StudentsReview OFFICIAL Rankings
New Years Day, 2005

About this College Ranking

Creative people are those who naturally see worlds of possibilities, and who value their individualism as a source of their creativity.  For creative schools, we highly emphasized creativity, but we also included collaboration/competitiveness.  While creative students may all have their own ideas about how to do things, we felt it was important for them to learn to work WITH other students, rather than against each other, which is why we included competition & collaboration in the rankings.  Finally because creative students often don't accommodate well to specific directions, we felt that it to be very important that the schoolwork be both useful and that their success be dependent upon understanding.

Creativity is something that is highly valuable — from personalization of the home to new business & product ideas.  Creativity changes our society and our world.

Creative/Innovation 
Innovation is the conversion of educational knowledge into new opportunities, and new ways of doing things.  Pure education can become outdated, but teaching a student how and encouraging their creativity and innovation will provide them with returns for the rest of their lives.

Course Competitiveness 
While a certain amount of competition is a good thing, this metric measures the amount of “bad competition” — the kind that results in cheating, hoarding knowledge, looking over the shoulder, and the general kind that is counterproductive to the working relationships at highly profitable companies, or in effective management.  Effective companies and employees — and “people” in general are those that work together openly.  Cut-throat competition teaches a work ethic & mentality that is actually counter to success.

Academic Success is based upon 'understanding'  This is fundamentally important.  In a world obsessed with grades, it is imperative that any educational institution insure that the grades it gives, the metrics, and evaluations are clear and appropriate to the student's mastery. 
Many schools stake their reputation on grades, and their abilities to make qualified, educated, and ambitious people either fail out, or do poorly — because then it artificially seems as though the education is difficult. 

Schoolwork is Useful & Instructive 
Many schools give coursework for the purpose of delivering grades rather than the purpose of educating students.  Students have evaluated to say what proportion of their coursework is useful and instructive.  In the context of a good education, busywork does not assist (for the most part) understanding and competency in the workforce, and provides a mechanism by which grades do not match competency, harming students post-graduation opportunities.  The purpose of universities is to educate, not to babysit, nor to leverage customers for reputation.

Would Return (Overall Experience) 
All things stated, would the students choose to return?  This blanket captures things that all of our ratings did not, or could not capture.  Is there some unknown factor affecting why students would not return? 

Filtering and Analysis
To find out how the data analysis was performed for the 2005 New Years Day OFFICIAL Rankings, including filtering, invalidity, weighting, distribution matching, and inherent biases, please go to 2005 NYD Rankings Explained.