| DailyDirt: Who Cares if You Went To A Good School? Oct 1st 2013, 00:00, by Michael Ho The field of education seems ripe for disruption -- with Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and other forms of online classes. However, it's difficult to judge the quality of these online programs and compare them to the traditional classroom experience. The conventional wisdom has ranked prestigious universities in roughly the same order for decades, so it'll be interesting to see how online courses and degrees might factor into these lists. Here are just a few interesting links on the quality of higher education. - The college/university rankings from US News & World Report is not as meaningful as most people assume, according to Malcolm Gladwell. Any ranked list generated by weighting multiple variables depends greatly on those weights -- and a simple, single score may be too simple to capture the most important characteristics of a diverse set of schools. [url]
- The US News college rankings don't heavily weight the value (or "bang for the buck") of the schools it covers, but the Washington Monthly ranking does. In 2013, Amherst College is listed as the "best bang for the buck" school, and Harvard/Princeton don't seem to be in the top ten.... [url]
- Norhtwestern University was once known as a horrible football school, setting a 34 consecutive game losing streak record in 1981, but its football team has turned itself around recently. Unfortunately, there's no special recognition for schools that simultaneously have good academic and athletic performance. [url]
- Newsweek and the Daily Beast have ranked 2,000 US high schools according to their effectiveness to produce college-ready graduates. But after going to college, how much does high school matter? [url]
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