Pell grant recipients, who make up a large portion (1/3) of college students. That 11% involves graduation rates, which is certainly relevant to the quality of the educational experience for that third. If you are wondering why that third should get the extra emphasis, it’s cause schools otherwise can engineer higher ranks by under-admitting from financially constrained families who historically have lower grad rates, often because of family hardship or the burden of having to hold down a job while in school, and not academic performance per se. Families are still free to rule out publics if they don’t want them, but it’s a positive privates now have less of an artificial and unintentionally created incentive (by USNWR themselves in their older methodology) to under-admit the 1/3 most financially constrained. This was an example of USNWR listening to the universities themselves who proposed the change so they wouldn’t be penalized for doing what they felt was proper. Incidentally, per my 2011 copy of their guide, Pell grant recipients were receiving some extra emphasis even back then; they were less transparent on the exact amount, but it was under 7.5%.  [/quote]

Good points. But look deeper into how US News measures things. They do not take into account the very generous non-loan financial aid that high endownment private universities often give to their students. More often than not, these students don't need to apply for Pell Grants because the university has already covered everything. But those private universities got penalized by the updated US News algorithm. It actually incentivizes private universities to give LESS financial aid in order to force more of their students toward federal financial aid. No matter how you look at it, it's very clear that US News very purposely changed their algorithm to boost public schools. Which, fine. It's their magazine. But there is a distinct difference between pre-2023 rankings and today. [/quote]

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