<p>hopkins,</p>
<p>You forget NU has top business, top journalism, very good law school....etc. Well, maybe you are, as kk suggested, biased towards jhu. US News need to show some movement in it or it can't sell. So someone got to move down and it just happens it's jhu this year. Your school will likely move up next year. I wouldn't worry about it too much. It looks bad only because you allow yourself to think so.</p>
<p>KK, Chicago's rise to #9 is primarily due to its 4.7 PA, not its financial resources "manipulation".</p>
<p>Sorry ,I am a chinese . Do anybody here can tell me What's selectivity ranking ?</p>
<p>I think hopkins is low because it's the boringest place in the universe. Even the architecture is an exercise in monotony.</p>
<p>你好 stellar jiang,</p>
<p>Selectivity ranking is SUPPOSED to be 'how hard it is to get into the school,' based on acceptance rates, average student stats etc. Most people will just go by the acceptance rate.</p>
<p>Chill out kk. Chicago's PA went up .1 while other schools like Columbia simultaneously dropped .1. I guarantee that's the main reason, especially since the score only rose by four points. Why are you so bitter?</p>
<p>I saw somewhere that Chicago acknowledged it made a point of massaging certain data it presented to USNews about financials, faculty and such, in "Penn-like" fashion, in order to successfully goose its ranking this year.</p>
<p>"Why are you so bitter?"</p>
<p>-Haha, bitter? I’m not bitter at all. I just don’t think schools should be able to meet with US News to conspire to report data more “successfully”; it undermines the system.</p>
<p>I just dont think schools should be able to meet with US News to conspire to report data more successfully; it undermines the system.</p>
<p>US NEws has been jiggling the numbers for years, how else can you explain that they aren't always identical to numbers from the schools themselves- college board and other sources-there is either just sloppy reporting or actual * massaging* going on in some cases</p>
<p>US News is a tool- but some might say a tool made in a offmarket shop in Mexico, not a precision tool made in Switzerland.</p>
<p>kk-
A system has to have integrity in the first place to be undermined. Sorry about the "bitter" thing, that was total bs on my part.</p>
<p>Byerly-
That's quite a spin, especially since the faculty numbers got significantly worse this year. You consider accurately reporting expenditures per student to be "massaging?"</p>
<p>^Really, the only data on US News that can't be manipulated is SAT scores of entering class, and PA even though thats a pretty skewed measure of undergrad</p>
<p>Makes you wonder how good any rankings are...however, since they all pretty much say similar things its reliable, though it could be because every ranking tried to mold themselves after existing rankings so they are all similar</p>
<p>I mean, theres a big list now of popular undergrad rankings, US News, Newsweek, THES, WSJ feeder...I guess the biggest one is US News by far and the rest sort of came into popularity after it. THES drastically redid its format to become more undergrad based since last year, making it more in line with US News in many ways. Newsweek I don't really get, is it undergrad, or grad...all these rankings are so similar though, that picking the best undergrads still consist of the same group of 10-15 schools.</p>
<p>DON'T BLAME USNEWS, BLAME THE COLLEGES THEMSELVES....</p>
<p>USNews gets its numbers directly from the colleges themselves. Often, schools have reported one number to USNews, and another to government agencies or bond rating agencies.</p>
<p>The whole "class size", "faculty resources" etc categories are often subject to accounting manipulation - not necessarily because some one is trying to con USNews, but simply because accountants can differ. What formula should be used to allocate administrative overhead, etc to the undergradute vs the graduate school aspect of a university? There is no magic rule. What constitutes a "class"? How are seminars, grad student classes, tutorials, sections etc. treated? Despite USNews efforts to encourage uniform reporting (ie, the Common Data Set, etc) there is no "official" formula and reporting differes from school to school.</p>
<p>Every stat can be "manipulated" if you are determined to do it. Certain schools do not include the SAT scores of certain "affirmative" action admits. They do this by developing a "policy" to exclude the scores for people in "special programs", or invite them to start early with a two-week "enrichment" or "headstart" program in August, so that they are technically not part of the class starting in September, etc etc. </p>
<p>Moreover, many schools report SAT scores only for a minor fraction of admits by making them "optional". Those submitting them anyway, naturally, tend to be those with higher scores, and the schools are happy to report these numbers to USNews.</p>
<p>Then there is the category of "percentage of matriculants in the top 10% of their class" - a stat USNews has always set great store by. I invite you to check the fine print (the famous "footnote 5") in the USNews rankings and see which schools report this stat for a minor fraction of the matriculating class. Some of those whose reported data is based on less than 51% of the class might surprise you - including Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth and Brown.</p>
