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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