John Ormsbee '83 looks 'em over ...

and gives us his comparison of Forbes v USNews

We all love the college rankings, especially this year with Williams in its rightful place atop both the Forbes and US News lists.

Here are a few of my favorite things about them:

1.  Each list is the work product of basically a single person.  (Forbes: Richard Vedder;  US News: Robert Morse)

2.  Both lists can be created without ever needing to set foot upon any of the schools in the lists. (All the data are available on line, and most of it for free.)

3.  Both of the lists can be created without ever needing to actually attend college - 8th grade arithmetic is pretty much all you need.

4.  Each of the Rankings Experts thinks more highly of the schools he attended than does his competitor (one exception: Morse gives a higher percentile ranking to Vedder's grad school, U. of Illinois, than Vedder does.)  See below:

	Percentile Rankings
School (attendee)	Forbes      (Vedder)	US News      (Morse)	Degree	Major
Northwestern (Vedder)	97%	95%	B.A	Econ
U. of Cincinnati (Morse)	17%	40%	B.A	Econ
U. of Illinois (Vedder)	77%	82%	Ph.D	Econ
Michigan State (Morse)	46%	70%	MBA	Finance

5. The Forbes ranking includes data from www.ratemyprofessor.com, which allows students to evaluate, among other things, their professors' physical appearance. (Inexplicably, Forbes ignores the "hotness" data from this source, and IMHO is the poorer for it.)

6. The data collected, and the weighting formulae, change every year.  I take this to mean that each of the Rankings Experts believes all of his previous rankings were WRONG.

7.  Neither of the Rankings Experts is really qualified to say anything about Williams.  Why?  Couldn't get in.  -QED.

Beat Amherst!

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