Schools are evaluated on up to 16 metrics that measure academic excellence, such as class size and average spending per student on areas like instruction and student services. The U.S. News methodology places the heaviest weight on student outcomes, including analyzing schools’ success at retaining and graduating students.
U.S. Fake News And World Report Ranks Princeton #1, Harvard #2
US News- Among National Universities, Princeton University in New Jersey again topped the rankings. Harvard University in Massachusetts remained at No. 2, while Columbia University in New York and Massachusetts Institute of Technology moved up two spots to tie at No. 3 with the University of Chicago and Yale University in Connecticut.
For the 2019 rankings, U.S. News added a new outcome indicator looking at social mobility, or a school’s success at graduating students who received federal Pell Grants. These students are typically from households whose family incomes are less than $50,000 annually.
To make room for the new social mobility indicator, a school’s acceptance rate has been completely removed from ranking calculations.
The US news and world report released its ranking of US colleges today. It’s total bullshit. But you don’t have to trust my word for it; Forbes says the same thing.
As writer and best selling author Malcolm Gladwell once pointed out in a scathing critique of U.S. News’ rankings in The New Yorker, “There’s no direct way to measure the quality of an institution—how well a college manages to inform, inspire, and challenge its students. So the U.S. News algorithm relies instead on proxies for quality—and the proxies for educational quality turn out to be flimsy at best.”
By the way, Forbes did their own rankings. They put Harvard at #1, Yale #2, Stanford #3, MIT #4, and Princeton #5. This feels much more accurate to me.
You can crunch the numbers as much as you want, but let me explain why Princeton is not better than Harvard in real-world terms. I’ve never had to convince anyone that Harvard was a better school than Princeton. Nobody. Nobody has ever made the joke that “x school is the Princeton of the midwest.” Nobody has ever said, “Princeton? Never heard of it.” Because it’s entirely possible that you might not have heard of Princeton.
Ever been to China? Well, I have. And when people there found out that I went to Harvard, they shit themselves. They thought I was fucking with them. To the Chinese, Harvard is some mythical Hogwarts-like castle that produces presidents, magnates, moguls and breakout Asian NBA stars. They don’t tell their children to work hard so that they can go to Princeton. Because they don’t have to. They can work medium and still get in there.
Princeton’s endowment is 22.2 billion. That’s great. You should be proud of that–seriously. I’m sure that’s a lot of money to a lot of colleges. You’re right up there with Yale and Stanford in the “20-billion billionaires club.” When you have over 20 billion dollars at your disposal, you can throw some really fun parties and admit a bunch of kids who can’t afford the tuition. Noble.
But Harvard’s endowment is 37.1 billion. If we subtract 22.2 billion from 37.1 billion, the difference is… 14.9 billion. And let’s round that up to 15 billion because it’s a nice, round number. Harvard has 15 billion dollars more than Princeton. If we compare these numbers to the GDPs of countries, Harvard has the same amount of money as Bolivia. Do you guys know Bolivia? It’s beautiful. The government donates tons of money to public education, and if you’re a llama, there’s no better place to live.
Princeton, on the other hand, is financially on par with Cambodia–a country so rife with corruption and human rights abuses that they still have SLAVES. According to the global slavery index, over 256,000 people are currently enslaved in Cambodia (Wikipedia obviously).
Dear God, there are so many countries separating Bolivia and Cambodia.
Still not getting it? I’ll compare the endowments of Harvard and Princeton in simpler terms. Let’s say a girl has sex with two different guys. Her friend asks her which one was better. She says, “well, the guy named Harvard was extremely well-endowed, while the Princeton guy was like, comfortably endowed.”
Boom. Say no more.