Everyone’s familiar with college rankings, those ham-handed attempts at quantifying that je ne sais quoi that separates the truly great colleges from the ones that haven’t yet figured out how to game the system.
Now CBS MoneyWatch.com has ranked the rankings and determined that “America’s Best Colleges ’09,” by Forbes magazine, is the best of the bunch. (Forbes‘s pick for No. 1, in case you missed it in August: the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.) Forbes beats U.S. News & World Report, Kiplinger’s, The Princeton Review, Washington Monthly, and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni because the business magazine “actually attempts to measure the quality of the education students receive.”
Next up: Ranking the rankings rankings. –Don Troop
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4 Responses to Ranking the Rankings
refling - September 25, 2009 at 3:16 pm
Does CBSMoneywatch.com rank ARWU.org’s rankings? Or The Times Higher Education Supplement?
11167997 - September 25, 2009 at 3:20 pm
A scene from the first year of graduate school in a dim, hot, airless winter classroom with the dark settling through the windows: the aging narrow-built professor moves his glasses over the bridge of his nose and utters a rhetorical question: “Do you know that there is a bibliography of bibliographies of bibliographies?,” then points his left forefinger toward that winter dark and intones: “That way doth madness lie!”Enough said.
landrumkelly - September 25, 2009 at 3:56 pm
So the best educational institution in the country is a military academy. . . ? So says that great supporter of capitalism, Forbes.My, my, my, my, my. I smell money, but at least the smell is caustic enough to seal my senses against that other smell.Landrum Kelly
_perplexed_ - September 25, 2009 at 4:20 pm
Forbes…the rankings based on RateMyProfessor.com and Who’s Who…The validity of the Forbes approach would have been improved by including the NCAA Fencing results in the mix…