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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]https://www.wsj.com/rankings/college-rankings/best-colleges-2025
https://www.wsj.com/rankings/college-rankings/best-colleges-2024

I have to say, I find it hard to believe in the credibility of a ranking that can have a school in the top 10 one year and outside the top 100 the next. Amherst College: #8 to #120.[/quote]

I recovered my Wall Streef Journal account and figured out why this list is so weird:

- It’s been a bad summer for web traffic and ad sales. A weird list that generates angry traffic beats a good list that gets fewer views.

- Roughly half of the results are based on a *student survey*, even when the team was creating statistics on what seem like factors that should be based on hard, common data set data or alumni surveys. Example: learning opportunities and learning opportunities. The “character building” factor seems to be based on a proprietary set of survey questions that isn’t available online, or at least was hard to find online.

- Some of the more concrete numbers were calculated in unusual ways. Example: 94% of Washington University undergraduates get their bachelor’s degrees within six years, but it got a 71 on that indicator in the WSJ rankings. That’s because the team adjusted the graduation rate to adjust for the test scores of  the freshman and the percentage of freshman with household income over $110,000 per year. So, due to the adjustments, that indicator punishes schools with a lot of high-income-family students with high test scores, even though going to a school with smart rich kids might generally be considered a good thing. MIT gets dinged hard on that factor for the same reason. [/quote]

These descriptions continue to get crazier and crazier - is THIS is how college rankings have always been created? If so, my god.[/quote]

First, news websites need hits. No one is asking the reporters if these lists make any sense. Hits are God. No stupid lists means no reporters.

Second, I think one thing that happened here is that the WSJ team (apparently, maybe including one of more people here in this thread), came up with the adjustments to try to make certain indicators (example: graduation rates) more fair than usual. But the problem is that the adjustment algorithms weren’t well-designed and are too hard on schools with rich, smart students.

Third, it’s hard to tell how the surveys worked, but the WSJ probably should have figured out a way to calibrate the data by comparing student positivity with some objective school statistic. Example: The WSJ shows Elon University having a higher learning opportunities score than my alma mater, Washington University. Both Elon and Wash. U. have higher learning opportunities scores than Yale, UC Berkeley and the University of Michigan.

I’m sure that many Elon students get a great education, but maybe they’re simply very positive people and Yale students are much more critical. Otherwise, it’s hard to see how Elon could beat Yale, Wash. U., Berkeley and Michigan on learning opportunities.

Maybe I missed something, but I think the income impact factor is another problem. I think the WSJ team adjusted that factor for incoming student test scores and the cost of living in the college’s state, but not for major mix or gender mix. One way to adjust for that would be to base the income factor solely on the income of math majors, to filter out any differences caused by what majors students pick. You figure, any school in the top 500 must have a few math majors, and that’s both a STEM topic and one of the liberal arts. So, both the engineering schools and the liberal arts colleges should have math major data. [/quote]

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