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.