<p>I like your post warblesrule.</p>
<p>Nobody talks about Northwestern anymore. Why is that, anyway?</p>
<p>Define ‘nobody’ in the context of your declaration. I know plenty of people who talk about Northwestern.</p>
<p>Well, on this thread, for example. Lots of talk about Stanford and Yale and, God help us, Duke, but not a peep about Northwestern, which until not too long ago, was routinely invoked in discussion about its “crosstown rival.” </p>
<p>I, for one, don’t hear those comparisons anymore. </p>
<p>Of course, the alleged “rivalry” with Northwestern drove UChicago folks nuts, as they never considered Northwestern in their league. But from the perspective of high schoolers, their parents, and their guidance counselors, Northwestern did have the upper hand. Sort of like Duke, at least until a couple of years ago. Does that make Duke the new Northwestern? If so, then five years down the road, what will be the new Duke. Yale?</p>
<p>I have to admit, I love how all the posters on this forum have this neurotic obsession with prestige. I feel right at home here.</p>
<p>I know. I wish I could delete that last comment of mine. It came off as a slur against Northwestern which I really didn’t intend. It’s terrific place, and these angels-on-the-head-of-pin distinctions are pretty pointless.</p>
<p>Duke, I’ll admit, just bugs me. But whatev…</p>
<p>You probably don’t like Duke because you dislike a handful of its students. That’s a pretty small sample size, and I would refrain from making generalizations about a university based on my experiences with a few over enthusiastic (read annoying) students/alums.</p>
<p>@kenyanpride. I might be guilty of that when it comes to Princeton (don’t get me started on Princeton), but I’ve no negative associations with Duke alumni. My aversion to Duke is just a residual contrarianism left over from their big marketing push in the late nineties, when every high-achieving high school kid and guidance counselor, it seemed, was swooning over the place–a place that struck me as, sure, quite fine but not the world-beating leviathan it was being made out to be. The Duke obsession struck me as an example of group think at work.</p>
<p>Anyway, done with this topic. Really, they’re all good as far as I’m concerned. I mean, UChicago v Duke v Stanford v Yale v University of Southern Nortth Dakota. Who the heck cares? As Keynes said, in the long run, we’re all dead.</p>
<p>@tortoise
Keynes’s insightful revelation aside, USNDK FTW!</p>
<p>@tortoise that is an interesting revelation. Isn’t Chicago currently doing almost exactly the same thing though (I’m not trying to be acrimonious, I’m just curious to know where you stand on the issue)?</p>
<p>I completely agree with your last sentence though.</p>
<p>@kenyanpride That’s exactly what I was going to say. I’ll let tortoise answer for himself on that one, but I’ll provide my own opinion.</p>
<p>If we go laissez-faire for a second and don’t have any interference in the application marketplace by marketing, etc., UChicago wouldn’t have nearly as many applicants as it does now. Neither would Duke. However, UChicago is (pretty much undoubtedly, in my humble opinion) a much better academic institution than Duke, so in a way, UChicago DESERVES to have as many applications as it is getting. Duke does not. Both institutions perform market manipulation (and MUST do so to be competitive), but only one actually deserves to benefit from it. </p>
<p>It’s not necessarily that the market manipulation is inherently wrong; it is only when the market manipulation produces UNJUSTIFIED results that one feels annoyed. As an extreme example, if Harvard tries to get an admitted student to enter their university, great! But if the University of Phoenix does the same, well… that isn’t the greatest thing in the world since UPhoenix is basically just a huge scam. Neither university is doing anything inherently wrong by advertising themselves; but the results are unjustified, leading to a sort of resentment against UPhoenix.</p>
<p>Phuriku:</p>
<p>An issue with your analysis: the assumption that students make decisions based on a school’s academic capabilities/clout. In the case of Duke, it’s rise had much to do with having “good-enough academics” (e.g. comparable to many top schools, if not necessarily “better” in however you want to define that time) as well as other “hooks” to attract applicants (e.g. big-time basketball, good social scene, etc.).</p>
<p>Similarly, a school like Dartmouth maintains strong popularity, even though it’s pure academic rep (by any measure - us news, rankings of dep’ts, etc.) lags behind its traditional peers. </p>
<p>So, the idea of what school “deserves” to have a certain number of applications is murky. I suspect that 18 yr old students find schools attractive based on an analysis of a constellation of factors, including academics (making sure they’re above a certain threshold, whatever that threshold would be), location, experience, etc. Schools then become “hot” because their offerings align with what a range of students want. </p>
<p>To summarize, I think your view on how a school “deserves” applications is myopic. Duke obviously passes the threshold for many students on academics, and also offers a lot of other appealing options to many students.</p>
