Reply to New Wall Street Journal Rankings 2019

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I do appreciate the attempt at more of an "output"-based ranking (where students end up after college) by the Wall Street Journal, [b]whereas the US News ranking is more of an "input"-based ranking (how hard it is to get *into* a particular college).[/b] Neither approach is necessarily better or worse or even using the proper methodology to measure what they claim to be measuring, but it's interesting to see the contrasts.

It seems like most people quibble over where the Harvard or Standard-type schools are placed, but that's not where I personally see the value in these rankings. Most of us don't need to be told that the Ivy League schools and others on that tier (e.g. Stanford, MIT, UChicago, Duke, Northwestern, et. al) are prestigious and difficult to get into. Instead, the real value in these rankings is getting more information about those schools *outside* of the top 20 or so that the vast, vast, vast majority of the population will attend. For instance, a lot of people just lump all "state schools" together as a big mass of interchangeable institutions, but there are some real differences between them, particularly when you break down specific majors.

The chances that your child is going to be choosing between Harvard and Stanford is about as likely as you winning the lottery. Even in high income and highly educated areas, the more likely scenario is that your child is going to be weighing going to an in-state public school versus an out-of-state public school versus a good (but not necessarily elite) private school that are all similarly ranked and priced versus a lower ranked school that's offering a significant scholarship.

No one should use rankings as the sole basis of a decision, but those rankings can certainly help put some context into evaluating the much more common and realistic situation that I've described above.[/quote]

Not a fan of any particular ranking, but the most recent US News rankings (the 2019 ones that came out in 2018) DROPPED any selectivity criteria from their methodology. Comparing that list to the prior ones it didn't seem to change the list very much, but is worth noting that they recognized the 'gaming' of the system by some colleges pumping up apps and responded. https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/how-us-news-calculated-the-rankings

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