US News & World Report Rankings Out of the Bag… Sort Of (UPDATED)
HYP: Time to celebrate. Everyone else: Get ready to be pissed off.
Justin Pope over at the Associated Press scooped the US News & World Report college rankings by 6 and a half hours. While we vivisected some of the rankings from the the Princeton Review's "Best 371 Colleges" and Forbes, no one cares about those lists.
Onward past the jump to the rankings that really matter, which we arrange into a handy, numbered list, because for some reason Pope didn't do that.
Pope gave the USNWR list a lengthy write-around (his way of pretending he didn't break the embargo?), but here are the rankings he did spill:
1. Harvard
1. Princeton
3. Yale
4. Cal Tech
4. MIT
4. Stanford
4. U Penn
11. Dartmouth
61. Clemson
That's right, Pope tells us about the fourth place clusterfuck but neglects to mention our other friends Brown, Columbia, and Cornell. That doesn't mean they're not in the top 10. Or does it?
The rankings are determined by a mix of SAT scores, peer reputation, selectivity, alumni giving, reading chicken entrails, and phrenology.
UPDATE: Ivy Gate commenter Double Ivy writes that the entire list was leaked this morning on the College Confidential forum. The poster claims he picked up a copy of USNWR off the newsstand a day early, so we can't fully stand behind it.
Some of it holds up, though. The Huffington Post story published 8 hours later affirms the rankings, and it's probably beyond coincidence to call two ties, one a four-way, randomly. Without further ado, the alleged top 20:
1. Harvard
1. Princeton
3. Yale
4. Caltech
4. MIT
4. Stanford
4. UPenn
8. Columbia
8. Chicago
10. Duke
11. Dartmouth
12. Northwestern
12. Washu
14. Hopkins
15. Cornell
16. Brown
17. Emory
!7. Rice
17. Vanderbilt
20. Notre Dame
And now you know.
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August 19th, 2009 at 9:34 pm
This list is already all around the collegeconfidential forums… but complete. Why is it incomplete here?
August 19th, 2009 at 9:56 pm
We’re already in, so we don’t read that shit.
August 19th, 2009 at 10:08 pm
Ack! Two terrible posts in one day! The complete top 50 is available at the P.U. Press Club Blog (link just inches to the bottom-left of this post), among many other places on the vast interwebs. Do some research. Here’s the top 25:
1. Harvard
1. Princeton
3. Yale
4. Caltech
4. MIT
4. Stanford
4. UPenn
8. Columbia
8. Chicago
10. Duke
11. Dartmouth
12. Northwestern
12. Washu
14. Hopkins
15. Cornell
16. Brown
17. Emory
17. Rice
17. Vanderbilt
20. Notre Dame
21. Berkeley
22. Carnegie Mellon
23. Georgetown
24. UCLA
24. UVA
August 19th, 2009 at 10:42 pm
Ah, another year, another US news crapfest. Again P’ton and Penn are overrated… Again UChicago students have a reason not to commit suicide… and Again Mary Sue Coleman is dragging the University of Michigan down with her into her self-afflicted affrimative action Hell (sorry I’m from Michigan- she’s the reason nobody’s turning down an ivy league to stay).
US News can go to hell and with them I condemn Kaplan- damn your SAT prep! and Princeton Review who is an amalgamation of those two.
We already know that West Point is the best school in the country, so what’s the point anyway?
August 19th, 2009 at 10:45 pm
I guarantee you that there is some circular logic involved when US News makes its annual refinements in methodology. US News knows that, if there were ever several years in a row in which neither Princeton nor Harvard were ranked number one, the rankings would begin to lose credibility. Imagine after a decade passed in which neither was on top; the US News list would be as irrelevant as the Forbes ranking, the Atlantic Monthly ranking or the Wall Street Journal ranking. It’s no surprise, then, that Princeton and Harvard are perenially ranked first and second or tied for first.
In years past, Caltech, Yale and Stanford have each been ranked first — but only for one year. Then it’s immediately back to Princeton and/or Harvard.
Among all the reasons to be cynical about this annual cringe-fest among college students and administrators, add this one. Princeton and Harvard will ALWAYS be 1 and/or 1 and 2 because US News knows that the relevance of its annual list and the significant recurring revenue stream spawned by the list depend upon it.
Unlike their competitors at Forbes Magazine, US News knows that college students and administrators will not break a sweat worrying about where they appear on a list headed by the United States Military Academy.
August 19th, 2009 at 11:13 pm
this blog had the entire list long before you!: http://www.universitypressclub.com/archive/2009/08/princeton-back-at-1-in-us-news-rankings/
August 19th, 2009 at 11:52 pm
Penn = Stanford, if not in academic excellence than at least in coke consumption.
