2025 - College Rankings, 5 ups and 5 downs

It is incredible that Howard had not been in to top 100, let alone top 20. They have some of the most successful alumni including a supreme court justice and vice president and presidential candidate.

 

Wow! My Georgetown University and Southern Methodist University lost their ranking to #24 and #91. I like Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) ranking better. Where is Imperial College London, my Alma Mater #2?

1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
2. Imperial College London (ICL)
3. University of Oxford
4. Harvard University
5. University of Cambridge
6. Stanford University
7. ETH Zurich
8. National University of Singapore (NUS)
9. University College London (UCL)
10. California Institute of Technology (CalTech)

https://www.topuniversities.com/world-university-rankings

 

Cooley Law School used to publish its own law school rankings in which, generously, the #1 law school in the US was Harvard. The #2 law school in the US was Cooley Law School.

 

My alma mater seems to fell from the top 50 in my specialty to unranked

 

U.S. News has changed their methodology at least twice in the past decade putting more emphasis on job outcomes and debt and less on test scores. What hurt a lot of schools, in the past, was the average SAT/ACT score among admitted students. University of Texas was the perfect example of this. They are always ranked very high for many individual programs, but the top 10% rule brought their average test score down.

Texas had a law that required all state colleges and universities to automatically admit those who graduated in the top 10% of their high school class. Eventually, the legislature realized this was hurting University of Texas' reputation and that, just because someone graduated in the top 10%, doesn't mean that they're academically prepared for the top public university in the state. Some schools are so low-performing, that the top 10% could be worse than the top 50% at high-performing schools, and this prevented high-achieving students from being accepted at UT and Texas A&M. Now, UT is down to only auto-admittong the top 5%, and their U.S. News ranking has improved.

 

This was the way it was when both my kids went to UT. They both graduated HS in the upper 10% so were automatically admitted. And (fortunately) they both graduated within a 4 year time period, while many of their contemporaries took 5 years (or longer). I always wondered about the upper 10% rule, so this post clarified what was happening to perhaps more deserving students. Thanks for the post sanantone.

 

Yeah, I heard that over 90% of UT's students were auto-admits before the rule change. If you were at a competitive high school and graduated just outside of the top 10%, too bad. UT didn't have space for you. Under the new law, only 75% of the admits have to be based on class rank. It's still astonishing that top 5% can fill up 75% of the seats.

 

Edward Blum ended up suing University of Texas for this policy because he saw it as Affirmative Action. His mistake was that his plaintiff was a White woman who wouldn't have been admitted without Affirmative Action, so he lost. That's when he recruited Asian students to sue Harvard.

 

(4) schools tied at #6.

USN needs to come up with differentiators to actually get rankings that are not tied.

 

Even five percent of any large group in a big state like Texas is still a lot of people. I wonder what would happen if they were to drop it from 5% to 3% (or even 2%).

 

When they do that, everyone else gets dropped down multiple spaces anyway. The next school is ranked #10. Might as well break the tie.

 

Exactly!

 

Properly looking at this way.

1. Princeton University
2. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
3. Harvard University
4. Stanford University
5. Yale University
6. California Institute of Technology
7. Duke University
8. Johns Hopkins University
9. Northwestern University
10. University of Pennsylvania

 

This would imply a meaningful difference in "quality" between these schools, which is not there.
On the other hand, it's not like the "difference" between #1 and #10 means anything in real life, either.