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Originally Posted by Mizzou B-ball fan
People have already pointed it out in this thread. That report often encourages schools to do things that can be detrimental to the overall health of the school if you want to increase your ranking. The schools that no longer participate in that list, some very prominent small academic institutions, now numbers around 100. In addition, it's been clearly documented over the past couple of years the great lengths that some schools go to in order to secure a high ranking, despite some actions that would seem to be contrary to what's best for the students and the institution. A prime example is the week long instructional classes held to teach schools how to optimize their score on the US News rankings.
News: 'Manipulating,' Er, Influencing 'U.S. News' - Inside Higher Ed
Other examples involve where universities lower class sizes in some classes by increasing attendance in other classes that were not used in the rankings calculation. They also saw where presidents had given lower scores to competitor universities to improve the standing of their own university. Misleading salary reports can also boost the score of a university. There's no audit process to actually verify the information provided, so there's no way to verify the validity of the rankings.
Do Not Place Too Much Emphasis on U.S. News College Rankings | The Digital Student Blog
It's quickly become a situation where the top presidents call for higher rankings when they take a job and then manipulate the system to artificially raise their rankings. It's sounds more like something that a Wall Street CEO would do rather than the president of an academic institution, yet that's exactly what's happening.
In recent weeks, they've also announced that future ratings will include the opinions of school execs, which will likely only further skew the bias towards certain universities and reduce the ranking of others based on perception rather than any real measurement.
U.S. News & World Report Changes Ranking Process
Anyone who uses these rankings as a measurement is wasting their time. They're a good starting point if a student want to get a list of universities to consider, but should never be used in terms of comparison of schools. They lack any real validity in that regard. |
This stuff is likely true, but then again nothing is saying that the current Big Ten schools are doing this stuff any more than Missouri, Kansas, etc. US News and World Report isn't the end all be all, but it's just one of a few ways to compare colleges. Earlier in this thread you wanted to use freshman ACT scores which is worse IMO given each school has different standards of admission that have nothing to do with the quality of education you receive. So you pick your poison.