Is usnews.com college ranking exactly correct?

Question

Is usnews.com college ranking exactly correct?

Answer 1

They're correct in the things they measure (peer assessment, graduation/retention rate, % classes with fifty or more, % faculty that are full-time, acceptance rate, etc.)

What they don't measure, though, is word-of-mouth, and how history affects prestige. For example, NYU is ranked 34th and William & Mary is ranked 35th on National Universities; Mount Holyoke is ranked 29, and Barnard is ranked 39 on Liberal Arts schools. This means that U Michigan Ann Arbor is ranked ahead of NYU and William and Mary. But a LOT of employers--and general people--will be more impressed if you went to NYU than if you went to U Michigan. And in terms of Mount Holyoke and Barnard--they are both Seven Sisters--the female equivalent of the Ivy League, which used to be some of the best in the country--so employers/general public will recognize that and be impressed, even if they don't rank so highly anymore.

Of course, schools like Williams and Amherst do deserve their number 1 and 2 ranks, in terms of prestige. It's just that for SOME colleges, their ranking may not reflect their perceived prestige.

Answer 2

There are no "exactly correct" rankings out there because they are simply people applying a methodology to work out the places of each intuition and that is why each ranking table that you see will vary slightly.

At the end of the day, all the rankings are pretty much the same, all of the schools in top 50 on USnews will be the same top 50 schools on QS' list, just with a slight variation in the order because nothing is 'exact' in these tables.