2008 vs 1999: What’s changed in the USNWR data? Who’s hot and who’s not?

College Search & Selection
121

<p>Hawkette-
As I said earlier, USC's graduation rate is still quite low. The year in which their SATs supposedly took a 70 point jump, that freshman class still has not graduated. Cornell's grad rate is 92%, USC's is 84%. Perhaps graduation success is one reason why PA seems slow to change. Cornell's faculty is 98% full-time and USC's is 82% full-time. The quality of a faculty takes a long time to change. Students turn over every 5 or 6 years but faculty turnover takes decades. Especially harmful when bad faculty get tenure. Faculty resources rank for Cornell is 14, for USC it is 28. Cornell's financial resources rank is 17. USC's is 40.</p>

<p>I said most of this before but maybe you missed it.</p>

122

<p>dstark,
Any sample set that I personally have on USC vs Cornell would not be large enough to make a definitive judgment. But look at how their most recent classes compare on the USNWR Selectivity measures:</p>

<p>USC: 1280-1460
Cornell: 1280-1490</p>

<p>USC: 86% of students were in the Top 10% of their high school class
Cornell: 84%</p>

<p>USC: 25% Acceptance Rate
Cornell: 25%</p>

<p>USC: Total Selectivity Rank of 19th
Cornell: 15th </p>

<p>They look pretty close to me.</p>

123

<p>Criticism of the PA's subjectivity and doubts about the ability of respondants to accurately evaluate are unfounded because, as I stated earlier, the PA agrees very well with hard data.</p>

124

<p>Hawkette, I like to look at the macro picture which is what you are doing, and the micro picture, where individuals that I know go to college or where students from my kid's high school go to college or other high schools' students and where they go etc. </p>

<p>I like to see the macro numbers and the micro numbers match.</p>

<p>Cornell is much harder to get into than USC from my kid's high school. It's a red flag to me. May not mean anything overall, but makes me wonder.</p>

<p>What is the average gpa of kids that go to Cornell compared to USC and do they take similar courses in high school?</p>

125

<p>Some links to a blog on ideas for how to improve schools standing in rankings...</p>

<p><a href="http://www.simpsonscarborough.com/blog/2007/05/usnwr_rankings_how_does_it_wor.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.simpsonscarborough.com/blog/2007/05/usnwr_rankings_how_does_it_wor.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p><a href="http://www.simpsonscarborough.com/blog/2007/05/%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.simpsonscarborough.com/blog/2007/05/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p><a href="http://www.simpsonscarborough.com/blog/2007/06/new_strategy_for_moving_up_in_the_rankin.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.simpsonscarborough.com/blog/2007/06/new_strategy_for_moving_up_in_the_rankin.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p><a href="http://www.simpsonscarborough.com/blog/2006/05/the_schizophrenia_associated_w_1.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.simpsonscarborough.com/blog/2006/05/the_schizophrenia_associated_w_1.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p><a href="http://www.simpsonscarborough.com/blog/2007/07/bob_morse_responds_and_the_coverage_wide.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.simpsonscarborough.com/blog/2007/07/bob_morse_responds_and_the_coverage_wide.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p><a href="http://chronicle.com/free/v53/i38/38a01101.htm%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://chronicle.com/free/v53/i38/38a01101.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

126

<p>"Anyway, my new favorite answer when clients ask me how to improve their rankings is, “hope they change the formula so that the new calculation puts you higher on the list.”</p>

<p>-- Elizabeth Scarborough"</p>

<p>UCBChemEGrad, thanks for the links. </p>

<p>Are you a chemistry engineering grad? I heard that was the hardest major at Berkeley. (That's what a friend told me who was a chem e grad. :) )</p>

127

<p>collegehelp,
We could go around and around on PA (and maybe we will), but doing measurements based on factors like G&R or faculty or financial measures is not going to satisfy anyone on the outside looking for some justification behind the PA scores. </p>

<p>Compare Cornell to Wash U on those metrics and Wash U crushes Cornell. Compare Vanderbilt to Cornell on those measures and Vanderbilt wins as many of those battles as Cornell. Compare Cornell to Tufts and the comparisons are very, very close. Yet Wash U and Vanderbilt have been stuck at 4.1 and 4.0 forever and Tufts remains mired in PA purgatory at 3.5-3.6. Meanwhile, Cornell chugs along with a steady 4.6. I'm not trying to drag Cornell down-it is a fine college and deserve its high marks. But so too are Wash U, Vanderbilt, Tufts and many others that have improved over time. But they never seem to see a rise in their relative PA scores. You will have a tough time convincing me (and probably almost anyone) that the competitive gap between these schools and Cornell has not been dramatically narrowed, if not altogether eliminated.</p>

128

<p>dstark, yes, chemical engineering grad here... :)</p>

129

<p>Very nice. I better respect your opinions. :)</p>

130

<p>
[quote]
USC's SAT scores jumped 70 points in two years. I find it hard to believe that is due to merit money. They must have pumped millions into their gift aid in 2001. Or, they found a new way to calculate their SAT range....

