GoldenWarrior11 wrote:What's going on at Seton Hall and St. John's that caused their rankings to tumble?
They suffered the same fate as many state flagship schools in the Midwest (Mizzou, Nebraska, Kansas, Arkansas, etc.) did this year that had previously hovered in the 75-100 range, taking on seemingly precipitous drops in the U.S. News rankings when in reality they still would have been within that range had a significant number of highly-ranked formerly Regional classified schools such as Creighton and Gonzaga not moved into the National rankings in the approximate 75-100 range, displacing many schools and exaggerating their actual drops.
A better indicator of whether there was an actual decline is to calculate the school's percentile rather than raw rank. For example, 80 new Doctoral universities were added this year to total 399, compared to 319 last year. So using St. John's as an example, they were ranked 152/319 last year (48th percentile) and 179/399 this year (45th percentile), which is actually a
relative improvement.