Reply to With US News Being Challenged by Top Schools, Does it Make More Sense to Combine Rankings?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This page is exactly what’s wrong with rankings.  Quibbling over Duke, Georgetown, Columbia is nonsense.  There is no way anyone can credibly say any of these are “better” than the others.  They are just different, with different areas of strength and different weakness.  Many of the supposed strengths and weaknesses are just value judgments.  There is no actual science behind college rankings and we should all just ignore them.

And, to the poster who keeps chiming in that it helped them cull down the 3000+ colleges, you could absolutely do that without any ordinal ranking.   [/quote]

Why is the blame on the consumers seeking information instead of the subterfuge by the schools by trying to block public information about admissions processes and graduate outcomes?

These schools basically are telling us, “Forget about rankings and pick a school that makes you *feel* good.” I’m sorry, but when people are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for each child, that’s crap.

Frankly, the most honest information is probably coming from the Department of Education College Scorecard. It’s incomplete information since it’s only based on those who took out federal student loans, but it’s at least better than the fuzzy platitudes of the schools. It’s funny that, as far as I’ve seen, the schools that have so much zeal in criticizing the US News rankings rarely point to any other alternative like the College Scorecard (lest they find about the amount of student loans people are taking out for how a whole lot of schools and/or majors that have pretty terrible income prospects).[/quote]

If the primary interest is ROI and financial outcomes, then Wall Street Journal and Forbes are the best rankings. Wall Street Journal actually has a subranking that ranks undergrad schools by outcomes:

1. Princeton
1. Yale
3. Duke
3. Harvard
3. MIT
3. Stanford
7. Cornell
8. Caltech
8. UChicago
8. Dartmouth
11. JHU
12. Northwestern
13. UPenn
14. Brown
15. Vanderbilt
16. UMich
17. WashU
18. UCLA
19. Amherst
19. Berkeley
21. Williams
22. UNC
23. Columbia
24. USC
25. Emory[/quote]
Where's Georgetown,  remember Schools like it Emory, Williams etc don't have engineering programs. So they overperform compared to Schools like Columbia and USC that underperformed. Especially Columbia [/quote]

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