Wall Street Journal College Rankings: The Full List and Rating Criteria

For many years, the gospel of college rankings was the U.S. News and World Report's annual list. Yet in the past decade, the venerable magazine has faced some criticism for both its results and elusive rating formula. Some schools who had traditionally fared well on the list even boycotted the annual event, refusing to return surveys and requests for information.

In the wake of the U.S. News controversy, other media sources like Forbes Magazine and Newsweek began compiling their own lists. In 2010, the Wall Street Journal emerged with its own list of the nations top schools. The rankings focused on the best "feeder" schools, to reflect the belief that the top colleges and universities were those that would have the highest placement rates in prestigious graduate programs around the country.

Wall Street Journal Ranking Criteria

In order to compile the list, the Wall Street Journal collected information on over 5,000 students starting at the nation's most prestigious graduate schools in business, medicine, and law programs. The data was collected through interviews with school personnel and examining school listings. The information was then analyzed and then subjected to a formula which would not penalize smaller institutions, in order figure out just which schools were seeing the best placement levels for students seeking graduate level education.

Pros and Cons

One of the best attributes of the Wall Street Journal's approach to the rankings is the fact that it gives recognition to many excellent smaller colleges that tend to be overlooked on the "big" sites like U.S. News. The omission of these smaller schools from the rankings has been one of the many criticisms of college rankings for years, and there is no denying the fact that smaller schools often reach the same quality standards as their larger peers. In addition, in today's job market, many students start out at a four-year school already knowing that they will be applying for a graduate degree rather than entering the workforce post-graduate.

However, the downside of staking the rankings solely on the discretion of the biggest and best graduate schools simply perpetuates some of elitism found in other ranking systems. Admissions counselors at prestigious graduate schools like Harvard and Yale are often more likely to admit those candidates from a similar alma mater. So in many cases, the feeder school designation does not actually reflect such criteria as quality of education, but potentially just the name recognition of the school within the admissions office.

Schools Providing Data

The following schools provided data regarding their admission demographics:

• Columbia (Medicine, Law)
• Harvard (Medicine, MBA, Law)
• Johns Hopkins (Medicine)
• University of California, San Francisco (Medicine)
• Yale (Medicine, Law)
• University of Chicago (MBA, Law)
• Dartmouth (Tuck School)
• MIT (Sloan School)
• Penn (Wharton School)
• University of Michigan (Law)

More on College Rankings

• Forbes 2012 College Rankings: Who Topped the List and Why?
  Overview of the Forbes 2012 college rankings, including top schools, as well as explanation the criteria used to determine the rankings.
• How Do the U.S. News College Rankings Compare to Other Best College Lists?
  While the U.S. News and World Report has long been regarded as the best for college and university rankings, in recent years they have undergone a bit of criticism regarding both their criteria and results.

Wall Street Journal's Top 50 Feeder Schools

1. Harvard University
2. Yale University
3. Princeton University
4. Stanford University
5. Williams College
6. Duke University
7. Dartmouth College
8. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
9. Amherst College
10. Swarthmore College
11. Columbia University
12. Brown University
13. Pomona College
14. University of Chicago
15. Wellesley College
16. University of Philadelphia
17. Georgetown University
18. Haverford College
19. Bowdoin College
20. Rice University
21. Northwestern University
22. Claremont McKenna College
23. Middlebury College
24. Johns Hopkins University
25. Cornell University
26. Bryn Mawr College
27. Wesleyan University
28. California Institute of Technology
29. Morehouse College
30. University of Michigan
31. New College of Florida
32. Vassar College
33. University of Virginia
34. United States Military Academy
35. University of Notre Dame
36. Emory University
37. United States Naval Academy
38. Macalester College
39. Brandeis University
40. Bates College
41. University of California, Berkely
42. Barnard College
43. Trinity College
44. Grinnell College
45. Tufts University
46. Colby College
47. Washington University
48. Washington and Lee
49. Case Western Reserve University
50. Reed College

Sources

http://www.wsjclassroomedition.com/college/feederschools.htm

http://www.inpathways.net/IPCNlibrary/ViewBiblio.aspx?aid=1577

Comments

Susie Watts from Denver, Colorado on January 02, 2013:

Don't you mean the University of Pennsylvania, not the University of Philadelphia?

College Direction

Denver, Colorado

http://www.collegedirection.org

Daniel on June 14, 2012:

Note that this data is is from 2003.

FloraBreenRobison on September 23, 2011:

We have a magazine that ranks the universities in Canada. the university I attended is ranked very high, despite it not being in a large city. The ranking system doesn't base criteria on living in Vancouver, Montreal, and Toronto vs. living everywhere else. In the US, you get the feeling that you have the Ivy League, then you have universities in major cities elsewhere, then you have everyone else, regardless of the quality of the institution.

Augustine A Zavala from Texas on September 22, 2011:

I have been saying the same thing about the college ranking system for years. I attended a state school with rigorous academic standards. It is never listed in the college ranking system, even though it is a good school. Thank you for sharing.