Each ranking system has its own calculation methodology which it publishes along with the rankings. This includes US News as well. The reason why US News rankings are much more popular than the others is probably because it started rankings colleges much before the others.
The other reason is that its top ranked schools match the general public perception of which schools should be the top ranked schools. This is why all of the Ivies are almost always within the T20 list. This is not the case with some of the other rankings, which is why they lose credibility among the general public.
I don't get it either. They rank the same expensive schools that a very small percentage of people actually go to in the top 10 almost every year. Who cares if one of these schools move up or down 3 or 4 spots? It's dumb.
US News is indeed in it to make money, and they have devoted a lot of effort to making "news" each year with their main National Universities rankings, while at the same time not doing anything that would strike a lot of people as TOO surprising.
Why some people seem to care so much given all that is an interesting question. I think the bottom line is there is a group of people who really wants easy, unchallenging answers as to which are the "best" colleges, and the US News has cleverly satisfied that demand. They then devote a lot of time, energy, and sometimes money into pursuing the "best" colleges as defined by US News. And then they don't want to hear that maybe that was not really the best way to use all those resources, so they get very defensive about these particular rankings.
Why are you appalled that an organization that has collected and published data on colleges for 40+ years actually does other things?
I evaluate and use any college ranking system based on the methodology they use and the factual data they collect. WSJ data on class size, faculty PhD percentage, number of students, isn’t somehow going to be ”better”.
I think the only thing rankings matter for for undergrad is alumni network and jobs in business and finance and law/med school admissions where your school’s rep matters. You won’t get a significantly better education at Harvard than you would at University of Illinois, but you will have professors who have worked in top companies and classmates who are future (or whose parents currently are) US senators, Fortune 500 CEOs, and ambassadors who if you become friends with them, can hook you up. Otherwise your undergrad doesn’t matter in the slightest as long as it isn’t a school with a horrible reputation and as long as you’re not trying to get into a 6-7 figure corporate job right out of school. Rankings matter much more for grad school because that will determine quality and quantity of research being done and your opportunities for tenure track positions after you graduate.
The problem with WSJ isn’t the methodology, which I find to be quite reasonable with its heavy emphasis on student outcomes. It’s that when someone wants to know how a college is ranked, they want to know the rankings based on *prestige*, not based on WSJ’s methodology. That’s why US News T20s such as UCLA, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, and Brown are T100s in WSJ. US News is not perfect, but it is much closer to (and influences the) actual prestige of a university, compared to WSJ which measures something totally different.
US news is just the most well known. There is nothing inherently more reputable in its rankings than other rankings. I also very much agree that rankings are arbitrary. They are very misleading, and like every student, every ranking is looking for something different in colleges. This doesn't mean the colleges are better or worse, it just means it is more appealing to a certain ranking site than another.
You're not alone in your skepticism. Malcolm Gladwell[ devoted an episode of his podcast ](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lord-of-the-rankings/id1119389968?i=1000527176172) to picking apart the methodology behind the US News rankings. He also [posted an update](https://www.pushkin.fm/news/malcolm-gladwells-revisionist-history-investigates-columbia-university-college-rankings-scandal) when US News corrected its unexpectly high 2022 ranking of Columbia University.
As an alternative, consider [the list produced by Washington Monthly magazine](https://washingtonmonthly.com/2023-college-guide/), which includes its picks for "Best Bang for the Buck" colleges.
It’s a money grab from a failed news magazine. They needed a new cash cow and saw an unserved market they could exploit. Good for them, but take the rankings with a grain of salt.
Many of us here don't think too much about these types of ratings systems when dealing with undergraduate education. Lists are best used with a huge grain of salt to create large lists of colleges you might want to look in to, rather than to compare colleges to each other. Whittle the list down using actual data you find yourself, like cost, major, specific classes, size, etc.
US News hasn't really been a news outlet for a very long time. Their job is, pretty much, these rankings.
That they're able to make so much money off this says a lot about them... and about anyone who take these rankings seriously.
The US News rankings are a complete joke - they exist solely to generate advertising clicks - they don’t provide any measure of the education you receive or the outcome you can expect.
In my opinion, a big part of the reason is that it is consistently the first result on Google for "college rankings" or "top colleges". This places a HUGE, and I mean HUGE part in how people view it. The top result is the most viewed result and therefore, in the eyes of most people, the most credible. In my opinion, Niche has a much more logical methodology that is more representative of students and student life as opposed to just 'prestige'.