August 20th, 2009 at 12:00 am
WHY ARE WE NEVER GOOD ENOUGH FOR YOU, USNWR, WHY?
August 20th, 2009 at 12:17 am
You know, for the 11th (or 98th) ranked school in the country, Dartmouth has done pretty well for itself in the rankings. Sure the Princeton review is apparently pretending it doesn’t exist, but it is number one on two lists: Commitment to undergraduate education (which is good, given what I’m paying for an undergraduate education), and graduate median salary (also good, considering what I’m paying for an undergraduate education).
And the Brown outrage at being lower than Cornell begins in 5…4…3…2…
August 20th, 2009 at 12:23 am
*Sigh* When will one of the so-called top 10 schools in this ranking have the guts to say “no mas” to USNWR and issue a press release saying they will no longer participate in this joke of a survey. I can’t believe a mediocre current events magazine still carries any sway. Are people that shallow? If you care so much about rankings, then just become a college football fan or something. BCS rankings are messed up, too, but more accurate than this drivel. Are we really to believe that Harvard (my grad school alma mater) is a better educational experience than UCLA? Doesn’t it depend entirely on factors relevant to the individual, his or her goals, his or her tastes, his or her temperament? Come on, Duke (my college alma mater) have the guts to bow out of this nonsense once and for all. Enough is enough. This rankings thing should have died away years ago.
August 20th, 2009 at 1:26 am
Odds are you don’t go there, so how do you figure Princeton and Penn are overrated? Because Princeton’s first you say that? Haha. Ratings are ratings, people need these in their lives. So what?
August 20th, 2009 at 6:45 am
H10, I’m from Michigan. You must be from Oakland County. In my poorer, mid-mitten county, the University of Michigan is entirely the reason that my high school’s best and brightest (author excluded) will never escape the state. Why pay $160k for Chicago or Princeton when Michigan is much less? Or even free, in the eventyour parents bought into that M-fund (or whatever it’s called) so many years earlier.
And yeah, this thing is a joke. An embargo by top schools (to the tune of what Stanford’s present articulated a decade ago) would be proper. However, can’t say I don’t look this thing up each and every year. What a spectacle!
August 20th, 2009 at 8:36 am
The wailing and gnashing of teeth after they come out is what makes it fun
August 20th, 2009 at 9:45 am
There’s only one that matters.
Where’s LSU Mechanical and Agricultural College?
August 20th, 2009 at 10:00 am
Let’s be honest, we haven’t been doing as well as we had hoped lately. I chalk it up to leadership. That’s why I’m working on finishing my degrees so I can go back and do things right on faculty. *inspired*
August 20th, 2009 at 10:14 am
Can we sign a petition to obsolete these rankings, please? What moron bases his college decision on what a magazine tells them?
August 20th, 2009 at 10:28 am
You are indeed correct DoubleIvy, I’m from Rochester, and I admit that I’ve only known one person to turn down an Ivy League (and that was without any aid from Cornell) for Michigan. I believe the plan you speak of was Met-life, and my parents weren’t quite so prescient as to pay the couple thousand that would have cost at my birth.
And I make fun of Princeton and Penn partly because I like to laugh at the responses, but mostly (and this obviously only applies to Penn) because I absolutely abhor the concept of an Undergraduate Business education. You can only be in college once, study the humanities or something you’ll never be able to justify studying again…but other wise I think both are great schools.
August 20th, 2009 at 12:36 pm
Now we can compare ourselves to OxBridge…
ARWU 2008 Top 20 International Universities:
1) Harvard University
2) Stanford University
3) University of California, Berkeley
4) University of Cambridge
5) Massachusetts Institute of Technology
6) California Institute of Technology
7) Columbia University
8) Princeton University
9) University of Chicago
10) University of Oxford
11) Yale University
12) Cornell University
13) University of California, Los Angeles
14) University of California, San Diego
15) University of Pennsylvania
16) University of Washington
17) University of Wisconsin – Madison
18) University of California, San Francisco
19) Tokyo University
20) Johns Hopkins University
August 20th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
although i’m disappointed old nassau has to share top billing with that overrated factory harvard…..by having pennsylvania u, the devry of the ivies, ranked equally with stanford & mit (and above columbia for that matter!) is a complete and utter joke. don’t kid yourselves, everyone on this board is thinking the same thing. it renders this ranking completely null and void.
so by that i’ll declare that princeton is indeed truly in sole possession of the top spot in the nation. put harvard down in the 4th place cluster f with all the other crap — hee hee!
August 20th, 2009 at 2:33 pm
@ H 10, Spoken like a frindless Harvard douche.
Chicago is a joke if you’re an undergrad. It’s the equivalent of online self-study (my department chair’s words, not mine).
