[/quote] The article is dated 1990... nearly 30 years ago.
The article states that by changing date criteria, 2013-2014 ratings are available... that is still 5 years ago.
2019 rankings [url=https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/2019/world-ranking#!/page/0/length/25/sort_by/rank/sort_order/asc/cols/st[/quote]
My apologie on the faux pas. I did not check the date.
But the composite of criteria is part of what we look for. And, as a CDN, who lived in the US for 30 years, my view is that Americans tend to say college when they mean a post secondary institution, whether it is a small liberal arts college or a large university. It appeared to me that it used to refer to a degree granting institution, but the lines have blurred and even community colleges are referred to as going to college. In Canada, they say university. College means community college. Here, there is no difference anymore.
I think the rankings are interesting in 2 things: input and output.
A third kind of input data used by USNWR concerns student selectivity. Some of these measures indicate how capable or prepared the students are when they enter a college or university: entering student scores on SAT or ACT tests and the percentage of students graduating in the top 10 percent of their high school class. Perhaps these measures are useful for a student choosing a college; high achievement students may want to keep company with other high achievement students. But such measures are a backwards approach to assessing the quality of learning at a college: Colleges are ranked higher insofar as they start with students who have already learned more.
Outcomes. The USNWR annual rankings do make use of one kind of outcome measure: graduation and graduation rates. They measure what percentage of an institution's first year students return for a second year, and what percentage of students graduate within six years. I believe these measures are the best aspect of the USNWR rankings. But, I also believe retention and graduation rates are a very primitive outcome measure: They beg the question of whether, and what, students have actually learned.
