Magazines' methods give mixed ratings to University

Forty and 155.

Those are the overall rankings the University received from two news magazines in this year's list of top U.S. educational institutions.

U.S. News and World Report, which has been compiling college rankings since 1983, gave the University a rank of 40 on a weighted and rounded scale. In its first year ranking colleges, Forbes placed the University at number 155.

But no matter what score the University receives, many students say magazine rankings were not an important factor in their college choice.

"I knew this was a good school, and I didn't need anyone to tell me that," said Erika Delgado, sophomore in LAS. "I didn't look before but I look at them now and I'm like 'Yeah, I made a good choice.'"

Although Delgado said she did not look at magazine rankings while choosing a school, some administrators believe these rankings are useful to students.

"They do matter because a lot of people do use them," said Robin Kaler, associate chancellor for public affairs.

Since some students use these rankings, the University strives to pay attention to how they are determined and how to stay competitive, said Michael Hirschi, assistant dean of the College of Engineering.

The U.S. News formula takes into account faculty resources, student retention rate, student selectivity, financial resources, graduation rate, alumni rate and assessments of each school by other schools' administrators. Each category counts for a different percentage, and the scores are weighted and rounded before becoming a final ranking.

"It boils down to basically and overwhelmingly how much money a university has," said Ellen Fireman, professor of statistics. "It seems redundant."

Forbes' formula has five categories. Its Web site said its rankings were designed to include more student perspectives.

Twenty-five percent of each school's ranking is based on student reviews on www.RateMyProfessors.com, and another 25 percent comes from the number of each school's alumni listed in Who's Who in America, a yearly list of noteworthy public figures. The other 50 percent is split evenly between the amount of debt student borrowers have at graduation, the percent of students who graduate in four years and the number of students and faculty who have won competitive national awards, such as the Rhodes Scholarship.

Fireman and Kaler said they doubt the validity of information from sites like www.RateMyProfessors.com.

"They use what's easily available like RateMyProfessors.com," Fireman said. "It shouldn't be in an official report. A very small percentage of students use it, and it tends to be the students who feel very strongly one way either negatively or positively."

Trente Blonski, sophomore in Media, said she used the professor and course discussion forum once and all the information she found on it has been very accurate. Blonski also did not use college rankings when deciding where to attend school, but she said she did use them when choosing to major in advertising.

Although listings of majors and universities assist some students in planning their educational paths, people should remember that rankings are to help magazines generate revenue, and they should not replace firsthand information when making a college selection, Hirschi said.

"It's tough for a magazine to do (rankings) because they're going to have to have the same data from all the different institutions they're trying to rank," Hirschi said. "That's going to be hard to accumulate because we all do things differently. There's no perfect way."