[/quote]
</p>

<p>It’s not only merit aid, but other factors as well, including USC aggressively recruiting more Jewish students (USC had hired an admissions officer specifically for that role – subsequently, the % of Jewish students at USC DOUBLED from about 4% to 8%), the return of USC football to national prominence, etc.</p>

<p>
[quote]
wow, I don't understand why Duke, Chicago, and UPenn were able to lower their acceptance rates in that time so dramatically while NU wasn't???

[/quote]
</p>

<p>There are a no. of factors why, including merit aid, size of student body, acceptance of the common application, the administration just being more aggressive, etc.</p>

<p>Duke (common application, merit aid, smaller class size)</p>

<p>Chicago (merit aid, smaller class size – almost about half of that of NU)</p>

<p>Penn (common application)</p>

<p>Since NU started accepting the common application last admissions cycle (not reflected in this year’s USNWR rankings) – NU had a record amount (and a record increase in applications) which resulted in the acceptance rate dropping to 26%.</p>

<p>
[quote]
4.4 , 4.5 , -0.1 Brown
4.2 , 4.3 , -0.1 UCLA
4.8 , 4.9 , -0.1 Yale
4.6 , 4.7 , -0.1 Columbia
4.6 , 4.7 , -0.1 U Chicago
4.3 , 4.4 , -0.1 Dartmouth
4.6 , 4.7 , -0.1 Cornell
4.3 , 4.4 , -0.1 Northwestern
4.6 , 4.7 , -0.1 Johns Hopkins
4.3 , 4.4 , -0.1 U Virginia
4.4 , 4.6 , -0.2 Duke
4 , 4.2 , -0.2 Rice

[/quote]
</p>

<p>While PA does have its merits – the fact that these schools have dropped says something about the validity of yearly changes in PA rankings (most of these schools have improved in areas such as faculty resources, quality of student body, etc.).</p>

131

<p>FWIW, a coupla years ago a group of universities noticed that nearly all PA movement was down over the previous year. One might expect some shifts and changes, whereupon some schools would go up and some schools would go down. The fact that the changes seemed biased in one direction raised red flags about the integrity of the data.</p>

<p>This point was raised with USNews, but I never knew the outcome.</p>

132

<p>k&s, just to clarify, Penn first adopted the common application last admissions cycle (i.e., for the Class of 2011), just like NU.</p>

<p>Penn had a big jump in applications (almost 2,200 additional) and lower acceptance rate (16.1%) this year, but it also had a fairly big jump in applications (almost 1,700 additional) and lowering of its acceptance rate (from 20.8% to 17.7%) last year, before it adopted the common application. Penn's yield has also increased steadily over the last several years, allowing it to accept fewer applicants even as the number of applicants was increasing. Penn's yield is now 66.5%, in the same range as MIT's, Princeton's, etc.</p>

133

<p>Great point -- the Common Application.</p>

134

<p>hawkette-
You have to keep in mind that Cornell has, on one hand, one of the best undergraduate Engineering colleges in the country and one of the best Arts and Sciences colleges in the country and, at the same time, is a land-grant college of NYS with several unique specialty colleges (which are the best in the US or world in their specialty). The specialty colleges don't have the same level of SAT scores. </p>

<p>I think Cornell's reputation is based on its excellent engineering and arts & sciences colleges (with stats that are on par with Wash U, Tufts, and Vanderbilt) and on the fact that its specialty schools are the best in their field.</p>

<p>I think this points out the value of Peer Assessment. It serves to capture the whole truth.</p>

<p>In 1991, Cornell's US News selectivity rank was 13. This year it is 15. In between there have been slight fluctuations.</p>

135

<p>
[quote]
I think this points out the value of Peer Assessment. It serves to capture the whole truth.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Seeing Peer Assessment and Truth in the same sentence is rather funny. Elevating the status of the PA by pretending it captures the whole truth is downright hilarious at a time when educators are coming forward with their open criticisms and accounts of inability to complete the questionaire with sufficient knowledge or ... integrity. How long will the evidence of blatant manipulation based on geographical or affiliation cronyism remain buried? Will the data that supposedly revealed a strong correlation between hard data and the PA ever explain the PA scores of Smith versus Harvey Mudd? </p>

