50 Excellent Blogs to Get Educational Data, Stats, and Rankings

Are you a high school junior who is starting a college search? Or, are you a transfer student, a freshman who has become disillusioned with your college choice or an adult who plans to re-enter college for a long-delayed degree? While you might ask for college brochures and take a campus tour, one of the best ways to measure a college and whether it’s right for you or not is through various college ranking and rating systems or through statistical data.

The following list of fifty excellent blogs and Webzines can supply you with educational data, stats and rankings provides information for your search. The links are categorized and listed in alphabetical order under each category to show that we do not favor one site over another. Additionally, instead of linking to a site’s blog in many cases, the link will take you straight to the ranking information.

Overall College Rankings

1. 100 Best Values in Public Colleges: Kiplinger updated and ranked this list for 2009. You can sort the overall rankings for both in-state and out-of-state students, cost, quality measures or financial aid measures by state.
2. Campus Compare: Discover 4000 community colleges, state colleges, traditional colleges, universities and compare them by academics, honor societies, cost and more.
3. America’s Best Colleges: Forbes offers a list of the best colleges in America. You also can find a list of America’s Best College Buys linked from this entry.
4. *The Center for College Affordability & Productivity: This site works with Forbes on some rankings. Many new rankings are available this year, including a list of “America’s Best Liberal Arts Colleges.”
5. The Consus Group: Some rankings in this site have not been updated since 2008, but other rankings are updated to 2009. This site uses a compilation from various other site sources for their lists.
6. The Princeton Review: This report is built from surveys answered by over 122,000 students as well as from other statistics. You can learn about academics, demographics, town life, school politics and more from these rankings.
7. Top 200 Colleges and Universities in the World: If you want to expand your search beyond U.S. shores, take a look at what this list offers. The list is ranked by popularity.
8. U.S. News & World Report: This link takes you to the 2010 version of an annual ranking that compares colleges by various definitions. Search through national universities, liberal arts college, business programs and more.
9. Washington Monthly College Guide: This ranking asks not what colleges can do for you, but what colleges are doing for the country. The point is to discover colleges where students and taxpayers in general are getting the most for the money.
10. What Will They Learn: This guide uses the criteria of how many courses within seven subjects that are required to complete a degree.

Student Reviews

11. College Confidential: Listen in on the discussions, review college stat profiles, participate in forums and read the latest posts on any just about college that you attend or want to attend.
12. College Prowler: Compare colleges by academics, athletics, campus dining, housing, strictness and much ore at this college search site. You can even rank colleges by the weather you prefer.
13. Rate My College: College reviews offered by real college students from around the world are located at this beta site offered by College Times.
14. Rate My College Dorm: Learn more about how students feel about their living conditions at this site. Since many colleges require students to reside in campus dorms during their first year, this site could provide some insight into the future.
15. Rate My Professors: College students use this site to strike back at professors. But, some great reviews exist here as well. Consider the source before you apply full credibility to the reviews.
16. Real College Tour: These college reviews are designed for high school students, parents, incoming freshmen, transfer students and anyone else who wants a “raw and uncensored” look at college life on campus from current college students across the nation.
17. StudentsReview: You can find over 80,000 college reviews at this site, which allows users to look at dynamic rankings and compare universities by cost, academic success, demographics and more.
18. StuVu: Pronounced “stoo-vyoo,” this site rates colleges by numerous descriptions as well as through reviews on four- and two-year colleges, online schools and vocational colleges.
19. The University Review: Students review colleges and potential students can use that information as part of a decision-making process. Search by state and school to learn more.
20. Unigo: Use this site to learn more about colleges straight from the students’ mouths. Get the scoop from videos, reviews, photos, forums and more.

Online College Rankings

21. Best Colleges Online: Use this site to learn more about online college rankings, accreditations and more.
22. Get Educated: Use this guide to learn more about rates, rankings and comparisons of online schools and degrees. Rankings include ‘best buy,’ ‘best student satisfaction’ and ‘best public perception.’
23. Guide to Online Schools: This site examined accreditation status, tuition costs, student-faculty ratios, graduation and retention rates and student reviews to determine its rankings.
24. OEDb: The Online Education Database site provides rankings of the top online universities based upon financial aid, graduation rate, peer Web citations, retention rate, scholarly citations, student-faculty ratio and years accredited.

