Rankings do mean something, especially for immigrant/first-generation applicants who have little to no frame of reference through their parents and family friends of what schools are legit or not,...
Rankings do mean something, especially for immigrant/first-generation applicants who have little to no frame of reference through their parents and family friends of what schools are legit or not, but should ultimately be taken with a grain of salt. I think a good balance would be to have 2-3 competing rankings with varying levels of credibility based on who you ask, that each use objective, audited criteria perhaps mixed with transparent "editor's choice" criteria. The government sites the article points to are okay, but really only tell you ROI which will make STEM-heavy and high COL area schools look disproportionately better.
Sure, they mean something (after all they aren't just a randomly sampled permutation of the universities) but I really don't think that they're a great indicator. Broadly what they measure is...
Sure, they mean something (after all they aren't just a randomly sampled permutation of the universities) but I really don't think that they're a great indicator.
Broadly what they measure is
academic output
reputation of the university among academics
internationalisation (i.e. share of international students)
None of which particularly matter when it comes to what you will learn at said university. Some universities don't rank particularly highly, but have really amazing programs (e.g. Waterloo in Canada) and some rank very highly but have terrible teaching quality.
I guess the problem is that there are a lot of people out there who are obsessed with university prestige (which for the life of me I cannot understand) and I think it's essentially another form of classism. Very unfortunately it leads to public spending being showered on rather useless areas (getting more citations) rather than actually useful research.
People usually say to me "bet you went to a terrible university" when I say this kind of thing, to which I sometimes act offended and sometimes mention that it is in the top 10 of most rankings.
Prestige obsession has gotten pretty bad, but you need some starting point to gauge the quality of the school and your future peers (which might matter to you if you are very academically oriented...
Prestige obsession has gotten pretty bad, but you need some starting point to gauge the quality of the school and your future peers (which might matter to you if you are very academically oriented and want to be around like-minded people). Also, in Canada the floor is typically fairly high for school quality, while in the US the floor can be quite low. If you can't depend on word-of-mouth, rankings can be a useful very rough starting point.
I think this is quite true. There is little or no difference in quality between the top 100 schools. Someone can get a great education whether they're at Purdue, Tufts, or UC Davis vs. Yale,...
I think this is quite true.
There is little or no difference in quality between the top 100 schools. Someone can get a great education whether they're at Purdue, Tufts, or UC Davis vs. Yale, Stanford, or MIT, so smart students shouldn't stress about not getting into the tippiest-toppest schools: they're going to do great in rank #11–100 schools.
But there is a significant difference between top 100 and, say, #500–1000.
And a massive difference between top 1000 and the rest. For example, Chicago State University is barely functioning as a school or even as an organization. Some schools really aren't worth anyone's 4 or so years.
I attended UC Davis, took some summer courses at Berkeley, and have consumed some of the free courses released by Stanford and MIT online. For the few courses I went through online, the Stanford...
I attended UC Davis, took some summer courses at Berkeley, and have consumed some of the free courses released by Stanford and MIT online. For the few courses I went through online, the Stanford and MIT lectures and course content were significantly better than what I experienced in person at school. At Berkeley I took some liberal arts courses so I can't compare that well, but I felt that there was a significant difference in peer effect. The general atmosphere I felt was that students were noticeably more serious about academics, and that kind of thing can make a difference in learning.
Small sample size so I don't know if it's true in general across programs, but my personal experience tells me that there really are benefits to attending top schools. It's not the end of the world if you don't get into one of the top schools, but in my opinion it's worth striving for.
At least when it comes to law school rankings, the statistics for employment after graduation are 100 percent manipulated. Every member of my class who wasn't employed as they were about to...
At least when it comes to law school rankings, the statistics for employment after graduation are 100 percent manipulated. Every member of my class who wasn't employed as they were about to graduate was offered a short term contract job by the university. They weren't about to say no either.
I'm sure you are right, but the people reading and believing the 99 percent employed post graduation statistic when choosing law schools are frequently students or parents who have no family or...
I'm sure you are right, but the people reading and believing the 99 percent employed post graduation statistic when choosing law schools are frequently students or parents who have no family or friends who are attorneys. It's a deceptive statistic that has been thoroughly gamed and manipulated to be meaningless, but people consider it as an important factor when choosing between schools. Most would be better served by looking for schools with a tight supportive local alumni network.
A great case in understanding why university rankings do not mean very much, and useful for explaining to people with no involvement in academia why the rankings are not actually the same thing as...
A great case in understanding why university rankings do not mean very much, and useful for explaining to people with no involvement in academia why the rankings are not actually the same thing as "university my child should go to".
I've always thought the correct way to hire newly minted PhD's is on the basis of the quality of their prior work. After all, one doesn't hire junior faculty for their current reputation, but...
I've always thought the correct way to hire newly minted PhD's is on the basis of the quality of their prior work. After all, one doesn't hire junior faculty for their current reputation, but rather in the hope that they will produce high quality research and go on to build a good reputation because they do well.
My issue with a lot of these is that they don't really present anything actionable. Yes, the rankings are not perfect - it is impossible to distill something like "how good is a university" into a...
My issue with a lot of these is that they don't really present anything actionable. Yes, the rankings are not perfect - it is impossible to distill something like "how good is a university" into a single number. However, they are important as general heuristics for applicants. No, absolutely being 1 place higher on US news should not sway your decision, but that a university is a top 20, whether overall or in your specific area of study, is an important signal.
