A simpler, better method for ranking universities

College Search & Selection
1

<p>The US News ranking formula implies a theory about what makes some universities better than others. When it comes to theories, simpler is better. This is called the principle of parsimony.</p>

<p>Parsimony</a> - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia</p>

<p>With statistics, it is possible to search for the simplest effective theory (model) of college quality. Using the data in the US News 2008 Best Colleges issue, asked used my statistical software to identify the two best US News factors for arriving at their ranking score.</p>

<p>The best two were:
Peer Assessment
SAT 75th percentile</p>

<p>You can arrive at almost the same ranking for National Universities with these two factors alone.
I used a technique called multiple regression (the R-squared was .96).</p>

<p>I plugged Peer Assessment and SAT 75th percentile scores into my formula and created a simpler, better ranking.</p>

<p>For schools that report ACTs (Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Tulane), I calculated two ways:
(1) by converting the ACTs <a href="http://www.collegeboard.com/prod_downloads/highered/ra/sat/satACT_concordance.pdf%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.collegeboard.com/prod_downloads/highered/ra/sat/satACT_concordance.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>(2) by using the SATs from IPEDS although fewer than half the students submit them. I called this second method "alt SAT".</p>

<p>For Cornell, I included a separate entry for the College of Arts and Sciences and Engineering, excluding the specialty colleges.</p>

<p>I know some people don't like the peer assessment score. I point out that the Peer Assessment score can be explained almost perfectly by hard data. I think its inclusion is justified.</p>

<p>Here is the simpler, better ranking.</p>

<pre><code> 1 Harvard University (MA) 101
2 Princeton University (NJ) 101
3 Yale University (CT) 97.9
4 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 96.7
5 Cal Institute of Technology 95.3
6 Stanford University (CA) 94.3
7 Columbia University (NY) 90.3
8 U Chicago (IL) 89.1
9 Cornell Coll Arts & Sciences and Engineering 88.4
10 Pennsylvania 87.7
11 Duke University (NC) 87.6
12 Dartmouth College (NH) 87.5
13 Brown University (RI) 86.4
14 Johns Hopkins University (MD) 84.4
15 Cornell University (NY) 84.4
16 Cal—Berkeley 82.7
17 Washington University in St. Louis 82.4
18 Rice University (TX) 82.3
19 Northwestern University (IL) 81.6
20 Carnegie Mellon University (PA) 79.1
21 Georgetown University (DC) 76.4
22 Notre Dame (IN) 76.2
23 Michigan alt SAT 75.6
24 Vanderbilt University (TN) 74.2
25 Emory University (GA) 74.2
26 Virginia 73.9
27 Southern Cal 73.1
28 Michigan—Ann Arbor 71.6
29 Cal—Los Angeles 70.6
30 Tufts University (MA) 70.0
31 North Carolina—Chapel Hill 68.6
32 Illinois alt SAT 67.9
33 Brandeis University (MA) 67.8
34 College of William and Mary (VA) 67.0
35 Georgia Institute of Technology 66.9
36 Wisconsin alt SAT 66.3
37 Texas—Austin 65.3
38 New York University 65.2
39 Boston College 63.6
40 Case Western Reserve University (OH) 63.3
41 Wisconsin—Madison 62.5
42 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (NY) 62.2
43 Illinois—Urbana - Champaign 61.2
44 Rochester (NY) 60.9
45 Maryland—College Park 60.6
46 Cal—San Diego 60.3
47 Wake Forest University (NC) 60.2
48 Tulane University (LA) 60.1
49 Florida 57.7
50 Washington 57.2
51 George Washington University (DC) 56.9
52 Lehigh University (PA) 56.2
53 Boston University 55.9
54 Tulane alt SAT 54.6
55 Ohio State University—Columbus 53.6
56 Cal—Davis 53.3
57 Pennsylvania State University—University Park 53.3
58 Georgia 52.7
59 Miami (FL) 52.3
60 Syracuse University (NY) 52.2
</code></pre>

2

<p>SAT 75th percentile score deviation among the top twenty schools is miniscule and negligible. So in essence, a mere shift of 20-30 points could send a school up or down 3-4 spaces.</p>

<p>I thought when it comes to creating phylogenetic trees that parismony was the most preferred way of handling things. When it comes down to handling multi-billion dollar corporations however the simple thing is to calculated their endowment, the endowment per undergraduate student.</p>

<p>Fact is in life, the more money you’ve got, the more your able to spend, the more renown professors you can retain, the more research you output, the larger development offices you can create, the more 99% percentile SAT scores you can buy from Collegeboard, the more top students you can recruit via financial aid and scholarship…</p>

<p>Everything is correlated with endowment.</p>

<p>I do agree that most of the academic intangibles could only be explained by faculty members, Provosts, school Presidents, and other administrative figures who know their insitution and their peer institutions best. As undergrads and potential highschool applicants, we can only speculate at the intangibles we can only hear about through word of mouth.</p>

3

<p>I like Cornell, but so wonderful it gets to take up two spots in your top 15? You must love that place.</p>

4

<p>

Top public schools are poorer, but they have more renown professors.</p>

5

<p>

LOL, yeah, how do you explain splitting up Cornell’s colleges when the PA is for all of them combined? </p>