August 20th, 2009 at 6:40 pm
The editor-in-chief of USN&WR is a UPenn alum, which may factor into their meteoric rise in rankings the past few years.
Also of note, this is the same magazine that recommends the Kia Soul as a good car for college students. And yet, the world worships its rankings.
Besides the tie at the top, did anything interesting happen? Doesn’t look like it at all.
August 20th, 2009 at 8:29 pm
Dartmouth’s 11th without a sincere graduate school curriculum. We’re hardly a national university at all. I suppose that means we’re really the best in the nation, eh?
August 20th, 2009 at 8:42 pm
Technically speaking, these rankings are really only a reflection of the quality of the undergraduate education at that school. Princeton, like Dartmouth, has a fairly small graduate program compared to most universities (we don’t even have a business school, unlike D). That said, having strong graduate programs does help with a school’s reputation and name recognition, and is probably reflected in parts of the methodology, like peer review.
August 20th, 2009 at 11:18 pm
USNews’s new “Undergraduate Teaching Ratings” were very predictable. Of the Ivies, everyone knows that Dartmouth, Princeton, Yale, and Brown are known for their good teaching. And likewise, everyone knows that Harvard, Penn, and Cornell aren’t. Not sure about Columbia’s reputation, but it didn’t make the top 20. Any Columbia alums want to chime in?
August 21st, 2009 at 5:48 am
Fuck you my undergrad teaching was great.
August 21st, 2009 at 8:03 am
hahaha duke. i spit in yo face!
August 21st, 2009 at 10:54 am
@ Undergrad Teaching Ratings:
The teaching of my classes at Cornell was quite good…not sure where you’re getting your information.
August 21st, 2009 at 8:07 pm
@Cornell ‘06, Harvard ‘09
Depends on you major…. engineers tend to have larger classes than the smaller liberal arts majors etc. Cornell should be rated based on it’s individual colleges, some would greatly out score the others.
August 21st, 2009 at 11:36 pm
Next time, try harder at trying to hid the fact that you’re actually a disgruntled, jealous Princeton student who has to settle for second place in the undergrad teaching rankings.
August 23rd, 2009 at 12:12 am
You spelled hide wrong. Sides, I couldn’t pay me to go to P’ton. Don’t you remember? Harvard sucks, Yale swallows and Princeton doesn’t matter. Hanover, bud. Hanover.
August 23rd, 2009 at 12:07 pm
Hopefully the undergraduate teaching ranking will lead toward an undergrad only ranking. Bias aside, I do feel that Penn, Chicago and Harvard are overrated. Princeton deserves its spot, but Dartmouth should really be higher – at least top 8. Now that we’re number 1 in something, maybe we’ll get some appreciation. Where are the complete rankings for that section?
P.s. For those of you who care more about what will land you a job more than a ranking, Dartmouth and Princeton will give it to you. The alumni networks are incredibly tight and the alums for both schools look after each other.
August 23rd, 2009 at 12:50 pm
@ Cornell ‘09:
I actually was an engineer (MechE, go FSAE!), and didn’t mind the large lectures–which most good engineering schools still have. Besides, there’s always a small section to go with the lectures. Truthfully, engineering is not an area where small class sizes really matter–either you are able to understand the material, or you’re not. Small classes are good for softer (read: easier) subjects in which your and your classmates’ thoughts are germane: “I feel that Brutus’ careful deliberations about his duty to Rome and the moral implications of his actions completely absolve him of Julius Caesar’s murder.” Conversely, how you “feel” about anisotropic plate deflection is irrelevant.
Regarding your suggestion that the seven colleges be ranked separately: that would be interesting. However, Engineering and AAP would finish at the top (engineering has had the highest test scores and class ranks, hands down, for years and years, and AAP is nigh impossible to get into). Arts & Sciences, home of Anne Coulter and some softer subjects, would likely be third, despite their smaller class sizes. The numbers supporting this are online somewhere, I remember looking at them a while back.
It would be very interesting to rank the League’s 20 or so colleges according to the USNWR methodologies. I suspect Columbia College and Cornell Engineering would end up at the top, since their numbers are generally better than those for HYP, who accept all undergrads into one college. This ranking would make a rocking IvyGate post…
August 23rd, 2009 at 1:17 pm
Just a correction. The editor did not go college at Penn. The Executive Committee Chairman and Editor-in-Chief is Mortimer B. Zuckerman, and he is a McGill alum (undergraduate and law school) and has graduate degrees from Harvard and Wharton. Brian Kelly, the Editor, went to undergrad at Georgetown. The managing editors…One went to American U and has a graduate degree in journalism from Columbia and the other graduated from the U of Florida. The Contributing Editor has a PhD from U Washington and is currently on the faculty of Johns Hopkins and previously was on Princeton’s faculty. Don’t post false information. I don’t really see bias here. It’s the methodology that produces the results. Critique the methodology but don’t say the rankings are stupid – they produce results consistent with the methodology. It’s not random ; the results have a basis.
