How We Calculate the College Rankings

brand name..?

Guys gimme a clue on how much the name of the university helps us in getting an offer letter after master course completion...if we leave alone top league univ..lets say amongst univs

ranked more than 60..is it logical to say that name of the univ hardly matters.?

Im kinda stuck choosing the univ for my masters :s

Thanks.

Accurate?

I question the accuracy and even the editing of the U.S. News, college rankings. While reviewing colleges I noticed in several instances that colleges that had as high as a 97% acceptance rate were rated "less selective" and some colleges with 70-75% acceptance rates were rated "least selective" does this make any sense? Also I was surprised to see that many SUNY schools here in the Northeast area that are/were known "party hard schools" with mediocre at best academics about 10+ years ago are now rated Tier 1 schools? I know that it is possible that theses institutions did make major turnarounds. It does seem that there are now a massive number of so-called tier 1 schools now with their new rating parameters (the elimination of Tier 2). Another thought if you (US News) eliminated tier 2, why not eliminate tier 3 and tier 4 using your same logic and just have your top tier and your bottom tier? The rating system is certainly better than nothing and the top schools (ivy league and those close behind) are represented here. However I have less faith in many of the other school ratings, and endowments are given too much weight. I realize that larger school endowments do represent alumni satisfaction or perhaps affluence to an extent, I disagree that they are necessarily an indicator of a quality educational program. That being said I think there should be more emphasis on smaller class sizes and student to teacher ratios, which is certainly conducive to an ideal learning environment.

http://goacta.org/

You really think their methodology is superior? Someone with an 8th grade education could look at the two methodologies and figure out the Goacta method (which is comprised of scouring course offerings and requirements on universities' websites) is heavily lacking compared to US News's methods. In fact, Goacta method is so ridiculous, I'm almost compelled to believe it's objective is political, since there appears to be a bias favoring public universities. Goacta gives Harvard, Cornell, and Rice F grades.