LUconn wrote:To answer these questions, the staff at CCAP gathered data from a variety of sources. They based 25% of the rankings on 4 million student evaluations of courses and instructors, as recorded on the Web site RateMyProfessors.com. Another 25% is based on post-graduate success, equally determined by enrollment-adjusted entries in Who's Who in America, and by a new metric, the average salaries of graduates reported by Payscale.com. An additional 20% is based on the estimated average student debt after four years. One-sixth of the rankings are based on four-year college graduation rates--half of that is the actual graduation rate, the other half the gap between the average rate and a predicted rate based on characteristics of the school. The last component is based on the number of students or faculty, adjusted for enrollment, who have won nationally competitive awards like Rhodes Scholarships or Nobel Prizes.
okie dokie
Ratemyprofessor, whos who in america, and payscale comprise 50% of the rankings?
ratemyprofessor - anybody can go on there and say anything they want about a professor, even if they dont go to that school (at least that's how it was when I posted a review of someone a couple years back).
who's who is a joke, I know people who had a 2.75 gpa who were sent letters saying they had a high chance of being selected for that list.
payscale.com doesn't even come close to including data for 95% of the four-year accredited schools in the USA. Seriously, they only have 78 schools on that entire website. That's a fairly significant portion of the Forbes List (at a minimum 87%) that can only have at most 75% of the data used to compile the ranking.
http://payscale.elearners.com/colleges/ ... edu01&tid=
20% is based on average debt of the student after 4 years? That automatically gives a bigger advantage to less expensive schools (e.g. state schools). I know some private schools are actually cheaper for some students based on the kind of scholarship packages they receive, but there is no doubt that state schools are generally more affordable - yet I don't see how that makes a school better. That probably explains why so many of the military schools rank so high - students don't have to pay tuition to go to Air Force, for example...
While I certainly think the quality of professors is important and the pay scale of graduates is important, that doesn't mean you should include two websites that aren't very credible. Any website that simply says professors who are the most clear and helpful are the defacto best professors should be taken with a grain of salt (seriously, those are the only two factors they use to base their overall quality equation on. you can be clear and helpful, that still doesn't mean you can teach. i've had professors who are clear and helpful, some I didn't learn much of anything from, others I learned a lot from). Any website that doesnt even scratch the surface for containing information on payscales of college graduates should also be taken with a grain of salt. The way this ranking is set up, a college could be producing graduates that are raking in the dough and not be on that payscale website, but a school that produces low paying graduates on payscale.com has an inherent advantage just because they are on that website.
- By flamehunter
- By LUOrange