<p>Here's a link to the top 10 rankings in the news today:</p>
<p>And here's more proof (posted earlier today in this thread):</p>
<p>Xiggi: Do you have evidence of your allegations? I would love to see it, so that I might perhaps have an opportunity to reassess my support of PA. I would like evidence of your allegations based on some semblance of factual information, as opposed to criticism based on negative feelings. Again, the opinions of respected scholars are valuable to me, in fact, more valuable than any other stat used to measure a school's standing. Please show me how the colleges use this stat as a way to manipulate standings...again, fact only, please. If you have specific evidence of cronyism, please be explicit. And you know that Morse is "duplicitous" and "gleeful," how? I am more than willing to see the light if you shed some authentic light on your statements.</p>
<p>Guess the International Herald Tribune can break the embargo because it's after midnight in parts of Europe and Asia.</p>
<p>PA scores are ridiculous. How can Caltech have a score of 4.7 while MIT has a score of 4.9? What differentiates these two schools? They are both amazingly good at what they do... so why does Caltech receive less recognition?</p>
<p>At best, these arbitrary scores should comprise a small percentage of the overall ranking. Unfortunately, they are actually one of the biggest factors taken into consideration (and one of the only ones that has no basis in real life- can someone please tell me what they are rating when they give Columbia a PA of 4.6? What exactly does Stanford have that gives it that extra .3? Do the students at Stanford receive an education that is 6% better? Is Stanford 6% more prestigious? 6% more competitive? 6% prettier? Who knows.).</p>
<p>The reputations may have been made years ago but most of the factual indicators show that the tops from 50 years ago are still among the best today. Very few have risen to push them aside. For example Berkeley, Wisconsin and Michigan still lead the state schools in producing award-winning faculty, top reseachers and having the most comprehensive and topnotch buildings and other assets.</p>
<p>Also some indication of what Penn did to improve their rankings.</p>
<p>"When the University of Pennsylvania tried to recruit UW-Madison professor Laura Kiessling last year, the pitch was simple.</p>
<p>"They pretty much asked us to tell them what we wanted - and they would give us that," Kiessling said, of the joint offer made to Kiessling and husband Ronald Raines, a fellow UW-Madison biochemist.</p>
<p>With outside offers presenting everything from raises of 30 percent and higher to housing allowances, from tuition waivers for faculty children to millions of dollars in startup money to set up shop someplace else, it's no surprise heads are turned.</p>
<p>To fight back, UW-Madison is going to have to get more creative to hold onto its best and brightest, administrators say. Increasingly, that could mean counting on donations to help keep top teachers and researchers here."</p>
<p>"</p>
<p>Stanford has over 250 NAS members, Columbia has 100. That's why they get more points. Maybe Columbia is overrated.</p>
<p>I was in a magazine store in DC today, and I saw the USNews 2008 college edition. The rankings posted are indeed correct.</p>
<p>I think Columbia is a bit over-rated on these boards also. Many people will say, well these rankings can't be accurate because how could School X be rated higher than Columbia? and that is the entire argument. I would put Columbia in the group of middle ivies with Brown and Dartmouth, and ahead of Cornell. I'm rethinking my position on Penn and bumping it to upper-ivy status. what do you all think?</p>
<p>Gabriellaah, since you're an obvious fan of evidence, why don't you spend some time researching the facts ... yourself. It's not my job to "enlightening" you or attempting to correct your lacking information and understanding of the issues. </p>
<p>However, out of courtesy, I will provide a few quotations to get you started on a productive google search:</p>
<ol>
<li>From the President of Drew University' s speech at the Council of Independent Colleges - as reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education.</li>
</ol>
<p>I quote a fellow president's wonderful remark about how he fills out the reputational survey, a full quarter of the ranking computation, "to reward my friends and punish my enemies."</p>
<ol>
<li>From Colin Diver, President of Reed, one of the Annapolis Group colleges - as reported in the Atlantic Monthly</li>
</ol>
