re: Forbes: America's Top Universities '13 list out...SEC schools ranking

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2. Pomona College
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8. Harvard



US News is the ranking system that is generally considered to be THE ranking system.

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Not really. US News is the best known but not necessarily the most respected. Their system rewards small private schools and they have some flawed methodology. Some examples:

They reward schools greatly for class sizes and graduation rates. It's a great deal easier for a private school with 2k students to have better ratios on those items than a 40 or 50k public school.

They do a poor job of verifying numbers and allow schools (esp private schools) to manipulate them. For instance Baylor has jumped in the rankings significantly in recent years partly because they instigated a program of paying current students to re-take their SAT's to improve their scores. They have A&M's Endowment listed at $358 million by some bizarre calculation (likely dismissing the Permanent University Fund and counting the rest of our endowment as shared amongst the entire System) when the actual Endowment is about $7 Billion.

In the end the best way to compare schools is to try to put apples to apples as much as possible. Comparing large publics to small privates is ridiculous. You might as well compare an F-350 to a Mustang.