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In higher education, college and university rankings are listings of educational institutions in an order determined by any combination of factors. Rankings can be based on subjectively perceived "quality," on some combination of empirical statistics, or on surveys of educators, scholars, students, prospective students, or others. Such rankings are often consulted by prospective students as they choose which schools they will apply to or which school they will attend. Higher education is education provided by universities and other institutions that award academic degrees, such as university colleges, and liberal arts colleges. ...
Students attending a lecture at the Helsinki University of Technology Etymologically derived through Middle English from the Latin second-type conjugation verb stÅdÄ“rÄ•, which means to direct ones zeal at; hence a student is one who directs zeal at a subject. ...
Rankings vary significantly from country to country. A Cornell University study found that the rankings in the United States significantly affected colleges' applications and admissions. In the United Kingdom, several newspapers publish league tables which claim to rank universities. For other uses of the name Cornell, see Cornell (disambiguation). ...
League Tables of British Universities, which rank their performance on a number of criteria, have been published every year by The Times newspaper since the early 1990s. ...
The U.S. News & World Report rankings
The best-known American college and university rankings have been compiled since 1983 by the magazine U.S. News and World Report based on a combination of statistics provided by institutional researchers and surveys of university faculty and staff members. The college rankings were not published in 1984, but were published in all years since. The precise methodology used by the U.S. News rankings has changed many times, and the data are not all available to the public, so peer review of the rankings is limited. (A private 1997 review by the National Opinion Research Center, commissioned by U.S. News itself, was later published by the Washington Monthly; it appeared to contain several serious criticisms of the rankings' methodology.) 1983 is a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ...
U.S. News & World Report is a weekly newsmagazine. ...
Overview Institutional research is a broad category of work done at colleges and universities to inform campus decision making and planning in areas such as admissions, financial aid, curriculum, enrollment, staffing, student life, finance, facilities, athletics, and alumni relations. ...
1984 is a leap year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ...
Peer review (known as refereeing in some academic fields) is a scholarly process used in the publication of manuscripts and in the awarding of funding for research. ...
1997 is a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ...
The Washington Monthly is a magazine based in Washington DC which covers American politics and government. ...
The U.S. News rankings, unlike some other such lists, create a strict hierarchy of colleges and universities in their "top tier," rather than ranking only groups or "tiers" of schools; the individual schools' order changes significantly every year the rankings are published. The most important factors in the rankings are:
- Peer assessment: a survey of the institution's reputation among presidents, provosts, and deans of admission of other institutions
- Retention: six-year graduation rate and first-year student retention rate
- Student selectivity: standardized test scores of admitted students, proportion of admitted students in upper percentiles of their high-school class, and proportion of applicants accepted
- Faculty resources: average class size, faculty salary, faculty degree level, student-faculty ratio, and proportion of full-time faculty
- Financial resources: per-student spending
- Graduation rate performance: difference between expected and actual graduation rate
- Alumni giving rate
All these factors are combined according to statistical weights determined by U.S. News. The weighting is often changed by U.S. News from year to year, and is not empirically determined (the NORC methodology review said that these weights "lack any defensible empirical or theoretical basis"). The first four such factors account for the great majority of the U.S. News ranking (80%, according to U.S. News's 2005 methodology), and the "reputational measure" (which surveys high-level administrators at similar institutions about their perceived quality ranking of each college and university) is especially important to the final ranking (accounting by itself for 25% of the ranking according to the 2005 methodology). Originally a standardized test was simply a standard test – of academic achievement or of knowledge in a specific academic or vocational domain. ...
2005 is a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar and is the current year. ...
2005 is a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar and is the current year. ...
Other rankings Other organizations which compile general annual college and university rankings include the Fiske Guide to Colleges and the Princeton Review. Many specialized rankings are available in guidebooks for undergraduate and graduate students, dealing with individual student interests, fields of study, and other concerns such as geographical location, financial aid, and affordability. The Princeton Review (TPR) is a for-profit U.S. company that offers private instruction and tutoring for standardized achievement tests, in particular those offered by the Educational Testing Service (ETS), such as the SAT, GRE, LSAT, GMAT, and MCAT. The company was founded in 1982 and is based in...
In some educational systems, an undergraduate is a post-secondary student pursuing a Bachelors degree. ...
