25

The biggest day of the year for participants in DCUM's college forum may be the day that U.S. News and World Report releases its college rankings list. That day was yesterday. Technically, it was the day before but so late in the day that most of the discussion didn't take place until yesterday. The result is that two threads on the topic are among the most active threads that I will discuss today. The most active thread overall yesterday was again the thread about Israel and Lebanon, which I've already discussed. Skipping that one, the next most active thread was titled, "US News best colleges 2025" and, of course, posted in the "College and University Discussion" forum. The original poster wrote nothing more than, "The rankings are out now." which was enough to provoke what is currently a 21 page thread. The normal rule of threads such as this is that posters claim to hate rankings in general and this one in particular. However, if the ranking happens to place a poster's favorite university highly, or at least above a rival university, then the list is, of course, praised for its accuracy. The U.S. News rankings were subject to considerable criticism last year when the methodology was changed in ways that many posters considered to be "woke". This year U.S. News dropped the graduation rate of 1st generation students from its formula and continued its focus on outcomes such as student retention and post-graduate earnings. Many of the posts in this thread were complaints about the ranking or methodology. But those issues were the focus of a second thread that I will discuss today so I will save those points for later. A number of posters suggested that this ranking were reasonably accurate, though almost everyone had at least one nit to pick. For instance, the positioning of UCLA at 15th was the subject of considerable discussion. The University of Virginia was another college whose ranking — tied at 24 — inspired considerable criticism along with a significant amount of smugness. Much of the discussion in this thread is about the value of such rankings. Some posters want to be able to rank colleges based on their own criteria rather than a magazine's methodology. Others suggest that these lists are good screening tools and are reasonable starting points for further research. This thread, like so many threads before it, got bogged down in an unnecessary discussion about yield protection. The forum has one or more posters who are completely obsessed with yield protection to the exclusion of almost any other topic. The single-mindedness is remarkable and I have to think that it must be motivated by a very painful rejection that was rationalized as being due to yield protection. Then the thread turned to a big debate about Notre Dame with participants accusing each other of being insufferable. That actually is a good summary of this thread. Everyone claims the U.S. News rankings are meaningless and nobody cares about them, but they will also fight to the death about whether a school deserves to be in the top 20.