US News 2021 College Rankings (bachelor's, degree, public schools, master's)
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Yep...UC Riverside Highlander alumnus...we went up in rank a few spots...however were established in 1954 and took a long time to move up. Very impressive that newest 16 year old UC Merced has ascended that rapidly in rank...tying UC Santa Cruz (which dropped some).
It's about time for people to throw these rankings in the trash can. They have little to do with academic rigor and excellence across disciplines and lots to do with nice sounding themes along the social justice arc.
Consider that other rankings heavily weighted by what deans across departments think/indicate that Berkeley (100+), Michigan (~85), The University of Texas (~75) in particular have dozens and dozens of top 10 ranked individual programs. Yet on this list UC Merced with either 0 or 1 top ten ranked programs is ranked higher than The University of Texas........that's just intellectual sophistry via an absurd algorithm.
ETA - also looking at its methods, by indirectly crediting parental wealth via penalizing student loan burden metrics per school USN grandly biases its list in favor of private schools.
Public schools never do that well overall on the USNWR rankings. Much of this is due to a lower alumni giving rate and graduation rate. Case in point, my alma mater (UC San Diego) scored #8 in public universities and #35 overall.
Many other publications list it as a top 20 university in the world (schools like Berkeley are even higher).
Public schools never do that well overall on the USNWR rankings. Much of this is due to a lower alumni giving rate and graduation rate. Case in point, my alma mater (UC San Diego) scored #8 in public universities and #35 overall.
Many other publications list it as a top 20 university in the world (schools like Berkeley are even higher).
Their criteria for ranking these schools have parts of it that are definitely suspect.
Here's what the the publication considers when putting this together according to a post from my university:
They compare bachelor's degree-granting institutions on 17 diverse measures of academic quality such as student-faculty ratios, graduation and retention rates, financial resources, average ACT/SAT scores of admitted students and alumni giving. Schools in the National Universities category offer a full range of undergraduate majors, plus master's and Ph.D. programs. According to U.S. News and World Report, these colleges also are committed to producing groundbreaking research.
So, if your alumni gives the school a lot of money even if it's from only 1 or 2 huge donors, it moves your institution up the ladder on their report. Also, it appears that if your graduation/retention rate is high you get bumped up too, even if you don't push academics too hard overall in keeping these rates up.
Public schools never do that well overall on the USNWR rankings. Much of this is due to a lower alumni giving rate and graduation rate. Case in point, my alma mater (UC San Diego) scored #8 in public universities and #35 overall.
Many other publications list it as a top 20 university in the world (schools like Berkeley are even higher).
Good post. Any ranking with Cal outside the top 10 and UCSD outside say the top 25 is broken.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