This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ...
In the United States, financial aid refers to funding intended to help students pay tuition or other costs, such as room and board, for education at a college, university, or private school. ...
Among the best-known rankings dealing with individual fields of study is the Philosophical Gourmet Report or "Leiter Report" (after its founding author, Brian Leiter of the University of Texas at Austin), a ranking of departments of analytic philosophy. This report has been at least as controversial within its field as the general U.S. News rankings, attracting criticism from many different viewpoints, but it is also extremely popular and well regarded by many in the profession. Notably, practitioners of continental philosophy, who perceive the Leiter report as unfair to their field, have compiled alternative rankings. The Philosophical Gourmet Report (also known as the Leiter Report) attempts to score and rank the university philosophy departments in the English-speaking world, based on a survey of philosophers who are nominated as evaluators by the Advisory Board of the Report. ...
The University of Texas at Austin, often called UT or Texas, is the flagship institution of the University of Texas System. ...
Analytic philosophy is the dominant philosophical movement of English-speaking countries. ...
Continental philosophy is a general term for several related philosophical traditions that (notionally) originated in continental Europe, in contrast with Anglo_American analytic philosophy. ...
The Times Higher Education Supplement, a British publication, annually publishes the Times Higher World University Rankings, a list of 200 ranked universities from around the world. The Times Higher Education Supplement, known as The Times Higher for short, is a newspaper based in London, United Kingdom, that reports specifically on issues related to education. ...
Criticisms of rankings College and university rankings, especially the well-known U.S. News rankings, have drawn significant criticism from within and without higher education. Critics feel that the rankings are arbitrary and based on criteria unimportant to education itself (especially wealth and reputation); they also charge that, with little oversight, colleges and universities inflate their reported statistics. Beyond these criticisms, critics claim that the rankings impose ill-considered external priorities on college administrations, whose decisions are sometimes driven by the need to create the most desirable statistics for reporting to U.S. News rather than by sound educational goals.
Furthermore, some have suggested that the formulae and methodologies used to turn the various data into a ranking are arrived at specifically, if unconsciously, to keep a few key institutions at the top of the chart — not because of any undue partisanship among the editors; but simply due to a subconscious assumption that a system which flies in the face of conventional wisdom must somehow be faulty. Hence editorial decisions would tend to reinforce preconceptions. In other words, if the public, as it is argued, looks to ranking publications not so much for guidance as for confirmation of its own assumptions, then mightn't the editors of U.S. News (as proud as they are of the annual "fine-tuning" they give their methodology), have a predisposition to overlook methodologies which "rock the boat" to the extent of dropping Harvard (say) out of the top handful of schools? Harvard, see Harvard (disambiguation) Harvard University is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA and a member of the Ivy League. ...
Some of the specific data used for quantification are also frequently criticized. For instance, Rice University, with a top 5 endowment and a generous Financial Aid department, is ranked in the mid-twenties for "Financial Resources". As another example, the "Peer Assessment" equally weighs the opinions of administrators at less-known schools such as Florida Atlantic and North Dakota State with those of say, Harvard and Stanford. Students with their sights set on the best graduate schools may not be interested in knowing which programs the administrators of bottom schools have heard of, or vice versa. Rice University William Marsh Rice University, usually called Rice University, is located in the Museum District of Houston, Texas. ...
Florida Atlantic University is a public state university, founded in 1961 in Boca Raton, Florida, USA. Their first four-year undergraduate program began in 1964, with 867 students. ...
North Dakota State University (NDSU) is an American state-supported university and the second largest school in the 11 campus North Dakota University System. ...
Harvard University is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, and a member of the Ivy League. ...
For other meanings of Stanford, see Stanford (disambiguation). ...
Other critics, seeing the issue from students' and prospective students' points of view, claim that the quality of a college or university experience is not quantifiable, and that the ratings should thus not be weighed seriously in a decision about which school to attend. Individual, subjective, and random factors all influence the educational experience to such an overwhelming extent, they say, that no general ranking can provide useful information to an individual student.