<p>Or, to use another example, if you just look at faculty strength and breadth by traditional measures, Swarthmore or Amherst wouldn’t cut it at all. They are inferior to Chicago, and inferior to places like Duke and Dartmouth, too. Yet each has been unquestionably successful at providing a first-rate educational experience for generations on end, and I think you would have an awfully hard time finding evidence that the educational outcomes for those colleges – however you want to measure educational outcomes – are inferior to those of Chicago students (or Duke, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, what-have-you students). Each represents a different way, but still an effective way, to balance the elements of a comprehensive college experience.</p>
<p>And what is this “manipulate the market” crap? Marketing is not market manipulation! Markets don’t work without full information. For people who don’t have millions of dollars invested in infrastructure to gather and to process information, marketing by and large is what makes information available to them in a way they can digest it. If Chicago or Duke were lying to people, that would be a different matter. But marketing themselves honestly is faithful to free market principles.</p>
<p>“Or, to use another example, if you just look at faculty strength and breadth by traditional measures, Swarthmore or Amherst wouldn’t cut it at all. They are inferior to Chicago, and inferior to places like Duke and Dartmouth, too.”</p>
<p>This is absolutely false in EVERY category.</p>
<p>Your’s is the perfect example of quoting out of context…</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Unfortunately it is not, and JHS is absolutely correct, but that is nothing but a reflection of the weakness of said “traditional methods”. In case you missed it, JHS does go on to say:
</p>
<p>I think “tradition methods” imply rankings which measure scholarly productivity indexes, or number of major awards won by faculty, or number of fields where colleges are highly ranked by peers (to measure breadth). For these criteria at the very least, colleges like Chicago or Harvard do have an obvious edge over Swarthmore and the likes. That this translates into real world educational outcomes is still dubious.</p>
<p>define “traditional measures” please</p>
<p>so he does so:
“I think “tradition methods” imply rankings which measure scholarly productivity indexes, or number of major awards won by faculty, or number of fields where colleges are highly ranked by peers (to measure breadth). For these criteria at the very least, colleges like Chicago or Harvard do have an obvious edge over Swarthmore and the likes. That this translates into real world educational outcomes is still dubious.”</p>
<p>This is what he assumes is a “traditional measure”</p>
<p>Yet I have NEVER seen a college ranking that ranks colleges overall by this. </p>
<p>Once again this is absolutely false in EVERY category</p>
<p>@Datboyjj
It seems that you habitually miss the concluding paragraphs in posts, but I shall indulge you nonetheless.</p>
<p>Traditional means in accordance with tradition (rather superfluous) and therefore traditional measures are those which are, and have been, traditionally used (by plebeians). It doesn’t take much work to find out what these could be, but I shall spare you some and direct you to the final paragraph of my previous post.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Then you probably haven’t seen many rankings. ARWU is a classic example. It is an influential ranking frequently cited by the Economist.</p>
<p>Is UChicago nice/does it have a soft corner towards Indians…?</p>
<p>This is a futile discussion which began with @Datboyjj misquoting JHS and then nitpicking at the resulting mess. </p>
<p>I defined traditional measures as such:</p>
<p>
I also cited a few examples which came to mind:
Your response:
I do not assume those are the only traditional methods (that would be a gross generalization), but they do represent criteria used by a large number of college ranking outfits…
My definition would encapsulate UNSWR, THE and QS just as well as it does ARWU. These are the go-to rankings for the masses at large and therefore would certainly come under “traditional methods”. </p>
<p>
It would be fine (but still incorrect) if you had said that UChicago and Harvard are only sometimes ranked ahead of Amherst and Swarthmore (as per the aforementioned “traditional methods”) but to say that Harvard and UChicago are NEVER ranked higher than Amherst and Swarthmore…<em>tsk</em> <em>tsk</em></p>
<p>Once again, please stop mistinterpreting what I (and others) say. I’ll quote JHS once more before abandoning this conversation…
</p>
<p>There… You see? We love Amherst and Swarthmore. Swarthmore, along with Yale and (perhaps) Princeton, was one of my top choices after UChicago. They are fantastic colleges and that “traditional methods” do not represent this is a testament only to the inefficiency of “traditional methods”, or indeed any kind of ranking. JHS’s original post, and my replies, were only meant to highlight this fact.</p>