There are plenty of college ranking systems out there but I just came across one that I had not seen before.
According to StateUniversity.com, the creator of the system, “StateUniversity.com uses many different measures in determining the rank of a particular school. The most important factors are a school’s ACT/SAT scores, its student retention, faculty salary, and student / faculty ratio.”
You will note that unlike the system used by US News, there is no weight given to peer reviews of the colleges. Here is the college ranking system used by StateUniversity.com.
You are probably asking why I am talking about another college ranking system since I am not a fan of such rankings. Unlike many of the other competitors to US News, this system uses data that is generally quantifiable and thus has some merit. More importantly, the data points out the complete fallacy of trying to rank something like colleges whether the document is quantifiable or not.
In this ranking, Princeton, always one of US News top schools ranks number 4. Not too bad. But Harvard, the other school always at the top, is ranked 38. Yes, you read that right. 38. The top college? MIT followed by Stanford.
Are these rankings great? No. But they are not worse and in many ways, better than most of the other college ranking systems out there.
What do you think?
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