How bad can they be? Almost from their inaugural appearance in , the U. News rankings have been a popular and easy target for critics. News rankings and those put out by other organizations like Kaplan, Fiske, or the Princeton Review. Dupes fork over their hard-earned money for the rankings to see how their kid and, thus, they themselves!
Sweetie, did you see that Bowdoin is ranked 20 spots higher than Oberlin?! Ah, the smug satisfaction and inner glow that come from having bested the Joneses. But surely there is something good to be said about the U.
Using the U. News rankings for any more exacting purpose is about as good for you as eating potato chips and Gummy Bears for dinner. With maple syrup. So, my best advice is simply to ignore the U. News rankings. The most common reason for a school to be unranked is that it doesn't use standardized tests. US News argues that there isn't enough data to compare the school to other institutions in the category without test scores, so it has to remain unranked.
This may be a valid point, but it means that schools that may otherwise have solid academics are excluded from rankings , leaving you with a slightly less complete picture of the college landscape.
On the website for US News, it states, "over time, the ranking model has put less emphasis on input measures of quality—which look at characteristics of the students, faculty and other resources going into the educational process—and more emphasis on output measures, which look at the results of the educational process, such as graduation and freshman retention rates. There is no doubt that graduation rates are important, and they do say a lot about the quality of a college. However, they will tell you very little about whether a school is a nice place to spend four years, especially if the school is very academically rigorous and prestigious.
Most students will graduate because they're very driven, but that doesn't tell you whether or not they enjoyed their time there. The US News rankings are based on hard statistics and information gleaned from academic peer reviews about the quality of the school. While this is very useful in determining how favorably the school is viewed from the heights of the academic Ivory Tower, it isn't always the best metric for conducting your search process.
Even though focusing on outcome does make sense to a certain degree, it also fails to fully evaluate the quality of the student experience. This can contribute to a somewhat harmful "ends justify the means" mindset that leads students to spend years in places where they are outwardly successful but inwardly unhappy.
For many students, prestige remains an important factor in deciding whether to attend a college. It's hard to resist the allure of a school that will impress other people and potentially get you good jobs down the road based on its name recognition. This is the reason why prestige is considered so strongly by US News in its rankings in the form of ratings from academic peer groups and guidance counselors. Of course, prestige correlates with selectivity in admissions and respect from the higher education community at large , so it does indicate some measure of academic quality.
However, measuring schools based on prestige can have the unfortunate consequence of discounting some up and coming colleges or colleges that may have a unique focus and be less well-known. Make sure you use other resources to research schools that have the criteria you're looking for—even if they're not ranked especially high, they may be a much better fit for your goals. In the US News rankings, private schools are always more highly ranked than public schools. This can be misleading, and shouldn't dissuade you from attending a public school!
The reason this happens is because the ranking model US News uses is naturally kinder to private schools: they usually score higher on measures of selectivity, student retention rates, and small class sizes. Since public schools tend to be larger and less selective, they end up with lower rankings, but that means very little for high achieving students who choose to attend public schools. Though the statistics are often less impressive than those of private schools, the public college experience may allow many students to thrive.
For students who are willing to seek out resources, public schools are often good choices because of the amount of different programs and high-level research facilities they offer. Rankings also don't consider the diversity of social life at schools and the opportunities in the form of extracurricular activities. I'm Chase, your new roommate. I like sailing and refusing to look at the world from anyone else's perspective.
If you're trying to avoid debt in college, you'll need to look at other lists to figure out which schools are the most affordable. Rankings in US News have nothing to do with the cost of schools , so they won't give you the perspective you're looking for if cost is a major issue.
You don't have to ignore the US News rankings just because they're not totally well-rounded in terms of their assessment metrics and inclusivity. What you should do is make sure that you are aware of what they can and can't tell you about a college.
It's important that you supplement your views on schools with other resources that will give you a more complete picture of what student life is like and how you might fare at the college. To their credit, US News fully acknowledges this fact: "the editors of U.
News believe rankings are only one of many criteria students should consider in choosing a college. Simply because a school is top in its category does not mean it is the top choice for everyone. The rankings should not be used as the sole basis to choose one school over another. You should make sure that you like the location of the school, the housing options, the food, the campus life, and the price tag before you make a decision.
And in case you don't like the food, bring a bottle of sriracha. You could put sriracha on woodchips and I would probably eat them. For the eleventh year in a row, Princeton University claims the top spot in U. News' Best College For the eleventh straight year, Princeton tops the National University list, followed by Columbia, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which all tied for second.
Best National Universities schools. National universities offer a full range of undergraduate majors in addition to master's and doctoral degrees. Many also emphasize research. Of the top 20 national universities, 19 are private, not-for-profit institutions. This ranking inertia has come to be expected, the product of both institutional stability and - despite small, annual revisions - a largely consistent methodology.
Best National Liberal Arts Colleges schools. Best National Public Universities schools. The only change from last year was that the New College of Florida replaced St. Best Historically Black Colleges and Universities 78 schools. News frequently revises its methodology, but this year saw no changes to its 17 measures of academic quality or the weights assigned to them.
The data came from schools surveyed in spring and summer of ACT and SAT scores mostly reflect testing periods from to early , prior to pandemic disruptions. Like last year, U.
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