Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education College Rankings 2021 methodology

Greetings — It also appears your methodology for assigning scores to the indicators has changed for 2021 rankings. Please create an addendum explaining what has changed, and how to use the new scoring methodology to make meaningful comparisons to scoring data from previous years.

With respect to the resources methodology it appears it penalizes institutions that have figured out how to more efficiently. How do you statistically adjust for efficiency gains? Or do you just reward institutions which spend more? With respect respect to student/faculty ratio, research indicates that there is not a linear relationship between student outcomes and class size-- that the relationship is marginally step-based. How does your model account for this research? In addition, how do you adjust for actual mean and median class size at the respective institution as more faculty do not necessarily translate into smaller class sizes-- especially at the underclassman level?

Why would an institution have no score on a metric, especially when that metric is drawn largely from IPEDS data?

I do not see two notable colleges on your list, Grove City College and Hillsdale College. I assume this is because neither school accepts any federal funding. Our daughter went to Grove City, and their tuition was consistently far lower than most comparable colleges, while students graduated with low debt and consistently got high paying job offers or admittance to top graduate schools. Excluding these two schools because they avoid federal funding makes your rankings highly dubious.

Technical overview of metrics; Resources; Papers per faculty – the number of academic papers published by faculty from a college in the period 2015-2019 (Elsevier) divided by the size of the faculty (IPEDS) ********************************************************** Assume 3 faculty members in school A publishing 7, 8, 9 papers. The Average is 8 papers at school "A"; School "B" has one faculty member publishing 8 papers. These schools both average 8 publications. Are these schools equal? No, they are not equal: 1) the school with the larger faculty "A" has one person publishing at a higher rate than the one person at "B"; if quantity equals quality (a dubious assertion supported by normalization), school "A" is superior to school "B"; 2) the faculty at "A" has generated 24 papers versus 8 generated at school "B". Would most students prefer "B" to "A"? Probably not, school "A" (probably) offers a greater research corpus as well as (probably) greater faculty access; What is the point of normalizing papers per faculty: 1) arbitrarily tends to give edge to smaller schools; 2) doesn't speak to citation count or quality of papers; 3) doesn't speak to total paper count; 4) doesn't speak to faculty access. Of the metrics used, any metric which presents a normalization by size fits into the category of "Not very useful".