The unofficial online home for fans of the Old Dominion University Monarchs. Part of Collegiate Sports Nation (CSN).

(09-14-2020 10:57 AM)Monarchblue Wrote:  

(09-14-2020 10:43 AM)BigBlueMonarch Wrote:  

(09-14-2020 10:35 AM)12thmonarch Wrote:  

(09-14-2020 10:27 AM)monarx Wrote:  Good news/Bad News

ODU comes in as the 258th best college in the US. If Im reading it correctly, we are back ahead of Regent. Which makes me glad because they bragged in their press release last year that they ranked higher than us.

The bad news: ODU comes in as the 258th best school, which while still ranked, is a drop from a few years ago. We really need to crack the top 200. For comparison:

GMU: 143
UAB:153
VCU:160
UCF: 160
Towson: 196
GSU: 216
ECU: 217
UNCC: 227

We do pretty well against CUSA teams though. Ranking higher than MTSU, Marshall, La Tech, WKU and FAU.

Terrible look if its just academics being evaluated for these rankings.

Academics has almost NOTHING to do with US News Rankings. I have completed their ranking survey and ended up throwing it in the trash because that is what it is....rubbish. There is no real data in the rankings other than admission rate. The bulk of the rankings are based on perception ratings, so people like guidance counselors and college admission officers are asked to share how good they think a school is. There is ZERO correlation to how good of an education you will get at any institution in the US News Rankings.

This may all be true, and the rankings may be useless, but unfortunately perception matters. In many cases, in this short attention span world we live in now, perception is the only thing that matters, and US News is a significant driver of that perception. So we can hate it as much as we want, and ODU can claim it is a bad representation all they want, but at the end of the day, if you aren't playing that game, you are losing ground when it comes to recruiting students, so the ranking matters.

While the fact that this crappy ranking isn't associated with academics is making me feel better i have to agree this doesn't help our perception among the ones that are not familiar with ODU. I don't know what percentage of kids and parents pick schools based on these types of polls but we better get our **** sorted.