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[fraude]

I looked up some of my prospects on US News and World Report.

I'm wondering how to compare schools that seems to come from different categories-- i.e., I guess, how do you compare apples and oranges?

For example, how do you make sense of the distinction between

School A = ranking 55 of Universities

School B = ranking of 22 Masters Institution in the North

What kind of sense can you glean from that?

[rvaidy5]

Are you applying for undergraduate or Graduate or teaching positions aka assistant professor positions? The relevence of the answer depends on your objective.

[jomarch]

of course, all numbers for all schools in all categories in US News & World Report are doctored. But with that in mind, I think they can be helpful, esp. to someone newly on the tenure track. When I first went on the market, I used US&WP to pull numbers (undergrad acceptance rates & avg test scores) from two institutions I knew well -- my undergrad & grad institutions. I then used those as comparisons for researching schools I was unfamiliar with that were advertising for positions. In other words, I found the actual rankings not as helpful as some of the other data they have available there.

[trabb]

At this stage of the game, comparisons across those kinds of categories are pretty pointless unless you're deciding whether or not even to apply.  As you're applying, it's helpful to demonstrate (subtly) that you know that School A is one of the best comprehensive universities in the South.  It's also helpful to show that you know what a comprehensive university is and that you can fit in there.  I don't think it's so helpful to try to show that School A is better than School B because B is ranked 71st in its category and A is ranked 34th in its.

The point at which it becomes useful to compare across categories is when you're deciding whether or not to apply or when you're weighing multiple job offers.  To use your analogy - when deciding whether or not to apply, the question isn't whether you want apples or oranges, it's whether you'd be willing to take an apple if that's all that's in the fruit bowl.  At the point of weighing competing offers, it's a question of whether you prefer apples or oranges.  Of course if there's one apple and one orange, and the orange is all moldy, you probably want the apple unless it has a worm in it.

[mended_drum]

If it were me, I'd get some stats from Barron's guides or the equivalent, especially regarding the student and faculty population size, geographical origins, perhaps religious and ethnics diversity as well as average g.p.a. and SAT/ACT scores for entering freshman.  The number of majors in each field would be helpful, as well.  Student-faculty ratios can be wildly skewed, as can study abroad rates, but the stats, whether from US News & World Report or elsewhere can give you some sense of the campus community.  Otherwise, I'm not sure that the overall rankings tell you very much.

[postmodern]

This provides more general information, but I've found checking the Carnegie Foundations' classifications helps as well.

[seniorscholar]

I keep any one of those big "everything about all the schools there are" guides from last year -- whichever one I happen to find first for $1 on a library sale table -- to help my grad students decide which jobs they want to apply to. I'm talking not so much about rankings but about all the chatty information for high-school seniors and their parents about majors, campus life, number of faculty, etc. as well as SAT scores. Reading between the lines you can sometimes actually see that the school is too small to be sustainable without its much vaunted program to offer college classes in the state prison, or that there seem to be more athletic teams than there are academic departments, or other such issues that would make you very unlikely to take the job even if it was offered. The outsiders' guides, even if they work from info supplied by the college, have more flavor than the website (and it's easier to check them quickly, too). The website is for later, when decisions have been made and you're crafting your application letter.

[sibyl]

Those generic ranking guides can give you some good information, but I think the rank itself is one of the least helpful things.  I look at things like SAT and ACT scores, to find out about students' general academic ability; the category that US News has them in, to find out whether they appeal to students from a region or from the whole country; the size of the endowment (which can also be found on chronicle.com); and the average salary of professors (which is not in a ranking guide but is published by the AAUP in Academe each spring).