August 25th, 2009 at 12:00 am
I hate how people are too lazy to spell out Pennsylvania (12 letters). They can spell out Carnegie Mellon (14 letters) and Northwestern (12 letters)… but not Pennsylvania.
August 25th, 2009 at 11:31 am
It’s about time they post an undergraduate teaching ranking. The whole thing is still ridiculous- how can you compress an entire school’s worth of teachers into one super-precise number?- but at least they’re comparing on something that will impact students who attend these schools.
Still, does anybody know their methodology? I can’t find it on the website. Reputation and tea leaf divining wouldn’t surprise me.
August 25th, 2009 at 2:06 pm
And, uh, for those of you that want a top-of-the-line education without all this constant Ivy self-fluffing (yes, that kind of fluffing), the full name of #12 is “Washington University in St. Louis”. Come for the pre-med, stay for the Imo’s.
August 25th, 2009 at 2:18 pm
leave because St. Louis sucks
August 25th, 2009 at 8:34 pm
But why would you NOT want to go to one of the fastest shrinking cities in America? It’s like the Buffalo of the Midwest!
August 26th, 2009 at 10:26 am
Hey, take it easy. There’s nothing wrong with Buffalo ;) And perhaps the reason no one wants to go to WashU is because they’re practices of tailoring admissions and aid standards solely to gain a foothold in these rankings is extremely well documented. They’re the only school on this list that could justifiably be called overrated. Plus, I hated the way they sent me something in the mail every three days when I was in high school.
One more thing: How does a ranking system composed of 75% objective criteria overrate (or conversely underrate) any particular school? Have any of you ever actually READ the methodology? The 25% peer assessment weighting is the only subjective section, everything else is just pure numbers. If you don’t like how they weight the numbers, then fine. But I’m willing to bet 95% of you have never even bothered to look.
August 26th, 2009 at 10:28 am
Yes, I realize there is a typo in the third line. Hard to check your there/their/they’re usage on your phone.
August 26th, 2009 at 9:00 pm
Problem is you can’t objectify everything. What exactly does it mean for a school to be better than another school? Everybody doesn’t have the same answer, but putting it in concrete numerical terms makes it seem that way. How do those “pure numbers” connect to a school’s overall worth?
August 27th, 2009 at 3:41 am
my sense from looking at the college choices of IMO, IPhO champs-
1. MIT
2. Harvard
3. Stanford/Caltech
5. Princeton/ UChicago
7. Yale/ Columbia
9. Penn
10. Dartmouth/Northwestern
August 27th, 2009 at 10:38 am
I’m assuming you mean quantify, and if so I think we’ll all agree.
And for my money, I definitely would put Swarthmore up there among the best colleges, since they were good enough for me to say no to Dartmouth, if not Columbia…
August 27th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
these rankings are silly. How many categories does the magazine use now? Separate listings for universities and one for liberal arts colleges and then divides them into national, regional, and local schools. Not that this applies to ivy league schools, but how can a school like Washington and Lee, which has a law school, be on the liberal arts colleges list? Since this is suppose to look at the undergraduate experience, I don’t understand the need to have a separate liberal arts ranking at all. All it does is elevate state schools higher than they should be on the national university list. I would be willing to bet most people would prefer going to a top 30 or 40 liberal arts college than the flagship state school. Is this just a gimick to elevate everyone’s rankings, so that $50,000 a year private schools like Lafeyette or Holy Cross don’t appear as number 100 or 150?
August 28th, 2009 at 12:32 am
Yes, it’s a gimmick to make everyone seem better. Over the years, USNews has continually tinkered with the categories to make schools feel better about themselves.
For example, back in the day, the top tier of National Universities used to only go up to 50. Schools ranked lower than 50, but above the third tier were considered “second tier,” listed on another page, etc. Now, the top tier of national universities (just called “Top Schools”) goes up to a staggering 130+ with schools such as Kentucky, Arkansas, and Missouri University of Sciences & Technology bringing up the rear. However, the logic was that even if you’re at the bottom of the top tier, you’re still in the top tier, and can brag about that fact — sounds better than being second tier, second rate, etc. And, now you hear lots of schools at the bottom of the list saying “We’re a Top School / in the top tier of schools as ranked by USNews!” Yes, you and 130+ others.
August 30th, 2009 at 1:12 pm
Vanderbilt is in fact prestigious, unless Emory is considered superior.