Business School Rankings

25. 2009 Full-Time MBA Ranking: The Economist provides their perspective on MBA programs around the world. You can customize your search for an MBA program here as well.
26. Business School Rankings & Profiles: BusinessWeek offers their version of the best undergraduate business schools across the nation.
27. Global MBA Rankings 2009: The Financial Times offers their list of top business school rankings at this site. This list includes colleges across the globe.
28. *UTD Top 100 North American Business School Rankings: This list is based solely upon research contributions from business programs to business journals between 2004-2008.

Law School Rankings

29. Internet Legal Research Group: This link takes you to this site’s index to law school rankings as determined by ILRG. The profiles are updated to reflect 2009 raw data.
30. Thomas M. Cooley Law School Comparison Program: Use this site to compare law programs by school, state or by factors such as median percentile LSAT scores, full- or part-time faculty and more.
31. Top 2010 Law School Rankings: Top Law Schools consolidates all of the 2010 law school rankings available, providing a general outlook on available law programs across the nation.

Campus Security

32. Is Your College Student Safe at School? Reader’s Digest offers two reports [PDF] that can provide students and parents with campus safety survey results as well as campus crime rankings.
33. Security on Campus: Peruse safety statistics on college campuses by criminal offenses, hate crimes, arrests and more from 1995 through 2003. the latest reports center on demographic information.
34. UCrime: Use this site to learn about campus crime nationwide. Pick a state, then a college and download a map where you can view campus crimes over the past few years by crime category.

College Sports Rankings

35. 2010 College Basketball Power Rankings: Look to this site for early basketball rankings, as well as rankings in football, baseball and more.
36. Class of 2010 Team Football Recruiting Rankings: The Football Recruiting site at ESPN provides an early look and updates to their college recruitment rankings at this site. ESPN also includes other college sports rankings such as basketball.
37. College Hockey Rankings: USCHO provides college hockey team rankings by poll.
38. NCAA Graduation Rates: The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (TIDES) at the University of Central Florida releases periodic reports on college sports. This link takes you to all the studies, with the 2008-2009 College Football Bowl Study included.
39. Rivals.com Rankings: Provided by Yahoo! Sports, this site ranks college football teams by their prospect commitments. This site also includes other sports, such as college basketball.

Degree and Accreditation Rankings

40. CHEA Database: You can search through more than 7,700 degree-granting degree-granting and non-degree-granting institutions and more than 18,700 programs that are accredited by United States accrediting organizations that have been recognized either by CHEA (Council for Higher Education Accreditation) or by the United States Department of Education (USDE) or both.
41. PhDs.org: The goal of the site is help students to prepare for the changing demands of today’s job market and to provide a voice for early career scientists through ranking PhD programs through a dynamic search.
42. Top 100 Associate Degree Producers: Every year, Community College Week produces a special report that features the top 100 degree and certificate producing two-year institutions. The latest report is from 2009.
43. Top US Colleges Graduate Degree Statistics: Learn more about your starting median and mid-career median salaries as a graduate of any given school on this PayScale list.

Special Rankings

44. Ivy League Admission Statistics by College: If you look at the left column when you get to this site, you’ll see a list under “Ivy League Statistics” that projects to the year 2013.
45. Most Lucrative College Degrees: Compare this CNNMoney report to the one listed below. The top fifteen highest-earning college degrees on this list all have one thing in common – math skills.
46. PayScale College Salary Report: Take a look at this list of best undergrad college degrees by salary and you’ll see that the engineers and scientists fare better financially; but, there is still plenty of money to be made with a liberal arts degree.
47. Playboy U Top Party Schools: If nothing else, you always can resort to going to the best party schools in the nation. This ranking is not intended for parents.
48. The College Solution: This blog carries tons of links to rating sites and includes information and articles about those college rankings which cover all the categories listed here and more.
49. Top Entry Level Employers: College Grad offers a list of the top 386 entry level employers in the nation. Use this list well before you graduate from college and keep an eye on the site to see if they renew that list before you graduate.
50. Will You Want A Job In That State After College? Forbes showcases the best and worst states for keeping college grads. If you attend college in West Virginia, for instance, don’t plan on staying in that state for a top job.