Why U.S. News' college rankings hurt students
1–10 of 38 posts
Re: Why U.S. News' college rankings hurt students
#2College rankings are bullshit, and anyone who doesn't realize that the difference between the #1 and #10 schools is negligible is an idiot.
Re: Why U.S. News' college rankings hurt students
#3Wow, those metrics are dismal. Here in Canada we have a similar report that Maclean's does, but it's focused on things like first-year class sizes, student satisfaction surveys, and other, more academically-focused metrics. Of course, the winning schools are usually tiny - 2013 looks to be Mt. Allison, where my brother is studying right now. He's had some pretty dismal experiences with the faculty there, but they do well because they have so few students, and the cost of living in a small town on the east coast is tiny. It's tough to say that any university ranking will be good, because there's a lot of complexity, but I think Maclean's is at least not completely toxic.
Re: Why U.S. News' college rankings hurt students
#4I agree, and I started a website to address this: http://www.collegeanswerz.com/.
Re: Why U.S. News' college rankings hurt students
#5I agree, and I started a website to address this: http://www.collegeanswerz.com/ .
Great site. Good resource!!
Re: Why U.S. News' college rankings hurt students
#6I think that the general US News College Rankings are useless. The rankings more specific to the major are more useful.
College is what you make of it. Learning should not stop after college - it should be an ongoing quest.
Re: Why U.S. News' college rankings hurt students
#7> At private schools, the percentage of students receiving need-based aid has actually declined!
..from 43% to 42%. This is not a significant amount. If the trend holds, we have something to worry about.
Re: Why U.S. News' college rankings hurt students
#8College rankings are bullshit, and anyone who doesn't realize that the difference between the #1 and #10 schools is negligible is an idiot.
I'd say, they're not bullshit, but presenting them in such a finely graduated ranking is harmful
There is a huge difference between the top 100 schools and the 201st-300th best schools.
Re: Why U.S. News' college rankings hurt students
#9College rankings are bullshit, and anyone who doesn't realize that the difference between the #1 and #10 schools is negligible is an idiot.
The problem is that it seems to matter in terms job prospects. I'm a biomedical engineering undergrad, so I thought I made the right decision turning down Harvard to come to Hopkins.
However, our recruitment is abysmal compared to Harvard even for biotech and I'm seeing peers who went to a much less rigorous undergraduate engineering program that also has grade inflation getting the jobs I want simply because those companies are not hiring from Hopkins.
Re: Why U.S. News' college rankings hurt students
#10College rankings are bullshit, and anyone who doesn't realize that the difference between the #1 and #10 schools is negligible is an idiot.
We should decide why we are above it all though, shouldn't we?
Is it because all of the top-ranked colleges are essentially the same, or is it because the top-ranked colleges are different in ways that are not captured by a single number.
Furthermore, if we are going to distinguish between, prestige, selectivity, learning outcomes, jobs out of college, careers 10, 20, 30 years out of college, or whether we measure that by income, or influence, etc, before even moving on to distinguishing between the paths chosen by graduates of Yale, Juilliard, or CalTech, shouldn't we at least identify which is the one true metric, and why it is better than this magazine's?
In dismissing rankings as but one take on the distinctions, I don't think prospective students are better served by the contention that the schools are largely interchangeable.