USNWR ranking

[tufinal4]

Tulane tied with several schools at 63, including Penn St, Miami FL, Michigan St, Santa Clara

[tumbuuh]

Tulane tied with several schools at 63, including Penn St, Miami FL, Michigan St, Santa Clara

Ehh at least it's a move up from last year I guess. These things are such doody though.

[nolasilver]

The California schools for many years really figured out how to game the system. UCSD (#29),UC Davis (33)UF Irvine (33), ucsb 39 is an absolute joke. Anecdotally, I have several extended family members who have attended, and let’s just say they weren’t there for the academics.

Never mind the state schools that all leaped up numerous spots over the last couple years (Ohio state #41 & Rutgers are tied at 41). I respect state schools, and think theyre a wonderful option for students and can produce very smart kids, but these rankings have unfortunately lost almost all of their credibility.

Never mind FSU at 51 . FSU is a bigger party school than us without any of the academics.

[PeteRasche]

Is USNWR the one that totally redid how they grade these things last year, and we dropped to like the 80s with tons of "meh" (or worse) schools ahead of us, including seemingly 3/4 of the P4?

Or was that one of the other rankings?

[Sophandros]

Is USNWR the one that totally redid how they grade these things last year, and we dropped to like the 80s with tons of "meh" (or worse) schools ahead of us, including seemingly 3/4 of the P4?

Or was that one of the other rankings?

It's USNWR who redid their system.

[PeteRasche]

Is USNWR the one that totally redid how they grade these things last year, and we dropped to like the 80s with tons of "meh" (or worse) schools ahead of us, including seemingly 3/4 of the P4?

Or was that one of the other rankings?

It's USNWR who redid their system.

So did they revisit it and adjust it such that we magically jumped 20 spots in a year?

[WaveProf]

but these rankings have unfortunately lost almost all of their credibility.

They never had any credibility at any point ever. And I said that when we were doing well in them in the past.


We started to slip post Katrina because of several factors. People freaked out about it, so Tulane learned to game the system, made changes that arguably made things worse, but that made us rank better, so we shot up the rankings. Then a couple of years ago they changed the metrics to overemphasize a bunch of stuff that almost no one thinks should be emphasized so much, and we plummetted further than ever. At no point in any of this has our ranking had much of anything to do with quality of the school, and most everyone in academia I know would like to see schools take a stand and stop sharing data to allow the rankings to exist---but no one wants to go first. Law schools took that stand for a couple of years recently because Harvard/Yale were willing to lead the charge, as of yet, no one high up the list has been willing to do that for the overall list