Ivy League Scores Low in Forbes’ College Rankings
Everyone is getting into the college rankings game these days, and everyone - it seems - has the same goal in mind: to dethrone the juggernaut that is the U.S. News & World Report. But while students and alums of certain liberal arts colleges and lesser-known universities are probably reveling in Forbes.com's inaugural rankings, the newest kid on the block is unlikely to find much support among the non-Princeton Ivy set this year.
Of the 569 schools included in the rankings, here's how the Ivies stacked up:
1. Princeton
3. Harvard
9. Yale
10. Columbia
27. Brown
61. Penn
121: Cornell
127: Dartmouth
Brown at 27 already seems like a stretch, but Penn at 61, Cornell at 121, and Dartmouth at 127? How vulgar, indecent, cruel! Some quotes and commentary after the jump.
The article accompanying the rankings by Forbes only pours more salt on the wound:
Small liberal arts schools shine in our rankings, probably due to both the quality of their faculty and the personal attention they can provide. Williams and Swarthmore both rank in the top five, while Pomona, Smith, Middlebury and Amherst all come in the top 20, ahead of such schools as Stanford (23rd) and Brown (27th)...
The list also suggests that some schools--the University of Pennsylvania (61st), Georgetown (76th), Cornell (121st) and Dartmouth (127th)--may be living a bit off of their reputations. Graduates of these schools typically ran up large debts; at most of them, notably Dartmouth, students are not particularly happy with the quality of instruction.
Ouch. Maybe Forbes has a point about the attention liberal arts colleges can provide their students, and about certain schools floating comfortably on their reputations, but saying Dartmouth students "are not particularly happy with the quality of their instruction" smells a bit fishy. Indeed, an article on Forbes' new rankings by The Dartmouth notes a 2006 survey by the Consortium on Financing Higher Education that seems to contest this claim:
96.4 percent of Dartmouth graduates were very or generally satisfied with the quality of instruction at Dartmouth; 97.8 percent were very or generally satisfied with the out-of-class availability of faculty, and 92 percent were overall satisfied with their undergraduate experience...
So what explains this disparity? If you poke around Forbes' complete methodology, it turns out that 25% of a school's ranking comes from professor ratings on Ratemyprofessors.com (Really, Forbes, this is the best you could do?). Nice try; see you next year!
P.S. We know that there's a Forbes College at Princeton, and that the magazine has been run by generations of Princetonians.
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August 15th, 2008 at 11:07 pm
It’s absurd in general to base any ranking system on the opinions of the students attending the school, if for no other reason then the fact that students at more prestigious universities will have much higher expectations, and therefore be more willing to express disappointment. Only objective measures should be trusted, like networking opportunities and starting salaries, in which case Dartmouth probably comes out ahead.
Hotness of the professor is fair game because it’s a statistical value.
August 16th, 2008 at 11:20 am
Well of COURSE Princeton is the only school to retain its ranking compared to the US News list, even though everybody else gets shaken up for the sake of “breaking through elitism and reputation.” Yeah, and Dartmouth totally deserves to be ranked hundreds of spots behind the hallowed halls of powerhouses like “Wabash” and “Centre.”
Try again.
August 16th, 2008 at 1:38 pm
This is bull… even though I go to Princeton, no Ivy League school should ever be ranked behind the likes of Wooster, Ripon, Principia, Bucknell, and Kalamazoo. Besides the absurdity concerning ratemyprofessors.com (what, are we all going to pretend we go to [insert school name here] now so we can rip on their professors and make them go down in the rankings?), student debt doesn’t affect how “good” a college is. What’s next, ranking sports cars by how much debt the average purchaser incurs because of it? Oh and ironically, you can also find a story on Forbes.com listing the … and Dartmouth is #1.
August 16th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
Ooh sorry for that break in my last comment. Btw, has anyone else noticed that the URL for Forbes’ College Rankings includes the word “opinions”?
August 16th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
Dartmouth has its own internal professor rating website run by our SA. I’ve never heard of anyone using ratemyprofessors.com here.
Oh well, I guess I should have gone to Juniata College instead.
August 16th, 2008 at 10:09 pm
SOccum… that probably explains why Dartmouth is so low. The only people who would use ratemyprofessors.com would be those who hated a professor so much (most likely for a bad grade), that they decided to publicly bash them in addition to the school’s course rating system. I would imagine that nearly every ranking on there would be negative.
I do understand, from time to time, why Dartmouth gets a low ranking by certain methodologies. International rankings, for example, really care about gross funding from grants (as opposed to per student) at the graduate level. Surely, Dartmouth should suffer there. But, I think its safe to say that Dartmouth, under no circumstances, should be more than 100 places off of Williams College.
August 17th, 2008 at 8:21 am
Ah, another set of rankings to rile people up. This one is particularly zany and loses all credibility when you see moves like Haverford above Stanford. The RateMyProfessors.com methodology is hilarious.
August 18th, 2008 at 9:59 am
Epic Fail ?
August 18th, 2008 at 10:58 am
Also, while having Cornell and Dartmouth ranked 121 and 127 is silly, is it as silly as having RIT ranked 567 out of 569?
