re: Forbes Best Colleges SEC Rank (Costs and Student Population)

Lists of this type are about the stupidest exercise available that involves higher education.

It's easy to rate small schools highly because they are able to concentrate resources in a single program or academic area. For instance, seriously... who would rate Beloit, Grove City, Hanover, Dayton, Bellarmine, George Fox, etc etc etc over SEC caliber schools? These small schools with only a couple thousand students are highly selective when state schools must serve a cross section of the general population. I'm sure that in many cases, they offer a fine education in specialty areas.

But the TRUTH is that Forbes, USN&WR, etc etc often rate schools on the basis of only a handful of opinions. Or maybe even the amount of research dollars - which isn't quite fair to schools who have a different educational mission.

The bottom line is that if you are in the position to hire someone who is a college graduate, do YOUR homework and hire on personality, team fit, experience, and worry less about where they earned a degree from. Heck, I bet that less than a quarter of the employed are actually DOING what they went and got an education for anyway.