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• May 9, 2013 10:32 AM

  More in Odd College Rankings

  Today in outlandish and sort of mathematically questionable college rankings, we’ve got a fun new one. Not content with one shallow measure of education quality, Buzzfeed has ranked America’s party schools according to the hotness of their students. The winners?...

  By Daniel Luzer

• May 8, 2013 9:19 AM

  Ranking of Worst Think Tanks in the World

  It seems that the "Center for College Affordability and Productivity" has issued a ranking of "worst college teaching" using data obtained from...ratemyprofessor.com. Based on a similar analysis of think tank punditry, this is the worst "study" ever from the worst...

  By Gregory Koger

• March 20, 2013 3:51 PM

  College Ranking "Professionals"

  The United States isn’t the only place obsessed with college rankings. According to a piece by Andrew Trounson at The Australian: Some Australian universities are paying about $100,000 a year each to employ full-time managers dedicated to working with ranking...

  By Daniel Luzer

• March 15, 2013 1:38 PM

  Law School Rankings Continue to Measure What's Probably Not So Important

  Yesterday I wrote a piece over at Political Animal about the structural problems facing recent law school graduates. They’ve assumed too much debt for jobs that don’t pay well and often aren’t available. But the racket continues. On Tuesday U.S....

  By Daniel Luzer

• December 4, 2012 3:36 PM

  Perception and Reality in College Rankings

  This is interesting. U.S. News & World Report, which annually publishes the country’s major college rankings guide, has issued a piece about college rankings: which colleges are under or over performing. As Robert Morse, director of data research for the...

  By Daniel Luzer

• September 25, 2012 10:00 AM

  Clarence Thomas Doesn’t Care About Your Fancy Law School

  Apparently Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who earned his J.D. from Yale, isn’t all that impressed with the top law schools, as determined by U.S. News & World Report. According to an Associated Press article by Brendan Farrintgon: Thomas...

  By Daniel Luzer

• September 14, 2012 4:00 PM

  Moneyball for College Professors?

  Is there a better way to hire and evaluate professors? For decades university academics have argued that their research matters, but no one’s really been keeping track of their influence systemically. Maybe we should do that. So argues John Yoo...

  By Daniel Luzer

• September 11, 2012 11:00 AM

  Another Ranking

  When the Monthly first began to rank colleges in 2005 part of the reason we offered for an alternative ranking was that we should be ranking schools on multiple measures. “Best” can mean lots of things. Well, we’ve got yet...

  By Daniel Luzer

• September 5, 2012 10:00 AM

  Does Law School Marketing Matter?

  One of the factors U.S. News & World Reports uses to rank colleges has to do with academic reputation, what faculty and administrators from other colleges think about a school. This leads many schools to mail out extensive publication materials...

  By Daniel Luzer

• August 27, 2012 11:58 AM

  The New College Rankings

  Today the Washington Monthly magazine is releasing its annual College Guide and Rankings, which The New York Times has called "more interesting than virtually any other ranking out there." While U.S. News & World Report relies on crude and...

  By Daniel Luzer

• July 2, 2012 1:00 PM

  The Non-Mystery of Most College Ranking Systems

  Anxious parents and their high school-aged children are a big market for university ranking systems. Appearing in a range of books and magazines, ranking systems promise to give the inside scoop on which universities are the best as determined by...

  By Keith Humphreys

• June 14, 2012 7:55 AM

  Soon Everyone Will Be Above Average

  As someone many years out of college, but who works for a publication that issues its own college ranking every year, I often have to look at other college guides for information about methodology and goals. One thing that often...

  By Daniel Luzer

• May 11, 2012 3:06 PM

  The Dubious Number One Position

  The U.S. is on top again. The county may be sixth in the world in terms of the percent of the population with college credentials and 20th in the world (just below Slovenia) in terms of general education quality, Cambridge...

