What this article doesn't mention is how much effort the colleges at the top put into gaming the rankings. For example, Harvard spends millions of dollars every year sending direct mail to graduating seniors who they know have no chance of getting in, encouraging them to apply. Why? To increase their rejection rate.
Similarly, Stanford was considered a relatively mediocre school until one year when they rejected every single valedictorian across the country as a marketing stunt, and suddenly jumped in the rankings after guidance counselors started encouraging the kids with the highest grades to apply there.
Similarly, the admissions departments get an update twice a day telling them their projected US News rank based on the grades and SAT scores of the kids who they are admitting. Thus your chances of getting in can vary wildly based on whether your application is read in the morning or afternoon. If the projected rank drops too low then they stop even reading the essays and just admit solely based on grades and SATs until the rankings are back up.
Reed College (Portland) goes out of its way to not be ranked. Colin Diver, the outgoing President, suggested as others have, that chasing a rank doesn't do the students any good.
Exactly. Brigham Young University (my university) is an absolute slave to the rankings. They intentionally limit the acceptance rates into certain programs even when there's open space for numbers' sake. If these rankings disappeared and universities operated only for the sake of its students, I think the overall quality of education would actually improve.
That just further enforces the point that you can't decide on what the best college for you would be by looking at any kind of ranking for the university as a whole. Different colleges and different departments within the university can be run so radically differently that it hardly matters that they're officially part of the same institution.
I heard it somewhere, I can't find a cite either. It's not the kind of thing they would ever admit to doing, so I'm not sure it would even really be possible to find a cite.
I just went looking for historical ranking data. What I found suggested that Stanford's Rankimg was higher in previous years, in 83, 84, and 85 they were number 1 and they have never dropped below 7. I can't verify my data, so please look for yourself, but unless this event was before then I doubt it happened.
Yes, when I went to MIT in the 80s, Stanford was often considered to be the best overall university in the country, and MIT wanted to become more like Stanford.
I don't know when it achieved such stature, but it also had been one of the Big 3 Computer Science graduate schools for quite some time. (I.e., MIT, Stanford, and CMU.)
No love for Berkeley? I would argue that if you were a perspective student reading USWNR, simply due to proximity to the silicon valley makes the average student get much better chances at jobs and experience in tech.
At the time, Berkeley was considered a distant forth, but there was also a big gap between Berkeley and the rest of the pack.
I recall that my undergraduate advisor thought that I probably wouldn't be able to get into MIT, Stanford, or CMU for grad school, but that I'd have no problem getting into Berkeley. He said staying in would be the problem. They had a reputation at the time for accepting a lot of students and then weeding them out.
Similarly, Stanford was considered a relatively mediocre school until one year when they rejected every single valedictorian across the country as a marketing stunt, and suddenly jumped in the rankings after guidance counselors started encouraging the kids with the highest grades to apply there.
Similarly, the admissions departments get an update twice a day telling them their projected US News rank based on the grades and SAT scores of the kids who they are admitting. Thus your chances of getting in can vary wildly based on whether your application is read in the morning or afternoon. If the projected rank drops too low then they stop even reading the essays and just admit solely based on grades and SATs until the rankings are back up.