One more thing, MIT at number 11; below Caltech, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford!!!!! Are you serious?????? Instead of relying on ratemyprof.com, Forbes should lay down some other ground rules for determining the status of faculty in an institute like number of Nobel Laureates, Louis Jeantet awardees, Millenium Award winners, National Medal of Science papers published in top rated Journals like Nature, grant received from the Federal Government, etc.. For students too the publications should be the foremost criteria and don’t get me started on Scholarships. You can not deduce anything from them as most of these scholarships have AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP as the first criteria and that singles out the vast majority of the International Students who throng the campuses.

Don’t mistake what US News does for trying to be fair. The do the rankings to make money. And they know that they have to rate certain schools high. The best example was a number of years ago when they changed the criteria for the rankings and Caltech came out as number 1. Everyone “knew” that couldn’t be right so US News changed the criteria back the next year and Caltech went to its “rightful” place about number 9.

And yes, I agree with you that Juniata is a great school that should be considered by more students.

By the way, Juniata College is an excellent school and is a tier 1 liberal arts college.

The Forbes page explains that RMP scores correlate to some degree with standard student evaluations, but I don’t think Forbes understands why universities collect student evaluations and how they’re read. Suffice it to say, each grain of student evaluation is taken with a 5 pound block of salt. Generally the comments are the only things that are useful.

Really?

I agree that having student input might have some validity to rating a college. However, ratemyprofessor has absolutely no control over who uses their services. So, if I want to, I can go onto any college site and rate any professor I want to. That is the problem with what Forbes did.

As I said in the original article, evaluating student debt does have some merit but the factors for rating that made some sense had less impact on Forbes ratings than the factors that should never have been used.

Your feedback made me consider another limitation to our preference method: the biases inherited by students over the years can be propagated. If people’s preferences are driven by US News instead of by some factors that actually matter to their education or their wellbeing for the next 4 years, then our list will just end up recapitulating that of US News. Depending on your vantage point, that would either be an extremely unfortunate sign of the times or a validation of the utility of the US News list.