  By Daniel Luzer

• April 10, 2012 11:00 AM

  How Colleges Manipulate SAT Score Information

  Turns out it’s not just law schools submitting inaccurate information to college rating guides. While there’s only so much deception that can occur before U.S. News notices, since colleges are responsible for submitting most of the information used to rate...

  By Daniel Luzer

• February 7, 2012 10:00 AM

  Claremont McKenna, Off the List

  The financial planning magazine Kiplinger's has dropped Claremont McKenna College from its prominent "Best Values in Liberal Arts Colleges" list. Claremont McKenna was number 18. This comes in the aftermath of news that the liberal arts college in Claremont, California...

  By Daniel Luzer

• September 7, 2011 10:00 AM

  U.S. News to Rank For-profit Colleges (Really)

  I was joking back when I wrote on April Fool’s Day that U.S. News & World Report would being to rate online, for-profit schools. But apparently the publication is actually going to do this in the 2012 ranking, which will...

  By Daniel Luzer

• September 6, 2011 11:00 AM

  College Rankings that Are Ridiculous

  This time of year is a big season for college rankings. Just last week at the Monthly, for instance, we released our own look at what American colleges are doing for the country. There are now more than a dozen...

  By Daniel Luzer

• August 17, 2011 11:00 AM

  Villanova Law School's Lies

  The American Bar Association has issued a public censure of Villanova Law School, which has been very deceptive about its inputs. As Martha Neil writes in the The ABA Journal: The ABA's Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the...

  By Daniel Luzer

• August 9, 2011 4:30 PM

  More Rankings

  August marks the beginning of the annual cascade of college rankings. The Monthly’s come out next month but in the last two weeks we’ve also seen the release of rankings by the Princeton Review and Forbes. They are rather...

  By Daniel Luzer

• June 14, 2011 4:40 PM

  Roosevelt’s Hubris

  In the last decade Chicago’s Roosevelt University put in a lot of money and effort to try and improve the school’s image. The college, founded in 1945 with a curriculum focused on social justice, built athletics facilities and new...

  By Daniel Luzer

• May 21, 2011 12:00 PM

  The College Ranking Complaints

  College guidance counselors don’t like U.S. News and World Report much. Well why do they keep using it then? According to an article by Caralee Adams in Education Week: They don't like how the list is generated, the impact the...

  By Daniel Luzer

• February 17, 2011 10:00 AM

  University Education: Equal vs. Unequal

  Last week I wrote a piece about Malcolm Gladwell’s recent article in the New Yorker about the college ratings system. Recently, while discussing that story, Gladwell made an interesting point about how college selectivity and quality actually works in...

  By Daniel Luzer

• January 24, 2011 3:01 PM

  Depends on What You Measure

  The Faculty Senate at Carolina State University, a historically black university in Orangeburg, South Carolina, recently gave president George Cooper a no confidence vote. And now some state legislators are saying Cooper should resign. Cooper doesn’t think so. According to...

  By Daniel Luzer

• January 10, 2011 10:00 AM

  When Rankings Are Too Honest

  The new graduate school rankings are out. Roughly every decade the National Research Council releases its rankings of American doctorate programs. Unlike undergraduate rankings, which are mostly kinda BS (what's the fanciest college to send your child?) graduate school rankings...

  By Daniel Luzer

• December 31, 2010 11:00 AM

  California’s Power

  The Los Angeles Times is apparently helping the University of California defend the status quo. This is understandable, but disturbingly short-sighted. According to an editorial in the Times Colleges and universities across the nation, prompted by ubiquitous rankings based on...

  By Daniel Luzer

• December 28, 2010 11:00 AM

  The New College Choice Mentality?

  How should students go about finding the right college? Something about the current process doesn’t quite seem to work. According to an article by Jennifer Feals in the Portsmouth Herald: Preparing for college is an exciting time, but as...

  By Daniel Luzer

• September 29, 2010 2:49 PM

  Measuring What Colleges Do

  Richard Vedder over at the Center for College Affordability and Productivity has an interesting piece today about trying to find a “bottom line” for college quality. What do colleges actually produce ? As Vedder explains: I have a modest proposal...