<p>Then there is the case of the California schools who report that a ridiculously high fraction of the freshman class were in the "top 10%" of their class, despite SAT medians that seem at odds with such a claim. The reason, of course, is that admission is often based entirely on this stat, regardless of the quality of the local school. </p>
<p>This technique was developed (in California, Texas and Florida) to get around affirmative action bans. Nevertheless, it earns those schools "selectivity" points under the USNews formula. Some cynics have claimed that, as a consequence, 40% of the class is included in the "top 10%" in some California school districts. Don't want to "deprive people of an educational opportunity", you know!</p>
<p>Then, I hate to destroy the faith of posters like "thethoughtprocess", but other stats like the "admission rate" are also subject to substantial manipulation - directly and indirectly. Some schools include as "applicants" people who never completed their application, or withrew it before it was acted upon. Some very fine schools use this technique for puffing up the number of applicants - and I am not talking about WUStL, which famously counted as applicants people who did little more than respond to a brochure inviting people to retun a postage pre-paid card as a request for information. Waitlist admits are canvassed in advance by some schools to ascertain their willingness to accept a place "if offered." Thus such schools can boost their yield (and drop their admit rate" by "going light" on RD admits and filling in with those juicy "100% yield" waitlist admits.</p>
<p>And finally it must be recognized that the "admit rate" is manipulated to a substantial degree by schools which fill a large fraction of the class via binding ED. If you fill half the class with those juicy "100% yield" ED admits, then you cover up what is often a much lower RD yield rate when you compete on the "open market."</p>
<p>Take #1 Princeton: it fills half the class via binding ED, but in recent years has convinced only half the RD admits to enroll (52% for the Class of 2009). Can you imagine how it impacts your admit rate when your yield is 50% vs 100%? At 50%, you have to admit 2 people to fill every seat, and the "admit rate" rises accordingly. And there are schools where the effect of binding ED on overall yield - and, in consequence, the "admit rate" - is even more dramatic.</p>
<p>Yes, I agree with Byerly that the USNWR rankings are riddled with faults to the point where they are basically completely invalid. Of course, a school in the top ten is different from one not in the top 50 -- there's only so much "massaging" of the numbers a school can do -- and the rankings are valid in a general sense (e.g., HYP are stronger overall than Northwestern or UChicago), but I wouldn't look at the numbers any closer than that. For example, Cornell and Dartmouth may very well be stronger than Stanford or UPenn; Caltech may be better than Harvard. A better system would place schools into "tiers" with various statistical confidence levels, based on a variety of vetted quality measures, resulting in a ranking like the one below. Also, LACs and universities should be combined since it's undergrad programs we're ranking, after all.</p>
<p>Tier One
HYP (95% confidence)
Caltech, MIT (85% confidence)
Stanford, Amherst, Williams, Swarthmore, Wellesley (40% confidence)
Dartmouth, Cornell, UChicago, Wesleyan (15% confidence)</p>
<p>Tier Two
HYP (5% confidence)
Caltech, MIT (15% confidence)
Stanford, Amherst, Williams, Swarthmore, Wellesley (50% confidence)
Dartmouth, Cornell, UChicago, Wesleyan (65% confidence)
Bowdoin, Carleton, Middlebury (50% confidence)
UPenn (40% confidence)</p>
<p>Tier Three
Stanford, Amherst, Williams, Swarthmore, Wellesley (10% confidence)
Dartmouth, Cornell, UChicago, Wesleyan (20% confidence)
Bowdoin, Carleton, Middlebury (40% confidence)
UPenn (60% confidence)</p>
<p>etc.</p>
<p>For a valid ranking, you need to look at something specific, such as the percentage of students who get NIH fellowships or Rhodes Scholarships, or the placement rate into the best law school in the country: <a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=177439%5B/url%5D">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=177439</a> or some other measure of students' success later on in life. Something like the percentage of alumni who donate money, which USNWR measures, certainly doesn't cut it, given that if you give your alma mater a dollar you are counted as a donor -- in this specific case, donations per capita would be a better measure. And, as Byerly points out, most of the USNWR numbers themselves, including the ones on "classes", student to faculty ratios, admissions, graduation rates and the like, are, at best, not very precise (although again, they can give you a general sense of things, e.g., Caltech's graduation rate is pretty low when compared to HYP and there's a reason for that).</p>
<p>I call the attention of "poster x" to this site, noting the numbers of winners of leading felloowships over the years, such as Rhodes, Marshalls etc. </p>
<p>Of course, these numbers are relatively small on an annual basis, as compared to long term trend lines. Poster X, predictably, only finds such categories "valid" in years when Yale does well!</p>