August 18th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
It is amazing what some publishers will do to sell magazines. The Forbes rankings are total nonsense, from a methodological stand point. How can anyone with half a brain rank Wabash above a Wesleyan, Brown, Stanford, Penn or Haverford? This pile of horse manure makes the US News and Washington Monthly rankings look brilliant by comparison, even though both are highly flawed.
August 18th, 2008 at 4:32 pm
Wow. Too bad Dartmouth uses its own SA system to provide course and prof evaluations. Who the hell from Dartmouth would go on Ratemyprofessors.com?
As for student debt, oh comeon.
August 18th, 2008 at 9:40 pm
I missed this the first time:
Barnard is ranked just higher than Brown. Impressive for a “not really Ivy League” school, eh?
August 21st, 2008 at 11:49 am
I’m a graduate of Wabash College, and a graduate of Vanderbilt University, and a graduate of University of Pennsylvania Law School. Wabash is a superb little college. When a small institution like Wabash with a 175-year history receives a little favorable attention, I think the appropriate response is to extend congratulations.
August 21st, 2008 at 2:20 pm
@jfrankli: It’s not that I don’t know of Wabash’s existence… I often skim the US News rankings and Wabash is ranked above many other noteworthy liberal arts colleges such as Denison, St. Olaf, Wheaton, Lawrence, and Reed. These rankings were mostly compiled by current college students and they look like they were hastily trotted out to the public. As I have stated in previous comments, my beef is with the methodology. Selectivity isn’t considered? Financial resources per student isn’t considered? 25% weight on student evaluations of professors from Ratemyprofessors.com? 16 2/3% on the avg accumulated debt of those borrowing money? Is this a “best” colleges list, or an “affordable” colleges list?
August 22nd, 2008 at 4:00 pm
The Forbes methodology is definitely imperfect, the idea of ordinally ranking colleges from “best to worst” is inherently silly, etc. I agree. But permit me to make a couple of observations. I know from experience that Wabash has an unusually powerful impact on a large number of its students. Routinely, it takes pretty good high school students and transforms them into excellent students and scholars. I think this is probably why Wabash scored unusually high on the student evaluations part of the Forbes survey. What this suggests to me is that, if you place emphasis on admissions standards (and Wabash is selective on the grand scale, but not selective on the Ivy League scale), the Forbes methodology is seriously flawed. If you emphasize what happens after you show up and get started with your college education, Forbes may be right in handing out some high rankings to small liberal arts colleges.
September 19th, 2008 at 8:47 am
Reading all the comments left by indignant Ivy League brats makes me want to laugh. You are all so over entitled. You all think that the top eight spots should automatically go to the Ivy League just because. Truth is that the Ivy League is a fraud. Nothing more than overrated schools for the elite and overprivledged. There are so many schools that are so vastly worth ranking above the Ivy League. Real universities like Cal Tech, Michigan, Northwestern, Chicago, and some of the UCs deserve the prestige because they actually make their students work hard to earn their degrees. An easy argument can be made that even some of the nicer state colleges like Ohio State, Penn State, Florida etc. deserve way more acclaim than the Ivy League because they actually have academic achievements to show for it. Could an Ivy League school say that they built the world’s largest telescope which in a few years will produce earth-based images 100 times sharper than Hubble? Univ. of Arizona can. Does the League have even one student that could hold his/her own at Cal Tech? Those kinds of schools are full of rocket scientists, not Wall Street speculators. Your schools are degree mills. Rubber stamps for the ruling class.
I have a friend who went to Chicago. She told me they had T-shirts there that said “If I wanted A’s I’d go to Harvard.”
September 19th, 2008 at 11:10 am
I remember when I was back in high school, I participated in this science program for the state’s best science students (emphasize science). The best and smartest students of the program went to these places:
MIT, Caltech, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Wharton M&T?, Wharton, Northwestern 8yr med.
As far as I am concerned, this is the “Ivy league” and the “real” Ivies make a pretty good showing, no?
October 30th, 2008 at 10:52 pm
Wow, Tom (Collins), that’s quite some opinion(rant) you’ve got there about the Ivy League. Lot’s of anger and bitterness. I sense something distinctly personal(rejection) in your tone. Sorry you or yours didn’t make it in; it’s quite nice here in the Ivy League…nothing quite like it really.
Signed,
Harvard-Yale-Princeton, etc.
November 29th, 2008 at 8:50 pm
as i believe the d pointed out, very, very few students at dartmouth use “rate my professor” as we have a student assembly course guide that is considered much more effective.
December 25th, 2008 at 4:10 am
I am languidly satisfied with this arbitrary ranking process.
/Still wish I’d gone to RISD.
January 10th, 2009 at 5:14 am
Wow — what a joke!! Steve Forbes went to Princeton, thus no wonder on #1. As for Dartmouth, we don’t need these rankings to know that we are the shizznitt! Remember that Michael Corleone is an alumnus!
I’m going to make my own list. Dartmouth College, ranked #1
August 18th, 2009 at 9:25 pm
IvyLeagueMan,
You misused an apostrophe. According to most educational standards, apostrophes should be mastered by the third grade. Perhaps my students with Down syndrome can tutor you.