Alternatives to U.S. News' Rankings

We have explored the most popular ranking publication, U.S. News and World Report, and how its methodology is a direct translation of their values. I challenged readers to examine US News' methodology to see if their values matched with those espoused in the methodology. What is one to do if U.S. News' values don't jive with your own? If you are still partial to rankings and similar such endeavors, you are lucky. There are many ranking systems. For the next couple of days, I want to examine some alternatives.

The Princeton Review has been publishing a narrative ranking system since 1992. Their system is quite different from U.S. News' in that the primary source of information they use in devising their rankings are the words and experiences of students. As an example, U.S. News uses "Faculty Resources," which includes faculty salary, class size, degree obtained, student/faculty ratio, and percentage of full-time faculty to examine the quality of an institution's faculty. Princenton Review directly asks students in its survey about their experience of the faculty (whether they are good teachers and whether they are accessible). It is difficult to say with any certainty that the objective measures that U.S. News uses to assess faculty quality actually say anything about the quality of a school's faculty. However, Princeton Review's method could produce equally spurious results. What if there was a campaign by students to answer these particular questions either negatively or positively. That could compromise the results. Whether this happens, is difficult to tell, athough Princeton Review claims to do their best to avoid and detect such possibilities.

Princeton Review publishes their full listings in book format and allows you to access some of the information on their website (subscription required for some content). They have some interesting lists they create based on their survey results, such as "Dorms Like Dungeons" and "Students Most Nostalgic For Bill Clinton" (or Reagan, if you prefer). Princeton Review has a different way of going about understanding the quality of colleges. I encourage you to review their methodology to see if their values are consanguine with your own. Never get all your information from one source, whether it is a ranking or one person who's sister went to a college you may be interested in. Finding the right college is a challenging process that requires thoroughness and time.