By: Eric Parker
Eric Parker lives in Seattle and has been teaching Tableau and Alteryx since 2014. He's helped thousands of students solve their most pressing problems. If you have a question, feel free to reach out to him directly via email.
Depends who you ask! According to US News the top national university in 2020 is Princeton. That’s a bit simplistic though. What if you want to be an aeronautical engineer, filmographer or social worker? What if you want to stay close to home or are on a tight budget? Is Princeton the “best university” in that case?
The US Department of Education under the Obama Administration started asking these same questions and decided they were going to create their own ranking. They wanted affordability to factor more into the equation. However, they quickly started running into issues determining which factors were most important. Additionally, they received a lot of push-back from existing institutions and higher education leadership.
It’s great to have rankings like the US News college list but there is no way that could ever be a prescriptive tool for everyone entering college in the US. Everyone has their own decision-making criteria.
I chose to attend the University of Washington for some of the following reasons:
● My parents and sister went there.
● It was an affordable option.
● It was close to home.
● My existing college credits transferred there easily.
The US Department of Education eventually decided they weren’t going to create a rank of their own but were going to publish all the information they could gather on American colleges in an easily accessible place. You can check out that data here.
That could certainly be a helpful tool to the data literate but it is a lot to look through. One of the most powerful things that you can do when trying to make a difficult decision is to identify your key criteria and compare your options against that criteria.
We use a guided experimentation tool called The Values Game to help us in our personal and corporate decision making. It has helped us determine direction for living arrangements, consulting offerings and where to locate our office.
Looking for help getting started in your own decision making process? Reach out and we are happy to help you get started!
Thanks to the book Weapons of Math Destruction for bringing the story of the US News ranking and Department of Education college ranking to my attention.