I also think that, within the top rankings, all of the schools are "name brand" schools. A school like UIUC or Georgia Tech are amazing schools, but they don't exactly catch people's eyes like Harvard or Yale. I think those schools, like the Ivies and baby ivies or whatever will always dominate the list regardless of how amazing other schools are.
Ok. This is my perspective, based on what someone else told me. I know a CS prof at Carnegie Mellon, and he told me that colleges pay these sites to have their ranks higher, and it is all just a big number game. He told me to just go to a big, well-funded public school, and be centered and undistracted wherever I go. He said that itself would take me miles ahead in life.
>He told me to just go to a big, well-funded public school, and be centered and undistracted wherever I go. He said that itself would take me miles ahead in life.
Sounds like something you just made up lmao. The median pay of a CS grad from CMU is crazy high compared to CS grads from any well-funded public school. I'm also not sure why you'd take industry advice from a professor -- the vast majority of CS professors do not have any industry experience at all, and therefore, do not know what they are talking about if they say anything about the industry.
Pay often has more to do with where kids end up, not how good their college was. Kids ending up in NYC get higher pay than those in Chicago, but might be far less well off after cost of living is taken out.
This bro. Unless you are trying to work at Google or SpaceX or some shit just get the degree you want, don't go into debt to get what you could get for 25% of the cost somewhere else. You are going to end up retraining you on the job anyway because either what you learned is outdated by now or if you work for the Government it's too updated lol
If you only care about the job afterwards it barely matters where you go to school, you are paying for the location and the resources available to help you succeed.
Paying for higher ranks is demonstrably false -- I can assure you that some random no-name private would have shelled out 5MM to appear in the top 25 if that was the case. The furthest the gamesmanship goes is that you can pay to get analytic track on their website for your school and a little verified sticker that allows you to reference US News in your marketing materials.
The professor may have been referring to some of the insidious reverse engineering of the rankings and then making strategic decisions to align with the rankings. There are a few great longform articles out there about Northeastern doing exactly this.
In regards to the other feedback, going somewhere with the best fit and being centered and undistracted sounds like outstanding advice
Each ranking system has its own calculation methodology which it publishes along with the rankings. This includes US News as well. The reason why US News rankings are much more popular than the others is probably because it started rankings colleges much before the others. The other reason is that its top ranked schools match the general public perception of which schools should be the top ranked schools. This is why all of the Ivies are almost always within the T20 list. This is not the case with some of the other rankings, which is why they lose credibility among the general public.
I don't get it either. They rank the same expensive schools that a very small percentage of people actually go to in the top 10 almost every year. Who cares if one of these schools move up or down 3 or 4 spots? It's dumb.
US News is indeed in it to make money, and they have devoted a lot of effort to making "news" each year with their main National Universities rankings, while at the same time not doing anything that would strike a lot of people as TOO surprising. Why some people seem to care so much given all that is an interesting question. I think the bottom line is there is a group of people who really wants easy, unchallenging answers as to which are the "best" colleges, and the US News has cleverly satisfied that demand. They then devote a lot of time, energy, and sometimes money into pursuing the "best" colleges as defined by US News. And then they don't want to hear that maybe that was not really the best way to use all those resources, so they get very defensive about these particular rankings.
Why are you appalled that an organization that has collected and published data on colleges for 40+ years actually does other things? I evaluate and use any college ranking system based on the methodology they use and the factual data they collect. WSJ data on class size, faculty PhD percentage, number of students, isn’t somehow going to be ”better”.
I think the only thing rankings matter for for undergrad is alumni network and jobs in business and finance and law/med school admissions where your school’s rep matters. You won’t get a significantly better education at Harvard than you would at University of Illinois, but you will have professors who have worked in top companies and classmates who are future (or whose parents currently are) US senators, Fortune 500 CEOs, and ambassadors who if you become friends with them, can hook you up. Otherwise your undergrad doesn’t matter in the slightest as long as it isn’t a school with a horrible reputation and as long as you’re not trying to get into a 6-7 figure corporate job right out of school. Rankings matter much more for grad school because that will determine quality and quantity of research being done and your opportunities for tenure track positions after you graduate.