Suppose, as these critics illustrate, that the difference between an "excellent" school and a "good" one is often that most of the departments in the excellent school are excellent, while only some of the departments in the good school are excellent. And the difference between an excellent department and a good one might be, similarly, that most of the professors in the excellent department are excellent, while only some in the good department are. For an individual student, depending on the student's choices of field of study and professors, this will often mean that there is no difference between an excellent college or university and a merely good one; the student will be able to find excellent departments and excellent faculty to work with even at an institution which might be ranked "second-tier" or lower. Statistically, the rankings are distributions with large variances and small differences between the individual universities' means (averages).
Complicating matters further, as most educators and students observe, individuals' opinions about the excellence of academic departments and, especially, of professors, exhibit a wide range of variation depending on personal preferences. And the quality of an individual student's education is most determined by whether or not the student happens to encounter a small number of professors that "click" with and inspire him or her. Similarly, the main difference between a "good" or "second-tier" large state university and an "excellent" or "top-tier" prestigious smaller institution, for the student, is often just that, at the larger school, the student needs to work a bit harder and be a bit more assertive and motivated in order to actively extract a good education. For many students this will not be difficult enough to justify a preference for the smaller institution, though some individuals do prefer a smaller school. For alternate meanings see state university (disambiguation). ...
Forget U.S. News Coalition In the 1990s a coalition of student activists calling themselves the Forget U.S. News Coalition (and occasionally substituting a coarser word for "Forget") arose, based initially at Stanford University. FUNC attempted to influence college and university administrations to reconsider their cooperation with the U.S. News rankings. They met with limited success, finding administrations encouraged the development of alternatives to the rankings, though most institutions (including Stanford) continued to cooperate with U.S. News. Critics of FUNC question its motives claiming that the organization is dissatisfied with the rankings not for principled objections to the ranking process, but rather because they are disatisfied that Stanford has ranked below Harvard, Yale, and Princeton for the past 10 years. One school which has criticized US News, but also has held steady in the rankings is Emory University which generally ranks in the top 20 colleges nationwide. // Events and trends The 1990s are generally classified as having moved slightly away from the more conservative 1980s, but keeping the same mind-set. ...
Fuck is among the strongest, most controversial expletives in the modern English language and probably the most well-known vulgarism in the world. ...
For other meanings of Stanford, see Stanford (disambiguation). ...
Harvard University is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, and a member of the Ivy League. ...
This article is about the institution of higher learning in the United States. ...
For other Princetons, see Princeton. ...
Colleges and criticism of U.S. News rankings Reed College has not cooperated with the U.S. News rankings nor submitted any institutional data to U.S. News since 1994; its administration has been outspoken in its criticism of the rankings. Critics charge, and Rolling Stone magazine reported, that Reed's "second-tier" or lower ranking in U.S. News's lists, which was based on U.S. News estimates of non-submitted data, is artificially depressed by U.S. News as retribution for Reed's harsh criticism of the rankings. Since the refusal to cooperate with U.S. News, Reed has seen its applicant pool grow tremendously and improve in academic quality, and the school is now among the most selective liberal arts colleges in the nation, and routinely receives stellar praise as a superior academic institution. Reed College is a liberal arts college with 1341 students as of the fall of 2004 (45% men and 55% women), located in Portland, Oregon in the quiet Eastmoreland neighborhood. ...
1994 was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International year of the Family. ...
Rolling Stone is a music and music industry magazine. ...
Other colleges which haven't been cooperative with the editors of the U.S. News rankings magazine, are Ohio Wesleyan University and St._John's_College,_U._S.. Ohio Wesleyan University (also Wesleyan or OWU) is a private, independent, coeducational, selective liberal arts college located in Delaware, Ohio (population 26,000), 20 miles north of Columbus, Ohio, the capital of the state of Ohio in the United States and is easily accessible by car, plane, bus or train. ...
St. ...
See also The Academic Ranking of World Universities is compiled by researchers from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and includes major institutes of higher education in all countries of North America, Europe, Asia, Pacific, and Latin America, compared and ranked by multiple numerical criteria, including publications in peer-reviewed journals and Nobel prizes...
External links
Rankings on the Web
World university rankings - Times Higher World University Rankings
- Shanghai Jiao Tong World University Rankings and Resources
Asian university rankings [[Im? Henry Jan age:LocationAsia. ...
- Times Higher Education Supplement Australian Rankings
- Australian university ratings by The Good Guides
Canadian university rankings Macleans is Canadas leading weekly news magazine. ...
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