But Greek and big time football is! Like Wisconsin undergrad.
In undergrad Business, there’s a big difference between #1 Wharton and whoever is #20, which is still very good with outstanding opportunities for those who maintain tippy-top credentials.
This is not necessarily true. Some of the strongest math students may be deficient in other areas that would prevent admission to MIT and other super-selective universities, or their family financial situations (e.g. uncooperative divorced parents) may prevent them from being able to afford MIT and other super-selective universities.
And others may not view themselves a good fit for the culture at MIT.
Seems like the nuance is finding significant differences between group of “top” math kids. But that is just essentially asking the same question.
As general matter, we always see similar reactions when new rankings are released. People tend to have rankings in their minds (based on their experience, where they went, kids went, etc). Rankings that are consistent with those internal rankings are viewed as good, valid, strong, etc. Those that are inconsistent are viewed as not valid, biased, outliers, etc. Some will cite data which supports their view. Others will say ratings are meaningless, distort the college process, don’t matter to most students, etc. Wash. Rinse, Repeat.
Some of the higher ranked colleges may be better fit for these same students (and families), academically and/or financially, but they are deprived of such opportunities because of obsessions of others, due to rankings, who may not be such good fits.
True, but with a mid-90s retention rate, the top schools do a good job of assimilating students. Or once a kid has won the lottery, they hold onto the ticket with all their might.
If you examine more closely, many of these “top” schools have been diluting their curricula and/or offering easier majors, so I’m unsure that high retention rate (or graduation rate) is still a good measure.
To use rankings as a filter isn’t really the most helpful or effective. There’re better ways to accomplished that task. Two comparably ranked schools may be polar opposites of each other.
It’s completely different. BCS College Football Rankings are measuring a well defined criteria. One call look back at the season record and games to confirm that the #2 ranked team is extremely likely to win against the #25 ranked team. As such AP, coaches poll, and other college football rankings all look quite similar None should ever have the #25 and #2 colleges swapped.
However, rankings of the “best” college are very different. The ranking systems apply an arbitrary weighting to a set of arbitrary and often poorly chosen criteria, and call the outcome of the formula “best.” Whatever your personal definition of “best” is, I’m sure it does not match the weightings selected with 20% marginal/distinguished survey, 18% graduation rate, 10% financial resources per student 7% faculty salary, etc.
The arbitrary rankings results in different college ranking lists sometimes having completely different results. Some rankings may have #25 and #2 swapped and nobody can prove one ranking is correct and the other is wrong since nobody has defined what criteria accurately measures the “best” college. For example, the #1 ranked college on Forbes (Berkeley) was #22 ranked on USNWR. That’s essentially the described swap in places. The #9 ranked colleges (Caltech and JHU) on USNWR were ranked #40 and #37 on Forbes. Nobody can prove which ranking system is correct. One can only observe that they sometimes produce quite different results, much more than occurs for any well known post-season college football ranking.
Or they select in admission students with strong academic credentials who are unlikely to have problems affording to continue to graduation (and offer good enough financial aid for those who cannot afford list price).
Retention and graduation rates are mostly based on students’ academic strength and ability to afford the cost.
Like NEU, Ohio State and Pepperdine?
I filter Top 70 and look at ranking and cost with solid engineering and potential to gain admission. Son could get a scholarship to Oklahoma but consider Purdue, OSU, Wisconsin to be better options. If there was a trustworthy list of outcomes, that would be nice.
My son’s school has a retention rate in the 90’s but it’s USWNR “rank” would give most people here a nervous tick.
My point is that comparable rankings don’t ensure the schools are comparable in any criteria (other than their rankings) you may wish to apply, so they aren’t useful as filters, IMO.
Really, you are using Caltech at #40 in your example and aren’t laughing? Are you trying to prove my points? Football rankings definitely have subjectivity, and if Clemson football is #40 in a football ranking next week, like Caltech is in the Forbes ranking, I’d throw out that ranking too. Your work is usually good, so I’ll let it slide this time.
Out of curiosity, I looked up stats for three schools likely to appeal to S, who is in 10th grade.
Of the three, Wake Forest has the highest ranking at 38. Its US News score was a 78. It’s six year graduation rate is 88%.
Tulane is slightly lower with a ranking of 42. It’s US News Score is a 73, and its six year graduation rate is 85%.
University of Miami is ranked 55. Their US News Score is a 69 and graduation rate is 83%.