<p>"I'm asked to rank some 220 liberal arts schools nationwide into five tiers of quality. Contemplating the latter, I wonder how any human being could possess, in the words of the cover letter, "the broad experience and expertise needed to assess the academic quality" of more than a tiny handful of these institutions. Of course, I could check off "don't know" next to any institution, but if I did so honestly, I would end up ranking only the few schools with which Reed directly competes or about which I happen to know from personal experience. Most of what I may think I know about the others is based on badly outdated information, fragmentary impressions, or the relative place of a school in the rankings-validated and rankings-influenced pecking order."</p>
<ol>
<li>From Wesleyan (in Macon) President Ruth Knox:</li>
</ol>
<p>“It’s hardly scientific and the general public should be fully aware of the methodology behind the rankings. I, like most college presidents, simply do not have enough information on any of the 200-plus colleges that I’m asked to judge.”</p>
<ol>
<li>From Matt Kurz, the vice president for public relations at Illinois Wesleyan University and a member of the Annapolis Group.</li>
</ol>
<p>"The peer assessment portion is usually the most controversial of the rankings. People have some concerns (whether) they're really capable of providing a truly good rating of a couple hundred other institutions because the experience most have really brings them into direct contact with a handful of universities, so they wind up making judgments or educated guesses on how the other institutions are in terms of their academic quality, and that's why there are some issues."</p>
<p>By the way, before everyone else starts yelling that Columbia is overrated, I was just using it as an example. It's downright ludicrous to imply that anyone gets a better education at Stanford than at Columbia, Duke, Chicago, etc.</p>
<p>Penn, Brown, Dartmouth, and Columbia are equals regardless of USNEWS rank.</p>
<p>why did NU and Dartmouth fall in PA score? Duke, I can understand......</p>
<p>What is the PA score for Rice, Emory, Tufts, Gtown?</p>
<p>National List 79-106
79. Brigham Young
79. Cal-Santa Cruiz
79. Colorado
82. Marquette
82. St. Louis
82. SUNY-Binghamton
85. American
85. Iowa State
85. NC State
85. SUNY Col Enviro
85. Denver
85. Kansas
91. Clark
91. Alabama
91. Missouri
91. Nebrasla
91. Tulsa
96. Auburn
96. Howard
96. Illinois Inst.
96. Northeastern
96. SUNY-Stony Brook
96. Arizona
96. Cal-Riverside
96. Massachusettes-Amherst
96. Tennessee
96. Pacific
96. Vermont</p>
<p>also, why are a bunch of the sat ranges published different from those founds in collegeboard.com</p>
<p>for instance, for Duke, collegeboard has it at like 1380-1550, for the rankings, it has it at 1350-1540. For Penn, collegeboard has it at 1330-1510. Ranking: 1330-1530?</p>
<p>Tufts 3.6 PA
Emory 4.0 PA
Rice 4.0 PA
Georgetown 4.0 PA</p>
<p>Thank you, Xiggi. I do know that there are several college presidents/provosts who are not happy with the entire concept of PA. However, these protests are generated by the relatively lower PA received by their representative schools. No one group has every member in agreement with every issue. There is, no doubt, some contentiousness between those schools who rank highly in terms of PA, and their counterparts who feel that they may have gotten short shrift from the consensus of expert opinion. For myself, when helping my children select schools where they could potentially fit, the first number I look at is PA. Until I hear anything that impresses me otherwise, I will continue to respect the opinions of those interested enough in the education of our kids to thoughtfully answer the questions asked of them, without any anger or bitterness.
Without PA to keep the standings on an even keel, the ranking might devolve into a list of the hottest schools, as opposed to a list of schools ranked according to factors that, on balance, let us know how the schools fare, in total, on the academic level. And, again, although you seem resentful of my request to supply the facts, I do appreciate your attempt to do so.</p>
<p>Mari- selectivity rankings for top 15?</p>
<p>I don't think these can possibly be true...wait one more day</p>
<p>Selectivity Rating for Top 15 National Ranked Colleges are as follows:</p>
<ol>
<li>Princeton 3 SR</li>
<li>Harvard 1 SR</li>
<li>Yale 1 SR</li>
<li>Stanford 7 SR</li>
<li>CIT 7 SR</li>
<li>Penn 7 SR</li>
<li>MIT 3 SR</li>
<li>Duke 12 SR</li>
<li>Columbia 5 SR</li>
<li>Chicago 24 SR</li>
<li>Dartmouth 7 SR</li>
<li>Cornell 15 SR</li>
<li>Wash at St. L 6 SR</li>
<li>Brown 7 SR</li>
<li>Johns Hopkins 24 SR</li>
<li>Northwestern 19 SR</li>
</ol>