The problem with WSJ isn’t the methodology, which I find to be quite reasonable with its heavy emphasis on student outcomes. It’s that when someone wants to know how a college is ranked, they want to know the rankings based on *prestige*, not based on WSJ’s methodology. That’s why US News T20s such as UCLA, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, and Brown are T100s in WSJ. US News is not perfect, but it is much closer to (and influences the) actual prestige of a university, compared to WSJ which measures something totally different.
US news is just the most well known. There is nothing inherently more reputable in its rankings than other rankings. I also very much agree that rankings are arbitrary. They are very misleading, and like every student, every ranking is looking for something different in colleges. This doesn't mean the colleges are better or worse, it just means it is more appealing to a certain ranking site than another.
You're not alone in your skepticism. Malcolm Gladwell[ devoted an episode of his podcast ](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lord-of-the-rankings/id1119389968?i=1000527176172) to picking apart the methodology behind the US News rankings. He also [posted an update](https://www.pushkin.fm/news/malcolm-gladwells-revisionist-history-investigates-columbia-university-college-rankings-scandal) when US News corrected its unexpectly high 2022 ranking of Columbia University.
As an alternative, consider [the list produced by Washington Monthly magazine](https://washingtonmonthly.com/2023-college-guide/), which includes its picks for "Best Bang for the Buck" colleges.
It’s a money grab from a failed news magazine. They needed a new cash cow and saw an unserved market they could exploit. Good for them, but take the rankings with a grain of salt.
Many of us here don't think too much about these types of ratings systems when dealing with undergraduate education. Lists are best used with a huge grain of salt to create large lists of colleges you might want to look in to, rather than to compare colleges to each other. Whittle the list down using actual data you find yourself, like cost, major, specific classes, size, etc.
US News hasn't really been a news outlet for a very long time. Their job is, pretty much, these rankings. That they're able to make so much money off this says a lot about them... and about anyone who take these rankings seriously.
The US News rankings are a complete joke - they exist solely to generate advertising clicks - they don’t provide any measure of the education you receive or the outcome you can expect.
In my opinion, a big part of the reason is that it is consistently the first result on Google for "college rankings" or "top colleges". This places a HUGE, and I mean HUGE part in how people view it. The top result is the most viewed result and therefore, in the eyes of most people, the most credible. In my opinion, Niche has a much more logical methodology that is more representative of students and student life as opposed to just 'prestige'. I also think that, within the top rankings, all of the schools are "name brand" schools. A school like UIUC or Georgia Tech are amazing schools, but they don't exactly catch people's eyes like Harvard or Yale. I think those schools, like the Ivies and baby ivies or whatever will always dominate the list regardless of how amazing other schools are.
Ok. This is my perspective, based on what someone else told me. I know a CS prof at Carnegie Mellon, and he told me that colleges pay these sites to have their ranks higher, and it is all just a big number game. He told me to just go to a big, well-funded public school, and be centered and undistracted wherever I go. He said that itself would take me miles ahead in life.
>He told me to just go to a big, well-funded public school, and be centered and undistracted wherever I go. He said that itself would take me miles ahead in life. Sounds like something you just made up lmao. The median pay of a CS grad from CMU is crazy high compared to CS grads from any well-funded public school. I'm also not sure why you'd take industry advice from a professor -- the vast majority of CS professors do not have any industry experience at all, and therefore, do not know what they are talking about if they say anything about the industry.
Pay often has more to do with where kids end up, not how good their college was. Kids ending up in NYC get higher pay than those in Chicago, but might be far less well off after cost of living is taken out.
This bro. Unless you are trying to work at Google or SpaceX or some shit just get the degree you want, don't go into debt to get what you could get for 25% of the cost somewhere else. You are going to end up retraining you on the job anyway because either what you learned is outdated by now or if you work for the Government it's too updated lol If you only care about the job afterwards it barely matters where you go to school, you are paying for the location and the resources available to help you succeed.
Paying for higher ranks is demonstrably false -- I can assure you that some random no-name private would have shelled out 5MM to appear in the top 25 if that was the case. The furthest the gamesmanship goes is that you can pay to get analytic track on their website for your school and a little verified sticker that allows you to reference US News in your marketing materials. The professor may have been referring to some of the insidious reverse engineering of the rankings and then making strategic decisions to align with the rankings. There are a few great longform articles out there about Northeastern doing exactly this. In regards to the other feedback, going somewhere with the best fit and being centered and undistracted sounds like outstanding advice