Do I see a distinction between U Miami and Wake Forest? Sure. The delta in graduation rates is modest but noticeable, and the 9 pt gap in USN raw scores likely reflects other real differences. All things being equal, I’d rather S chose WF if given a choice, but all things are rarely equal.
Moreover, the differences between Tulane and Wake Forest are much much smaller, as are the differences between Tulane and Miami. I can’t imagine any employer reflexively preferring a Tulane graduate over a Miami graduate because of the USN rankings. That just sounds nuts to me.
In fact, if S got into any of these three schools, we’d be happy for him and expect him to choose the best program that matches his interests and personality.
For the Engineering/CS rankings, this is straightforward as the numerical rankings are given. My D22s target schools clearly fit in three tiers (though this was pretty clear already).
Without rankings, how would one determine tiers? Common data sets and computer science department sites?
College football rankings are subjective, but it’s well defined by what criteria they are ranking colleges – ability to win football games. College football rankings also have a well defined way to validate that the rankings are accurate – by looking at how the colleges performed in football games. For example, the current #25 ranked team is Michigan. If I say the college football rankings are wrong, and Michigan should be ranked #2, then we can verify whether my claim is accurate by seeing how Michigan does this season in their games. If Michigan can’t beat any top 25 ranked teams, then it should be obvious that my claim is wrong. However, if Michigan goes undefeated, then my claim may be accurate, and the rankings will be corrected to fix this early season error.
In contrast USNWR and Forbes ranking of “best” colleges do not have any way to validate that their formula of arbitrary weightings of arbitrary and often poorly chosen criteria are accurate in whatever they are trying to measure.
For example, it’s clear that you think the Forbes ranking is wrong. Are you assuming the “best” college is the one that admits the best students rather than the one that has the greatest change in trajectory of students lives and/or has good social mobility? How do you know that is the correct definition of “best” college? The Forbes ranking formula is below. How would you correct the formula to make the ranking right? How would you verify that the corrected formula and rankings are accurate?
Forbes Weightings
Alumni Salary – 20%
Federal Student Debt (7.5% average debt, 7.5% repayment rate) – 15%
Financial ROI (10% Overall, 5% low income)-- 15%
Graduation Rate (10% Overall, 5% Pell) – 15%
Rate of American Leaders List – 15%
First Year Retention – 10%
Rate of Fulbright/Truman/Goldwater…-- 5%
Rate of PhDs – 5%
Sounds good, but the empirical results say otherwise. A while back I had some private conversations with a CC member who had collected extensive information on MIT’s award winners. Here are his publicly posted results that showed MIT’s domination in getting USA IMO team members. Recently, MIT has been getting about 80 percent of them. The same is true of Physics Olympiad and other award winners as well, and to a lesser extent the Computing Olympiad as well. MIT wants those kids, actively recruits them, and usually gets them.
You could argue that that these are not THE most talented math students in the country, but that’s kind of like arguing that the NBA doesn’t have the most talented basketball players because there could be others who could be just as good if only their talent was developed. True in both cases, but no arguing that it is the greatest collection of demonstrated talent.
At the very top level, the talent spread doesn’t shrink, but expands, and the differences are obvious to anyone capable of interpreting it. My son is talented enough in math (top few hundred students, but not top 100) that he has met a few of the kids listed above and is awed at how well they perform. The most talented kids can do things easily that people at his level either take much longer to do, or simply cannot do regardless of how much they work at it. Going back to the NBA, while everyone there is in the top 0.01% of all basketball players, we can easily see the difference between a NBA star and a bench warmer.
Getting back to the main point, the elite schools collect a higher concentration of talent. Certainly not all the talent, but a higher concentration. The student peer group is different as a result.
I recently listened to Gladwell’s podcast episodes on college rankings. It was interesting. I’m wondering if there are studies that show how colleges perform for different student populations when normalizing for socioeconomic status, race, gender etc. I’m particularly interested in how colleges perform in retention of minority students in STEM fields. Gladwell seem to indicate that a historically black southern liberal arts college in the deep bottom (is that a good opposite of tippy top?) of the rankings did better at graduating black physicists than Harvard. Gladwell can engage in extreme extrapolations with his data but I also have personal knowledge of smart but poor minority kids that were admitted to high ranking universities for engineering or physics and almost all of them switched major by their junior year. Just wondering if you or anyone else can shed some light on how well the different colleges serve poor minority kids in the STEM fields.