bowlsby: whatthehale: christinefriar
Innnnnnteresting … I lose the sibling war for sure, though we Hale kids chill together in the 400’s:
- BROTHER: Augustana (in SD) - 411
- SISTER (& both parents): University of Nebraska at Lincoln - 463
- SELF: Bradley University - 466
Wah, wahhh.
Pretty suspect list…. how is the US Military academy number 1? No thank you.
Yay! We made the list!
Wait, Cornell is 207? Explain that one to me. I’m not saying Ivy League schools need to be top 10, but two hundred and seven?
Yeah, it’s a pretty strange ranking. 21 is the lowest I’ve seen Chicago on any list since I applied. The methodologies of ALL college rankings are bum, but these seem particularly bum:
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.
At Chicago, not one person I knew used RateMyProfessors.. we had our own, internal system for this (every student would fill out a review at the end of the quarter and they would post it online for students to see). Plus, the faculty was generally so good that we just didn’t care and would take classes from anyone. I don’t know what the Who’s Who In America thing is, but just given the percentage of people in the Obama administration from Chicago, one would think it would have done well here; guess not. Estimated debt? Yeah, okay, I bet Chicago falls apart here. And four-year graduation rates: I knew a few people who left, but I had never heard of anyone on the five-year plan, so I have to imagine it was pretty high. Now, Rhodes and Nobels, I know Chicago does well on those (82 Nobels, 44 Rhodes, to be exact).
So, if I had to take a guess, there’s just a lot of obvious bias in these rankings.
Also, one thing to note about college rankings is that while schools don’t change that much year over year, the rankings do. The obvious reason for this is that if the rankings didn’t change, they would never sell any new versions. So, this leads to new players in the rankings game to try drastically different rankings, in an effort to get publicity (as is happening here) and to sell more copies.
