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

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It's strange that a bankrupt magzine has so much sway on the  higher-education systems.

That US NEWS ranking University of Florida much higher than Univ of Washington should make people think twice. Instead, people just take the ranking as if god-given. [/quote]

Those are the obvious ones but other than those, the rankings are pretty solid relative to their actual prestige. [/quote]
Don't act like you would've heard of Chicago, Vanderbilt, Rice, Washington University, Northwestern, or even Duke and Hopkins outside of the DC Area had it not been for US News.

The top 10 of USNews is a strong indicator of national and worldwide prestige. The ranking after 10 becomes 
useless as a measure of prestige excluding the Ivies which will always hold sway due to being Ivies, not being ranked between 10-20.

The fact that Chicago went from >15 to top 3 (or where ever it is now) within 20 years shows how idiotic the rankings are even for prestige - schools don't rise in prestige so quickly at the top because prestige is entrenched.  U. Chicago has always had strong graduate departments but that its often ranked ahead of Yale, Caltech, etc. or ranked alongside Harvard today is simply a result of  ranking manipulation.[/quote]

All the schools you named have <15% acceptance rate and average SATs of above 1450 so Id say there prestige is through the roof among prospective students. [/quote]
Certainly, and look at their acceptance rates and scores 20 years ago. The ranking provides a self-reinforcing cycle where schools ranked higher receive more applications, higher scores, etc.

That does not mean that the schools ranked higher are necessarily more prestigious nationally though, excluding the top 10 w/o Chicago.

Schools like [b]Duke, Hopkins, Vanderbilt, Northwestern, Rice, Chicago, Washington University[/b] were, in the 1990's and early 2000s, respected regional universities that attracted great students from their respective regions. If they were renowned nationally, they were so in a few specific fields - Hopkins for medicine, Chicago for Economics, Duke for Divinity (no joke), etc.

These schools were not nationally prestigious universities as they are today, and certainly not globally renowned, which they still largely aren't today

So the people acting like Northwestern, Chicago, Rice, Vanderbilt, etc. were simply destined to be top national universities or already were largely considered prestigious nationally prior to the domination of these rankings is flat out lying. Had it not been for the rankings, they wouldn't have even heard of these universities. The rankings have provided a self-perpetuating cycle that has brought these universities to their current level of national prestige in recent years. [/quote]

What?  Nonsense. If you mean that they weren't known to the average middle class family, maybe.  But they were nationally and internationally prestigious. They were elite schools, known to elites. All of those schools have been extremely well regarded for more than 50 years. I

[/quote]
They were known to elites in their respective regions, and certainly not upper-middle class families on the other end of the country.

And no, they were not internationally prestigious, and neither are they today. Have you even lived outside of the US?[/quote]

Uh this would only make sense if not for the extensive list of alumni from these schools who are not from the schools' respective regions. How old are you? You keep making all these bold claims but I can't help but feel you're an angsty 30-something-year-old that doesn't actually have insight into the time periods you're speaking on so authoritatively. You're also making a fatal mistake by indiscriminately grouping a whole bunch of universities together that don't really share all too much in common other than being non-Ivy private schools that are ranked relatively highly on US News (and thus betraying your own obsession with the very rankings that you are so painstakingly decrying). Like, I could [I]maybe[/I] see your arguments for schools like Rice, Vanderbilt, Emory, and Wake Forest, but not for schools like Hopkins, Duke, Northwestern, and UChicago, which have been prominent research institutions for quite some time and have long legs as prestigious schools.[/quote]

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