The only other solution the article offers is to go on different sites which have effectively equally meaningless metrics, but now distilled into specific areas, and to compare with them - but first, you equally cannot measure something like "student support" with a number, it's equally arbitrary, and secondly, it's quite frankly not practical. In the modern day of sub 10% acceptance rates, students apply to >10 universities as a floor. You're never guaranteed anything anymore.
Doing a pairwise comparison of >10 universities with each other (and comparing 5-6 different "stats" in each one) ends up being a bit of an absurd exercise. Inevitably, if you try this, what you end up doing is making your own version of the US news ranking just to be able to process things, likely even more biased due to your inexperience with the area - these are 17-18 year olds, not data scientists.
Rankings do mean something, especially for immigrant/first-generation applicants who have little to no frame of reference through their parents and family friends of what schools are legit or not, but should ultimately be taken with a grain of salt. I think a good balance would be to have 2-3 competing rankings with varying levels of credibility based on who you ask, that each use objective, audited criteria perhaps mixed with transparent "editor's choice" criteria. The government sites the article points to are okay, but really only tell you ROI which will make STEM-heavy and high COL area schools look disproportionately better.
Sure, they mean something (after all they aren't just a randomly sampled permutation of the universities) but I really don't think that they're a great indicator.
Broadly what they measure is
None of which particularly matter when it comes to what you will learn at said university. Some universities don't rank particularly highly, but have really amazing programs (e.g. Waterloo in Canada) and some rank very highly but have terrible teaching quality.
I guess the problem is that there are a lot of people out there who are obsessed with university prestige (which for the life of me I cannot understand) and I think it's essentially another form of classism. Very unfortunately it leads to public spending being showered on rather useless areas (getting more citations) rather than actually useful research.
People usually say to me "bet you went to a terrible university" when I say this kind of thing, to which I sometimes act offended and sometimes mention that it is in the top 10 of most rankings.
Prestige obsession has gotten pretty bad, but you need some starting point to gauge the quality of the school and your future peers (which might matter to you if you are very academically oriented and want to be around like-minded people). Also, in Canada the floor is typically fairly high for school quality, while in the US the floor can be quite low. If you can't depend on word-of-mouth, rankings can be a useful very rough starting point.
I think this is quite true.
There is little or no difference in quality between the top 100 schools. Someone can get a great education whether they're at Purdue, Tufts, or UC Davis vs. Yale, Stanford, or MIT, so smart students shouldn't stress about not getting into the tippiest-toppest schools: they're going to do great in rank #11–100 schools.
But there is a significant difference between top 100 and, say, #500–1000.
And a massive difference between top 1000 and the rest. For example, Chicago State University is barely functioning as a school or even as an organization. Some schools really aren't worth anyone's 4 or so years.
I attended UC Davis, took some summer courses at Berkeley, and have consumed some of the free courses released by Stanford and MIT online. For the few courses I went through online, the Stanford and MIT lectures and course content were significantly better than what I experienced in person at school. At Berkeley I took some liberal arts courses so I can't compare that well, but I felt that there was a significant difference in peer effect. The general atmosphere I felt was that students were noticeably more serious about academics, and that kind of thing can make a difference in learning.
Small sample size so I don't know if it's true in general across programs, but my personal experience tells me that there really are benefits to attending top schools. It's not the end of the world if you don't get into one of the top schools, but in my opinion it's worth striving for.
At least when it comes to law school rankings, the statistics for employment after graduation are 100 percent manipulated. Every member of my class who wasn't employed as they were about to graduate was offered a short term contract job by the university. They weren't about to say no either.
I'm sure you are right, but the people reading and believing the 99 percent employed post graduation statistic when choosing law schools are frequently students or parents who have no family or friends who are attorneys. It's a deceptive statistic that has been thoroughly gamed and manipulated to be meaningless, but people consider it as an important factor when choosing between schools. Most would be better served by looking for schools with a tight supportive local alumni network.
A great case in understanding why university rankings do not mean very much, and useful for explaining to people with no involvement in academia why the rankings are not actually the same thing as "university my child should go to".
I've always thought the correct way to hire newly minted PhD's is on the basis of the quality of their prior work. After all, one doesn't hire junior faculty for their current reputation, but rather in the hope that they will produce high quality research and go on to build a good reputation because they do well.
My issue with a lot of these is that they don't really present anything actionable. Yes, the rankings are not perfect - it is impossible to distill something like "how good is a university" into a single number. However, they are important as general heuristics for applicants. No, absolutely being 1 place higher on US news should not sway your decision, but that a university is a top 20, whether overall or in your specific area of study, is an important signal.
The only other solution the article offers is to go on different sites which have effectively equally meaningless metrics, but now distilled into specific areas, and to compare with them - but first, you equally cannot measure something like "student support" with a number, it's equally arbitrary, and secondly, it's quite frankly not practical. In the modern day of sub 10% acceptance rates, students apply to >10 universities as a floor. You're never guaranteed anything anymore.
Doing a pairwise comparison of >10 universities with each other (and comparing 5-6 different "stats" in each one) ends up being a bit of an absurd exercise. Inevitably, if you try this, what you end up doing is making your own version of the US news ranking just to be able to process things, likely even more biased due to your inexperience with the area - these are 17-18 year olds, not data scientists.