Money Magazine college rankings

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24. Texas A&M
28. Florida
50. Vanderbilt
62. Georgia
95. LSU
183. Auburn

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Big 6

LINK

Dang, even I think that is too low for Bama.

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409. Alabama

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Sidewalking hurts the rep of the whole university. Y'all need to keep those guys in line.

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Just to show that everything is relative...

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It's all bullshite.

Unless you're discussing elitist schools with wealthy or very intelligent students, a state school is a state school, imo. Yes, some are great, but in the end it's just undergrad.

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409. Alabama

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:kige:

At any state school it's mostly what you make of it. If you're in the honors program at one of them you can get a fantastic education at a low cost. Certain programs will stick out (Petroleum Engineering at A&M, International Business at Carolina, etc) and the overall reputations might give you a head start coming out of college for jobs and grad school over others, but when you're 30-35 and have relevant work experience nobody is really gonna give a shite where you went.

To continue paying attention to our rivals, the following scores are in

Money, AU 183,,,,,Bama 409
Forbes, AU 204.....Bama 335
USNEWS Bama 86, AU 91..
LINK /
The rankings are flawed, but they sell magazines.

1. The college rankings fuel higher college costs. U.S. News' methodology rewards schools that spend more cash. Schools get brownie points for sinking money into new buildings, posh student unions, athletic facilities and higher teacher salaries. And guess who is paying for all that? The rankings don't encourage schools to keep their tuition lower, and the rankings mavens don't care if all this spending ends up forcing students into greater debt. Schools aren't penalized for graduating students with onerous student loans.

2. The rankings don't measure academic quality. U.S. News also doesn't care about what type of learning -- if any -- is happening at the colleges and universities it ranks. Seriously, I'm not making this up! By contrast, the rankings methodology, however, does care about what percentage of students that a school rejects. Go figure.

3. Schools cheat. No one knows how many colleges and universities fib when they complete their college rankings surveys. But some pretty big players have been caught falsifying or manipulating numbers to bump themselves up in the standings, including Clemson University, Claremont McKenna College, U.S. Naval Academy, Baylor University and Emory University (I wrote about such questionable behavior by Ivy League institutions in a previous post.)

4. The ranks are based on beauty contest. The biggest factor in the college rankings is a school's reputation and, more specifically, what institutions think of each other. All the schools in a specific category, such as the national university category, are asked to rate all of their peers on a one-to-five scale. For example, administrators at UCLA rate their peers, including such different institutions as Dartmouth, Ball State, Georgia Tech, Wake Forest, San Diego State and Georgetown. Of course, this practice is ludicrous.

Bottom Line

At the very least, you should understand that the U.S. News college rankings are deeply flawed. You shouldn't make any decisions on what school to visit or attend based on what these faulty numbers appear to be telling you.

USNWR is the only academic ranking service that I've seen Alabama high at all. Most other SEC schools fall [respectively] along the same curve

Makes you wonder what Alabama is being dinged for in the other 2 rankings, unless you actually believe UA is the +400th ranked school in the country.