Arizona’s three state universities rank in the bottom half of 610 undergraduate programs evaluated, according to Forbes magazine and the Center for College Affordability and Productivity.
The University of Arizona is No. 339, Arizona State University No. 382 and Northern Arizona University No. 460.
Rankings were determined on the quality of education, student experience and academic achievement.
Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash., ranks first. Rounding out the top 10 are Princeton University, Amherst College, the U.S. Military Academy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, Swarthmore College, Harvard University, Claremont McKenna College and Yale University.
MSC168 posted at 5:22 pm on Fri, Aug 13, 2010.
The good news is that most employers don't care where you went or even take the time to ask what your GPA was. You could have attended the lowest ranking school on the list and graduated with a 2.0.. In reality, all they care about is that you acquired a degree.
IF you are really interested in making an impact, do a follow-up piece on WHY the students voted the way they did. Give me details. What is it about Whitman that makes the students feel like they are getting a quality education? You do a piece like that and I might actually post it to my linkedin and facebook pages.
One would automatically assume that you SHOULD be getting a quality education from schools such as M.I.T, Harvard, Yale, Princeton and the like...
rugoin7777 posted at 10:54 pm on Fri, Aug 13, 2010.
Good point It is true as a Store Mgr. For Walmart we hired several right out of school without asking.....Great point thx
Mesa Citizen posted at 11:06 pm on Fri, Aug 13, 2010.
What do you expect from a Liberal school...
I suspect they are not getting enough "Free" stuff...
That makes their education "Bad"...[thumbdown]
snipes posted at 8:53 am on Mon, Aug 16, 2010.
There are entire sections in the Forbes article on the methodology used to create these rankings.
Including this summary (with detailed explanations for each section):
No. 1: Student Satisfaction (27.5%)
Student Evaluations from RateMyProfessor.com (17.5%)
Freshman-to-Sophomore Retention Rates (5%)
Student Evaluations from MyPlan.com (5%)
No. 2: Postgraduate Success (30%)
Salary of Alumni from Payscale.com (15%)
Listings of Alumni in Who's Who in America (10%)
Alumni in Forbes/CCAP Corporate Officers List (5%)
No. 3: Student Debt (17.5%)
Four-year Debt Load for Typical Student Borrower (12.5%)
Student Loan Default Rates (5%)
No. 4: Four-year Graduation Rate (17.5%)
Actual Four-year Graduation Rate (8.75%)
Predicted vs. Actual Four-year Graduation Rate (8.75%)
No. 5: Competitive Awards (7.5%)
Student Nationally Competitive Awards (7.5%)
Austonmini posted at 10:00 pm on Tue, Aug 17, 2010.
MSC168, no one uses the Forbes list anyway (well, maybe if you were applying for a job at the magazine itself..,). In this country people generally use the US News, or just favor colleges they heard of, and internationally, the Time Higher Education and ARWU lists are used. Which makes sense because, as you can see on snipe's comment, a large majority of this ranking is based on stuff like student satisfaction, debt, graduation rate and things like that has little, if anything, to do with how well your college prepared you for your job.
And no employer who isn't one of the few Williams alumnus is going to favor a Williams (#1) grad over a Cornell (70), NYU (173), or for that matter, U of Miami (479) grad. And everywhere in the world outside of MA, the name recognition and alumni networks of Miami, NYU and particularly an Ivy like Cornell will take you much, much farther. Yes, students may not be as happy there, but learning isn't all fun and games.
Austonmini posted at 11:23 pm on Tue, Aug 17, 2010.
Sorry to double post, but I forgot to point out that the methodology of this ranking favors colleges where students have rich, well-connected parents (generally private colleges), where students trend toward business and similarly money-oriented majors, and schools that are pretty easy or practice wide-spread grade inflation. These rankings are pretty useful if you just are going to college for the experience before working for daddy's or mommy's business, or going to law school, but if you plan on using your major, look elsewhere.
And because of the bias towards business schools, and others producing high earners like engineers, schools where elite graduates tend to stay in academia, like schools focused on sciences do very poorly. For example, Stony Brook, which has great tuition and grad school placement in hard sciences, but where students are miserably overloaded with difficult work gets ranked 312, but schools like Wells (95) are in the top 100 (beating even U of Illinois for heavens sake!) In fact, all of the big 10 schools (with the exception of the private one, big surprise {sarc}), which are traditionally strong in the sciences, did poorly to terrible in the rankings for their caliber.
eg:
92 University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
97 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
212 University of Wisconsin, Madison
222 Indiana University, Bloomington
246 Ohio State University
282 Michigan State University
362 Purdue University
418 University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
and so on (that's all I noticed)