  By Daniel Luzer

• September 22, 2010 11:00 AM

  Well Not That Desirable

  Kansas State University was very briefly in Newsweek’s list of the 25 Most Desirable Large Schools. And then it was off the list. According to an article by Mara Rose Williams in the Kansas City Star: The Kaplan/Newsweek 2010...

  By Daniel Luzer

• August 25, 2010 11:00 AM

  A Parade of Lists

  August is college ranking season. In my rush to put up our own annual ranking, I missed another new release of America’s “best” colleges. On Sunday Parade, the national Sunday magazine distributed to more than 400 newspapers in the United...

  By Daniel Luzer

• August 19, 2010 4:24 PM

  The “Best” Law Schools

  College Guide has written before about the trouble with law schools in this economic climate: students assume huge debt to go to law school and then can’t get jobs that pay enough to service the debt once they get out....

  By Daniel Luzer

• August 17, 2010 5:17 PM

  The Latest College Rankings News

  The new U.S. News & World Report college rankings are out. According to the magazine, the top four colleges in America are, unsurprisingly, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Columbia. As the magazine explains, however: This marks the 27th year that...

  By Daniel Luzer

• August 17, 2010 10:00 AM

  More Wheaton Confusion

  The recent Forbes magazine ranking of American colleges, which College Guide covered on the weekend, had a little trouble distinguishing between the two Wheaton Colleges. The Forbes entry for college number 244 (which appears to be based on statistical...

  By Daniel Luzer

• August 16, 2010 5:22 PM

  The Weak Distribution Requirements of American Colleges

  American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a nonprofit organization (founded by Lynn Cheney in 1995) created to "support liberal arts education, uphold high academic standards, safeguard the free exchange of ideas on campus, and ensure that the next generation...

  By Daniel Luzer

• August 15, 2010 12:00 PM

  Another College Rating

  New magazines are getting into the college ratings game. Forbes recently released its own list of the top 50 colleges in America. According to the methodology, the magazine attempts to figure out what colleges are actually best for undergraduates: The...

  By Daniel Luzer

• August 4, 2010 11:00 AM

  A Better Score

  Staten Island’s Wagner College will no longer require applicants to submit SAT scores for admission to the college. The college explained its decision, which will apply beginning in the fall of 2010: We believe that the best predictor of...

  By Daniel Luzer

• August 4, 2010 10:00 AM

  Whose Party?

  A male college student has the option of attending one of two holiday parties. One of these parties will take place at the Playboy Mansion. The other one will occur at the corporate headquarters of the Princeton Review, in...

  By Daniel Luzer

• June 30, 2010 2:26 PM

  More Investment Advice

  Which colleges are the best deals? Or, at any rate, what colleges are good returns on the amount someone pays to attend them? According to PayScale, a site that gathers data on salaries, the top five schools using a...

  By Daniel Luzer

• June 23, 2010 3:07 PM

  Survey Says Other Surveys Are Invalid

  Apparently a school’s move up or down a position or two in international annual college rankings doesn’t really much affect people’s opinions of that school. According to an article by David Wheeler in the Chronicle of Higher Education: A new...

  By Daniel Luzer

• June 8, 2010 10:00 AM

  Ratings Changes

  U.S. News & World Report, the magazine that annually publishes one of the country’s most influential college ratings, may make some minor changes in the methodology the magazine uses to rate schools. Robert Morse, director of data research for U.S....

  By Daniel Luzer

• May 7, 2010 10:00 AM

  We’re (Not) Number One

  In an update to the Washington Post story about college ratings, Dana Chivvis at AOL News writes that this time of year brings out major critics of the college ratings game: "[To] say that there's one best college ... is...

  By Daniel Luzer

• May 3, 2010 12:48 PM

  Refuse to Answer

  The most important component of U.S. News & World Report’s annual college rankings is the peer assessment of colleges. This is the survey of college personnel used to measure the reputation a college enjoys among its peers. The Washington Post...

