Aerospace Engineering Rankings By Students Review

Q: Everybody either loves or hate college rankings. Some like me can't do with them as a guide for comparing colleges. I went to the http://www.studentsreview.com/ website and feeling bored, happened to stumble upon its SR Rankins facility. I selected 'Program/Education Quality' as the Dynamic Ranking factor and 'Aerospace Engineering' as an Additional Optional Ranking Restriction, without selecting any other variable. Lo and behold! The list below was obtained. To my great joy, I realized I had obtained an aerospace engineering college ranking for 26 U.S. colleges; a list impossible to obtain from U.S. News & World Report for free. So for once, Ann Arbor is able to triumph over GA Tech. If the data says the U.S. Naval Academy is superior to the U.S. Air Force Academy in aerospace engineering, alright, I can believe that. After all, too much flying may make one light-headed. Caltech no. 8, Stanford no. 10, MIT no. 14, UCLA no. 24, well, who am I to doubt such strange figures? For the benefit of everyone in this newsgroup, especially those who may wish to try a similar approach in order to obtain other lists for other disciplines, I thought it would be nice to make everyone here aware of such a wonderful source of information. However, there may be a catch. As they like to say, beware of Greeks bearing gifts. I have to

confess I find the explanation of what the rankings actually mean too challenging to understand. Would someone care to try? Prof. Darcity, perhaps?

A: You hit the nail on the head regarding this tool. It can only rank based on the number of surveys filled out be students. It skews the results toward schools with more data. I find www.studentsreview.com good only for fleshing out a school's good and bad points, as a way of raising caution flags. The rankings are as bogus as US News', which is a college president's beauty contest. studentsreview may get better as more students from more schools find the site and make their opinions known.