<p>Comrade Blue Jay, think of me as your local wrecker and capitalist roader [but not shirker]. Exactly the kind of guy Uncle Joe’s NKVD kept Grim Reaping. So, the kind of guy who has a question or two as regards your magnificently argued for assertions.
You say: “I was interested from statistical viewpoint…if you put together a bell curve with a calculated standard deviation from the mean, both Cornell and 'Dame would be likely be > 1 standard deviation from the mean, likely disproving the null hypothesis…”</p>
<p>First, what is this mean you are proposing for your Null Hypothesis? For what population are you proposing to carry out this “test of hypothesis”? What sample have you drawn to carry out this test? You are carrying out a t-test? If so, have you checked that the conditions needed for its applicability hold for the case you have in mind? Is your test 1-sided? 2-sided? Do you really really believe that a significance level of roughly 0.32 [assuming a 2-sided test] makes for good statistics??? Assuming you stuck with that level of significance, do you think that a sample which produced a P-value which met that level could be said to “disprove” the Null? … you write of this stuff as if your " command" of the material came from the happy hour at the local college pub. </p>
<p>You say: “therefore, on a purely statistical basis, those two schools don’t belong to their respective groups…”</p>
<pre><code>What is true is that purely on the basis of your discussion of what might be a statistical basis you have no basis whatsoever for anything remotely close to your above conclusion. But, to give you something to mull over on your way to taking a second and richer draught from the cornucopia of Mal-Statistica, here are three simple, non-statistical, questions:
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<p>What groups do these groups belong to which you claim they do not belong to? Are you sure that the criterion for membership in these groups depends on what you think it depends on? Do you find yourself using the word “Inconceivable” in inconceivably inept ways?</p>
<p>You say: “important if your kid got into a bunch of ivies or selectives, and was deciding between them all…”
So you are saying that the admissions statistics are important for deciding between Ivies, Selectives, “them all”? That the quality of a university, or college, and the quality of the education it offers, is measured by the acceptance rate? If that is what you are saying, then you are spectacularly dim. Are you saying that the quality of a university or college, and the education it offers, is not measured by the acceptance rate—and yet acceptance rate is what should shape a "kid"s decision? If so you are even more spectacularly dim. To help clarify this for you, would you rather choose the physician popular amongst the crowd, or the physician best qualified to cure what ails you? </p>
<p>You say: “in the real world, I think Cornell IS perceived as a distant relative of the ivies”
Ah, by whom? You? You think that in the “real world” most people would not judge Cornell to be a University fully at home in a league that includes Dartmouth, Brown, University of Pennsylvania? Or is your beef that it has elements of a State University, through its landgrant component, and so is “culturally” different? And that such a cultural difference should mark it as “not belonging”? If so, do you think that Northwestern does not belong in the Big Ten, as–after all-- it is a private University in an association of State Universities? That Stanford does not belong in the Pac 10?
The brute fact is that Cornell is academically, in research and quality of faculty and students, as significant a university as any in the Ivy league. Perhaps you should attend it, and learn a little about statistics and how not to confuse being lost at sea for sound navigation.</p>
<p>You say: " they even had some sort of administrative push to improve their numbers, and therefore a tacit acknowledgement of their deficiencies. sorry…just sayin…"</p>
<pre><code>So you are saying that a push to improve their admission numbers is a tacit acknowledgement of their deficiencies as a University??? Now that is sorry alright…and, as you say Comrade, ‘just sayin’ .
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