  By Daniel Luzer

• April 20, 2010 2:53 PM

  Judging Community Colleges

  How can people know if community colleges are doing a good job? That issue is a major point of discussion for administrators attending the annual meeting of the American Association of Community Colleges in Seattle. According to an article...

  By Daniel Luzer

• April 8, 2010 11:00 AM

  The Optional SAT

  St. Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont is the latest American school to join those that don’t require the SATs for admission. According to an article in the Burlington Free Press: Students applying to St. Michael's for admission in September...

  By Daniel Luzer

• February 25, 2010 4:08 PM

  Ranking the Rankings

  Well this is meta. From DIY Learning, an online guide to higher education, comes a ranking of the rankings of sorts. DIY has compiled a list of the “Top 50 College Rankings Blogs.” While it’s a little unclear what...

  By Daniel Luzer

• February 15, 2010 3:39 PM

  Depends on What You Measure

  The U.S. News and World Report annual college rankings are a matter of great controversy. But from an article by Daniel de Vise in the Washington Post comes news that a mediocre college might be “great” when one looks...

  By Daniel Luzer

• February 3, 2010 4:30 PM

  The New Elite

  The president of Yale believes that soon Chinese universities will be the world’s top schools. From the Guardian comes news that: China's top universities could soon rival Oxford, Cambridge and the Ivy League, the president of Yale University has...

  By Daniel Luzer

• January 22, 2010 4:08 PM

  The U.S. News Defense

  From U.S. News and World Report comes a piece called, interestingly enough, “Do the U.S. News rankings play key role in determining a school’s academic reputation?” In it, Robert Morse, the director of data research for U.S. News & World...

  By Daniel Luzer

• January 13, 2010 2:52 PM

  Why College Rankings Never Change Much

  U.S. News & World Report rankings of colleges has long been a source of concern for those interested in determining college quality. Part of the trouble comes from the way that 25 percent of the college ranking (more than any...

  By Daniel Luzer

• December 30, 2009 7:23 PM

  Sisyphus in South Carolina

  South Carolina needs to improve its higher education system. This is according to the chairman of the state’s Commission on Higher Education. From an article in the Columbia City Paper: For South Carolina to get out of the cellar...

  By Daniel Luzer

• December 18, 2009 8:21 PM

  Student Athletes

  While the College Guide is on the subject of college football, it’s worth taking a look at a recent piece at Higher Ed Watch. The publication annually looks at the graduation rates and academic progress of the country’s top...

  By Daniel Luzer

• December 9, 2009 4:58 PM

  “Favorable Market Dynamics”

  In addition to helping students get the scores they need to get into college, Princeton Review now also owns a college. Yesterday the standardized test preparation company concluded its takeover of Penn Foster Education Group, a for-profit online career...

  By Daniel Luzer

• December 9, 2009 3:21 PM

  On Lowering Academic Standards

  In an update to the case of SUNY-Cobleskill and the (possible) whistleblower dean, George Leef argued yesterday in the conservative John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy’s Clarion Call that lowering academic standards was nothing new in higher...

  By Daniel Luzer

• November 30, 2009 3:00 PM

  Another College Guide

  There’s another college guide in the works. The Washington Times reports that: WhatWillThey Learn.com is an alternative college guide that challenges much of the standard wisdom used for ranking colleges and universities. It was launched recently by the American...

  By Daniel Luzer

• September 8, 2009 2:33 PM

  Location, Location, Location

  The best metro areas for off-campus enjoyment.

  By Jesse Singal

• September 4, 2009 10:07 AM

  What He Said

  Missed the post at the time, but Matt Yglesias summed things up quite nicely on Wednesday: The underlying issue... is that there’s very little in the way of reliable information about the quality of undergraduate education in the United States....

  By Jesse Singal

• September 4, 2009 9:14 AM

  210 Percent of Our Faculty Won Major Awards Last Year!

  More credulousness from U.S. News.

  By Jesse Singal