Oregon College Rankings Revisited

Many readers seemed perplexed that Oregon so consistently ranks poorly in the rankings from US News and the Wall Street Journal, so to be fair, let’s take a look at how we ranked in the very newest survey from Forbes Magazine.

Forbes ranked 569 undergraduate institutions based on the quality of the education they provide and how much the students achieve. The rankings were based on 25% of the rankings on 7 million student evaluations of courses and instructors, as recorded on the Web site RateMyProfessors.com. Another 25% depended on how many of the school’s alumni, adjusted for enrollment, are listed among the notable people in Who’s Who in America.
The other half of the ranking is based equally on three factors: the average amount of student debt at graduation held by those who borrowed; the percentage of students graduating in four years; and the number of students or faculty, adjusted for enrollment, who have won nationally competitive awards like Rhodes Scholarships or Nobel Prizes.

Using this criteria (I know, it really isn’t fair at all) here is how Oregon colleges and universities ranked out of 569 in the nation.

64 Reed College

131 George Fox University

170 Lewis and Clark College

184 Pacific University

210 Willamette University

246 Linfield College

287 University of Oregon

443 Corban College

522 Oregon State University

532 University of Portland

Top half of the nation from Linfield on up. Not bad, not bad at all.