Of Matters Light and Dark

maxistentialist:

scout:

jholla:

tobeyoung:

jholla:

KU bringing up the rear at 425.  I feel so proud.

Madison at 415 FTW

My basketball team is better.  My one and only defense.

goucher at 369, holla

Nique, my school is better than yours.

I call BS on this methodolgy—which is frankly rather bad:

To answer these questions, the staff at CCAP gathered data from a variety of sources. They based 25% of the rankings on 4 million student evaluations of courses and instructors, as recorded on the Web site RateMyProfessors.com. Another 25% is based on post-graduate success, equally determined by enrollment-adjusted entries in Who’s Who in America, and by a new metric, the average salaries of graduates reported by Payscale.com. An additional 20% is based on the estimated average student debt after four years. One-sixth of the rankings are based on four-year college graduation rates—half of that is the actual graduation rate, the other half the gap between the average rate and a predicted rate based on characteristics of the school. The last component is based on the number of students or faculty, adjusted for enrollment, who have won nationally competitive awards like Rhodes Scholarships or Nobel Prizes.

What these rankings don’t measure are which schools offer the best return on your educational investment. So this year CCAP also compiled a best-value ranking, comparing school quality to cost. It’s topped by Kentucky’s Berea College, a remarkable institution where students incur no financial costs or debt. The public schools fare considerably better here as they typically cost less.

College rankings tend to be bad, but these rankings are really problematic:

• Ratemyprofessors.com is hardly a scientific measure.  There are significant obvious biases that occur when reviews of professors are not mandatory.
• Who’s Who in America, if it’s anything like “Who’s Who among High School Students” is useless.
• Lastly, looking at cost without looking at average cost after financial aid is misleading.  West Point might be “free,” but what does four years of your life and the chance of getting killed really cost?  Likewise, while Stanford (like many schools) has a very high tuition, the actual cost is much lower for most students—myself included.  I actually support high tuitions if they are coupled with generous financial aid.  The rich legacies should pay more.