<p>Yes Byerly, those data would be a good place to start, if adjusted on per capita terms, of course. Adjusting per capita, you might find small schools like Williams or Wesleyan near the top. But your source is from 1986 to 2006 and that's a long time period. Regarding your question about Yale, Yale has recently become more selective than Harvard. In the past, it was not. For the sake of argument here, two additional anecdotal indications of Yale's increased selectivity vis a vis Harvard - other than the fact that Yale now has a lower acceptance rate - are as follows: </p>
<p>1, Yale has been drawing an increasing share of NMSC-sponsored National Merit Scholars versus its peers (in the past, Harvard had an edge, now the two schools are tied as a percentage of their entering class, and both are far ahead of Princeton);</p>
<p>2, Yale students won 3 Rhodes and 4 Marshall Scholarships last year; even though Yale is one of the smallest Ivies by enrollment, no other Ivy League School won more than 1 Rhodes or more than 2 Marshalls. Shifts in selectivity might be another reason why using 1986 data might not be your best bet. Who knows, maybe in the 1980s and early 1990s Columbia wasn't able to get great students. So let's look at the more recent record.</p>
<p>These are the "canaries in the coal mine," so to speak. Certainly, they are better than the USNWR ranking as predictors of selectivity, e.g., in the case of Princeton, the school has been ranked "#1" by USNWR for many years in a row yet its applications have only increased by 17% since 1999, versus much larger increases at other Ivies (up nearly 60% in the case of Yale). Anyone looking in depth at how these kinds of numbers were shifting three or four years ago could probably have predicted that Yale would be more selective than Harvard (and, incidentally, that Princeton would fall to fourth in selectivity after Yale, Harvard and Columbia).</p>
<p>Instead of looking at the best law school in the land, why not look at the 15 best professional schools in the land:
<a href="http://www.collegejournal.com/special/top50feeder.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://www.collegejournal.com/special/top50feeder.pdf</a></p>
<p>The best law school in the land, plus Columbia, Harvard, and other law friends join in on that one</p>
<p>Byerly, I know that admissions rate can be manipulated. I never said acceptance rate was important. Instead, I think stats like SATs are really the only standard bar for measuring selectivity and strength of student body pre-college entrance. Then, professional school entrance, average LSATs or MCATs, and elite fellowships are a good measure of how strong the student body during college.</p>
<p>Poster X, you didn't mention two schools that have never left the top 10 in your statistical analysis, Columbia and Duke, which are probably around Dartmouth or UPenn.</p>
<p>thethoughtprocess, that was just an example of what the ranking might look like if done correctly, given the severe limitations of USNWR's underlying data. It wasn't meant to be a ranking. As far as the preprofessional ranking, it is not as good as the "best school for getting into the best law school" ranking, because the numbers on the % of preprofessional alumni vary much more between different universities than the numbers on the % of alumni who want to get into the best law school do, and also because once you get past the undisputed best law school -- YLS, which has a 85-90% yield rate meaning virtually everyone who gets in chooses to go there regardless of who they are or where they come from -- the choices people make are less predictable and therefore more subjective to analyze. I would say the ranking you posted is pretty good, but it is much, much more subjective than one that shows who gets into the best law school.</p>
<p>“And finally it must be recognized that the "admit rate" is manipulated to a substantial degree by schools which fill a large fraction of the class via binding ED. If you fill half the class with those juicy "100% yield" ED admits, then you cover up what is often a much lower RD yield rate when you compete on the "open market."”</p>
<p>"Byerly, I know that admissions rate can be manipulated. I never said acceptance rate was important. Instead, I think stats like SATs are really the only standard bar for measuring selectivity and strength of student body pre-college entrance."</p>
<p>-Finally somebody gets it!</p>
<p>who, me or byerly, or both? or was that just sarcastic (sobs)?</p>
<p>"who, me or byerly, or both?"</p>
<p>-Both are things I have been arguing on here for a few years. :)</p>
<p>“and also because once you get past the undisputed best law school -- YLS, which has a 85-90% yield rate meaning virtually everyone who gets in chooses to go there regardless of who they are or where they come from -- the choices people make are less predictable and therefore more subjective to analyze.”</p>
<p>-This is still ridiculous to me. Yes, most who apply to Yale enter. This, however, says absolutely nothing about how or why it is the “undisputed” best school. If an applicant did not even wish to attend Yale Law, and that person did not deem it worthy of an application, then to him, it is not the best. I’m not disputing that Yale Law is the best, but using yield as the criterion for that judgment is silly.</p>