<p>This is just getting so old!</p>

136

<p>Is it the "whole truth" that PA is assessing and delivering, as conducted by the USNWR, or something that's more like partial truth or assumed truth or pretty-close truth? Or a subjective truth that could be essentially meaningless? </p>

<p>For some of us, the static nature of the PA assessment does not speak "truth" but cronyism and regional favoritism and a just-fill-it-out-the-way-we've-always-filled-it-out approach to the questionnaire that is the meat of the PA "survey." It's not worthless, no, but it doesn't deserve the major weight it has been given in the overall ranking formula. </p>

<p>The facts about the increase in quality in recent years in student bodies, the shifting of resources to faculty support, small class sizes, emphasis on teaching etc, etc, and more subjectively, what we (as parents of students attending) know about the quality of education at WashU or Tufts or Vanderbilt come much closer to representing the "whole truth" than the inexplicably rigid PA scores. I suppose it depends on how you choose to look at it.</p>

137

<p>collegehelp,
Diving into a comparison of Cornell vs any of these other colleges will only inflame the discussion so maybe we should try to avoid that. My point here and elsewhere has not been to drag down Cornell and other historical powers, but to point out the abundant and increasingly obvious datapoints that support higher regard for other colleges that traditionally have received lower assessments.</p>

<p>I'd like to better understand how you and others see PA and if your view comports with the data that I have been looking at: </p>

<ol>
<li><p>What do you think is a reasonable amount of time in which you would expect to see material changes for ANY colleges whose competitive position either improved or declined?</p></li>
<li><p>How much would you expect to see ANY college's scores to vary, both absolutely and relatively over a period of time, eg, 5 years, 10 years, 15 years, longer? </p></li>
<li><p>If HYPSM are the benchmark and other schools make progress against that benchmark over time, should their relative scoring change to reflect this? </p></li>
<li><p>Should geographic location play a role in the assignment of scores?</p></li>
</ol>

138

<p>xiggi-
You ridicule the things with which you disagree with words like "funny" and "old" (post # 135). Then you go on a rant about geographic bias and cronyism. Is this the way you discuss things? I am sorry you couldn't find the words to express yourself more effectively?</p>

<p>My point is that the PA is a very accurate reflection of hard facts. With statistical analysis, I have shown it to be correlated .93 with a combination of the data presented in US News 2007 Best Colleges. This is such a very strong relationship that it effectively settles the question about whether PA is inaccurate or biased. The issue is moot. It means that 86% of PA can be explained by hard data. The remaining 14% is still up for discussion, I suppose. </p>

<p>regarding the other 14%:
I think the PA picks up some of the things about a school that are true but not evident in the hard data, such as the unique strengths of Cornell. Yes, it helps capture the whole truth about a school. That shouldn't be so hard to understand. Every school has a different "feel" or culture. Faculty teaching and scholarship are not captured in the US News statistics but contribute to "reputation".</p>

139

<p>Hawkette, the key to your question lies in your assumption that you (or someone else) can objectively ascertain when a college's "competitive position either improved or declined." You can't. There are too many variables. USC's freshman SAT scores smoke Berkeley's. I live in California. I don't buy the theory that USC is now the superior academic college. Pick another variable, and another, and another - which of them have what degree of significance? </p>

<p>So to answer your questions:<br>
1. N/A - question is defeated by its faulty internal assumptions.
2. Very little over 5 years; not much more over 10 or 15. It takes a long time to materially affect the quality of an established university, even longer to change its "reputation" or "prestige" - which are obviously important issues to many CC posters, young and old. Rapid changes in PA would be anomalous.<br>
3. Same internal question fault as #1. The "benchmarks" are all just proxies of varying predictive validity. Whatever weight you assign to any particular "benchmark" is necessarily arbitrary.
4. Not overtly. But if in fact coastal universities are perceived in the "marketplace" as being superior, that perception is a significant factor which should be acknowledged, not suppressed. Sorry - that's the academic "marketplace" at work.</p>

140

<p>If we wanted a pure measure of reputation, less sullied by cronyism, we might try a survey of FOREIGN hiring managers, academics, and college graduates, to see which American colleges have a reputation outside the borders of the United States. There may be some interesting regional patterns in such data; that is, maybe Europeans have a different list of prestigious American universities from east Asians.</p>