<p>Anyway, I don’t really understand what the point of this is. You basically found two factors that correlate very well with U.S. News’s scores. But what’s the point of that when we have U.S. News scores for every college we could possibly want to know about? I could only see this as being useful if we only knew what some of the colleges’ U.S. News scores were and wanted to estimate the others.</p>

6

<p>I like this ranking method but of course, the posters above have pointed out some concerns.</p>

<p>Also, what is with the Cornell splitting? Why don’t you also do John Hopkins premed so it is top 10, Georgetown SFS so it is top 10, CMU Comp Sci so it is top 10, etc.</p>

7

<p>First, I’m generally not in favor of ordinal, one-dimensional rankings, as they oversimplify what is a complex and nuanced decision for many high school students. </p>

<p>Secondly, as a Cornell alum from the contract colleges, I’m not in favor of splitting Cornell into two if you are going to engage in an ordinal ranking. Cornell can more than rest on its own laurels, and most know that Cornell de-emphasizes the SATs relative to most other colleges. I’ve heard that the Hotel School could easily increase its average SAT score by 50-100 points, but instead seeks out the applicants with the best fit. </p>

<p>However, I think the inclusion of the two Cornells raises an important point that is often overlooked on this board. It suggests that there is often more diversity within a specific college or university than across different colleges or universities. </p>

<p>In life, people tend to focus on the mean and not the variations or the tails. This phenomena is more important than ever, as it appears to be what a whole bunch of Ivy-educated Wall Street analysts did to set the stage for the mortgage meltdown that we are currently experiencing. </p>

<p>Just look at Cornell. From one vantage point, Cornell can be a top 10 institution. From another, it can be in the mid-teens. And another (say, if you only looked at the contract colleges under these assumptions), it would probably be placing in the same realm as CMU or Georgetown due to lower SAT scores.</p>

<p>The same variation exists at all universities, as each institution develops its own identity for every student. And that’s why it is silly to create such pecking orders.</p>

<p>I suppose it’s a good way to sell magazines.</p>

8

<p>I propose they look at raw number of students scoring above certain SAT score. Also, one school cannot report highest combo SAT score. All UC and probably other state schools reports highest sitting only.</p>

9

<p>CMU as a top drama/art school is also held down by its 75% SAT avg. The other schools (engineering/CS/MCS/Tepper) are much more selective with their SATs. It is also a bit underrated on this kind of scoring due to the CFA/HSS schools which make up a very large portion of students.</p>

10

<p>

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<p>CMU is an excellent school. They even have football team!</p>

11

<p>Haha, I think more people go to the IM games (to watch the Greeks/Clubs play) than the real football games.</p>

12

<p>Shhh. Don’t tell Hawkette.</p>

13

<p>This method shows that two factors contain almost all the information that is contained in the other factors. There is redundancy in the information. Peer Assessment alone captures a lot of the information contained in the other factors. Reputations are pretty valid.</p>

<p>Cornell A&S and Engineering are separated to make it more comparable to other universities in curriculum. The specialty colleges (statutory colleges) at Cornell are the best in the world in their respective disciplines but they admit students based on fit, factors other than SAT.</p>

<p>Phead128-
But does endowment lead to quality or does quality lead to endowment? I think they affect each other but initially it is the quality of the university that brings in endowment dollars.</p>

14

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<p>Two of the specialty colleges at Cornell are non-statutory as well. Hotel and APP.</p>

15

<p>And Hotel and Architecture are the best in the world, too.</p>

16

<p>Well, I don’t know about that. But they are strong programs.</p>

17

<p>

Yeah, but the point is you could’ve just posted the R-squared. You didn’t need to actually post the way the schools would be ranked if a methodology was used that imitates a more popular yet more complex methodology.</p>

<p>Also, I understand what you’re saying with Cornell, but the point is that it’s not fair to do that unless you’re going to do it for every university that has individual schools within its overall university.</p>

18

<p>As I mentioned on another thread a couple days ago, Cornell, and <em>maybe</em> Northwestern and CMU, are the only schools where it matters.</p>

<p>Other top schools with different colleges (Duke, Penn, Georgetown, Notre Dame, UVa) pretty much feature a liberal arts college, an engineering college, and a business college. So while there will be some variance, it will be a lot less.</p>

<p>This is as opposed to Cornell, where 50 percent of the students are in niche majors that aren’t offered anywhere else. (Let me know when Princeton offers a program in textile design.)</p>

<p>Nursing schools are so negligible they don’t affect the standing of the school in the slightest. What is at Penn, less than 3 percent of the student body?</p>

19

<p>relationship between US News data and overall score
in order, according to the strength of the relationship</p>

<p>factor, correlation</p>

<p>SAT 75th percentile 0.92
SAT 25th percentile 0.91
peer assessment 0.91
actual graduation rate 0.9
predicted graduation rate 0.89
freshman retention 0.88
top 10 percent of HS class 0.85
graduation rank -0.85
acceptance rate -0.85
selectivity rank -0.83
financial rank -0.76
faculty resources rank -0.68
student faculty ratio -0.64
percent classes under 20 0.63
alumni giving rank -0.53
over- underperformance grad rate -0.28
alumni giving rate 0.27
percent fulltime faculty 0.21
percent classes over 50 -0.11</p>

20

<p>

It’s about 5%.</p>