Meh....I'll be honest: I used the rankings to initially establish to which schools I would apply; however, my final choice ended up relying on a more comprehensive assessment of my choices. In the end I chose Rice University (GO OWLS!!!!) over other higher ranked and FAR MORE EXPENSIVE schools....yet I still received a comparable education.

This is really just a ploy for schools to try impress parents and students so they can charge more tuition, it should be about which schools have the hottest babes in Playboy.

There was nothing more satisying than seeing the "child" who walked out our front door in late August return through that same door a developing "adult" this past Thanksgiving.

Parents, schools and society need to focus their attention on finding the best "fit" for graduating high school students.

Of course bragging that your child is flourishing at a lesser known college or university or reporting that he or she is "comfortable in their own skin" at a lower ranked institution might not make you the envy of the cocktail party or country club event. What it might do is give you the satisfaction that, as a parent, you actually did your job.

I look a the best value rankings. Which school do you get a greater return in salary versus the cost of tuition.

Here's a little something no one is going to admit--male students will not apply to colleges that have over a certain percentage of female professors. I can't recall the precise percentage--but they were very surprised to find that it was a solid indicator, didn't vary much between regions, and has held true for some time.

One reason that administrators are loathe to hire full time female professors is so that the skew towards women on campus (and there are more women students than males already) won't get even higher. They will hire lots of women to teach--but they are part-time and temporary . . . and despised by the male students who consider them "secretaries" or "students."

Universities are not a place where "professional educators" hang out--they are a place where administrators and full-time faculty have a very good gig. The administrators make salaries of 100K, plus (I saw one "director" who was going to make $200K in a Bible-belt state at a state university--to run a probably unnecessary program). They don't educate--they get in warm bodies with parents to pay the bills and Pell Grants to get them started, and they make a good salary doing so.

There is blessedly little difference between a for-profit school and a "not-for-profit" state school--it's about time people stop expecting to see behavior that differs between the two. The universities are as upset about their ranking as Coke vs. Pepsi or McDonald's vs. Burger King because it impacts the salary of the administrators. One doesn't get "merit pay" if one's school's ranking doesn't go up. It's all profit-motive.

ahhh...The Educational Industrial Complex at its best.

no i did not choose these rankings since they are flawed. when it came down to my last two choices, it was either cal tech or cal poly. the only reason i choose cal poly was because it was 30 miles closer to my home and it was cheaper. sure, i could have gone to cal tech but right know i would have been in 200,000 in debt. going to cal poly, i owe no money to any lender. it really came down to cost, either pay 50k plus housing a year to live at cal tech or pay 12,000 for 4 years and get to live at home for free. well, it does not take a rocket scientist that it is cheaper to attend a state university that also offers aeronautical engineering and many in this program end up working for JPL anyway. I think that if a parent is going to pay, it should be the cheapest or moderately priced school. remember its your connections that help you get a job not the school.

Colleges routinely cook the numbers to make themselves look better. Everything from "vetting courses" designed to cull 40% of students from academic programs the college hasn't staffed itself for to to whoring themselves out to superstar faculty (but never forcing them to teach undergraduate courses, which are increasingly farmed out to "instructors" from local industry) to playing games with graduation rates (lower is "better", thus indicating the school has higher standards or something) to playing PC games by adjusting the male/female or race ratios to present a nice pleasant "diversity" facade for prospective students.

But this is a very old story. Nobody was "caught." The infotainment industry is just exploiting an episode in an ongoing series of corruption.

If they really wanted to drill down, it would be on the real scandal, which is the increasing non-transferability of credits, which effectively locks incoming students into the college's own product. It costs students tens of thousands of dollars in lost credits to transfer between colleges, even those accredited by the same regional associations. Colleges are business just like all others.

If you want to know the true standing of a college, find someone practicing in the field of interest and ask them the top practitioners they can quote from memory, then check out where they work--the real movers and shakers. Odds are it won't be many in the US Snooze Top 20. It always boils down to a handful--MIT, Harvard, Caltech, Stanford.

Forget sports. Colleges should be ranked on the number of graduates placed in paying jobs. College sports have become severely overrated as a reason to attend a given school/

Unfortunately at the very expensive private schools, the students are under a lot of pressure from faculty and administration to get into a highly ranked college, expecially the Ivies. The children that do get in are "paraded" around to entice new families to enroll their children in that same overpriced school. It is more than just bragging rights, it is advertisement.

i think that schools should start getting ranked on student achievements while at the school. For example, how much do students improve while at a given school. Why do land grant institutes always pale in comparison to the Ivy league? Its comparing apples to oranges- land grant institutes (ie many state universities have mission statements to serve their citizens, and consequently have to have lower admission standards). Ivy leagues are very much made up of polished kids, many of which have been brought up with a lot of privilege (equating to polish). Consequently, grade inflation runs rampant at the Ivy leagues. i really don't think many of these kids could handle the state school. The state schools are much more Darwinian. When you look at the "real movers and shakers", i think just as many of them (or more) come from state schools, and landed jobs at the Ivy leagues, or if lucky back in more realistic terrain.

Colleges undeniably boast about what percentage of upper quartile their accepted students rank in their ACT or SAT scores. But, if you take all these colleges that say how many of their students are in the top quartile, sum them, I'd bet they would sum to more than 25%. I bet they'd sum to about 40%; they all boast to wildly and it's quite obvious. Just take a look at a handful of random colleges and see what they report as their top quartile students. No way! And colleges are suppose to teach its students ethics!

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A college degree today means as much as a high school diploma. Which does not mean very much, can't read, can't write, can't add. multiply or divide, certainly can't think or comprehend various inputs from different data sets to utilize them proactively in a dynamically diverse business setting. Good luck America. Buy they can tweet!

That was - But they can tweet, not buy they can tweet. For those who noticed.

“Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously, and he will give you everything you need” (Matthew 6:33 NLT)

When universities seek higher rankings, they will fail.

Instead, the professors, administrators, and even students should seek to complete their duties to the best of their abilities...and good rankings will follow as a consequence.

There's no substitute for responsible and ethical management. "Gaming" the ranking system by cheating and manipulation is wrong. The solution is not so much with abandoning the ranking system, rather with ethical and responsible behavior in university management.

If college managers want a higher rating they ought to honestly earn it. Anything else is cheating, and ultimately hurts both the college and its students. This paradigm - selfish and unethical managers who game a system for personal gain, and because they're lazy or incompetent - occurs in business and government, too. It's been the ruination of us.

Finally, people realize COLLEGES are pricing themselves out of the market. Why pay $100K+ for a college education by liberal teachers only to find out your career is outsourced in 10 years to others far away and your stuck with a mountain of debt.

The problem I have with the rankings is that they mostly depend on rankings from college administrators from other colleges to rank their similar colleges. While this works in theory, it is not a good judge on how well a college teaches students.

For example, Deans from Colleges of Engineering rank Biomedical Engineering based on their knowledge of programs from around the country. They are biased since they will favor those with more advertising, research, published papers, and colleagues with whom they are familiar. In my example of Biomedical Engineering, one school was ranked in the top 10 even though their program was new and only graduated 2 classes to date. The ranking must have more to do with the prestige the University has in general since it can't be based on the program that was ranked.

The idea of ranking is a good one. But be sure to consider those in the top 30 or 40 before making your cut. In my experience, some of the best teaching and successful schools don't care about their ranking, they instead focus on being a great school.

like the old saying goes....I have a liberal arts degree....so do you want fries with that?