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

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[quote=Anonymous]Anyone who has ever worked in a university knows that these rankings are garbage.  Our university is regularly playing around with various policies that will gain us more points on the rubrics used.  There's a meausre that looks at the percent of courses taught to undergrads by full time faculty, so even if most courses in a department are taught by TA's, they will do things like put a full time professor down as the 'professor of record,' etc.

There are all kinds of ways to game the system. They sometimes hire their own grads as temp employees over the summer so that they can claim that "all our recent grades are employed" even if they are employed in six month fake jobs that end as soon as the stats are compiled.

THere was someone a while back that did a similar 'reputation survey' with university presidents -- but they included programs and schools that didn't exist (i.e.  saying that a prestigious school had a medical school or law school even if it didn't).  Yup.  University presidents ranked those programs are "very well regarded" even though they didn't exist!

Not saying you want to ignore them entirely but please for the love of God don't go into debt to go to the "number 27" school when you have a free ride at the "number 30" school.  That would be ridiculous -- and yet people do it.[/quote]

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