<p>rooster,
Do you have a date for that article? I think it may be a few years old.</p>
<p>Also from the Princeton article quoted by Hormesis:</p>
<p>**"Losing students to Harvard is nothing new, said Chris Avery, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government who researches the college admissions process.
In a 2000 study of 3,000 highly-qualified students admitted to the nation's most selective colleges, Avery found that in head-to-head battles, schools almost invariably lost out to Harvard.
"We found [that] essentially Harvard was winning most of the competitions for students," Avery said in an interview.
He cautioned that "basically what that's showing is that Harvard's a popular college. It doesn't mean it's better, just that it's popular." **</p>
<p>Personally, I can't see spending much more time about this study because it's ultimately about popularity. Even the acknowledged and undisputed champion of these school vs. school combats ... Harvard ... the Big-H ... acknowledges as much. Some schools are popular because they are outstanding in all respects, others because they are quality and have lengthy histories, others because they are quality and have strong alumni bases (either nationally or regionally), others because they are quality and have some amazing faculty members, others because they are quality and employer and grad school clout, others because they are quality and have great sports teams, others because they are quality and have the rep for having a great campus lifestyle (of many possible different varieties), others because they are quality and they have always been highly regarded by USNWR and similar rankings, others because they are quality and are emerging stars, at least per USNWR and similar rankings ... and so on and so on. There are an infinite number of ways how a school can said to be popular ... and perhaps all schools have their popularity measured by each and every one of these infinite characteristics. When the day is done, ultimately, this index measures POPULARITY ... and crowning one school as more popular than another ... more popular than most ... or more popular than all ... says nothing whatsoever about the respective SUBJECTIVE QUALITY or FIT that these schools might have for particular applicants.</p>
<p>To me and to many others, these rankings are simply a laundry list of possible qualities to consider with the numerical rankings being given becoming interesting, but not particularly illuminating, reading and fodder for discussion. My favorite Italian restaurant is far from the most popular restaurant in my hometown -- many longtime Italian "powerhouse" restaurants are much more popular, many others have long had the food critics in their hip pockets (sometimes deservedly, sometimes not), and many others are chains with monster advertising budgets, great locations, and spectacular signage -- but I'd always consider that my particular favorite Italian restaurant takes a backseat to none of these others even if it would lose a popularity contest to all.</p>
<p>Thanks for all of the information about this study, but I see it as nothing more than just "another" and frankly rather limited tool to be used by potential college students as they assess their options.</p>
<p>Yes, it is about popularity, the popularity of a school to the country's best students. Without the best students, the learning opportunities at any given school declines. The University of Chicago has suffered precisely because its popularity amongst the top students has declined. Show me one university that doesn't want to be popular with the top students in a country, in order to have the brightest students to enhance the school's learning environment. If the quality of students didn't matter you could just sit at home and read the same books and be equally educated. But a lot of learning comes from your peers, just as I hope we educate one another, to a degree, on CC.</p>
<p>Atlantic Monthly ranks top 10</p>
<ol>
<li>MIT </li>
<li>Princeton</li>
<li>California Institute of Technology</li>
<li>Yale</li>
<li>Harvard</li>
<li>Stanford</li>
<li>Columbia</li>
<li>University of Pennsylvania</li>
<li>Brown </li>
<li>Swarthmore.</li>
</ol>
<p>Hormesis, I believe your thinking is flawed. There's not such a steep drop-off in the quality of students between the #1 school and the #20 school and it's not as if those who attend Harvard are the Elect here on Earth...and even many of them recognize it.
Not only is the list superficial in its basing of popularity, that popularity is in turn based on what [often laughable, as demonstrated on these boards] knowledge is possessed by 17- and 18-year-old kids. </p>
<p>One issue that is only one facet of the flaws is the lack of knowledge period about LAC's: you ask many hs students in SoCal about Amherst, Middlebury, Smith, Trinity...and you get blank stares...and this would be from many high-achieving kids for whom these colleges would be good fits. If you don't even <em>know</em> about school, it won't be a school you apply to and won't figure in your ranked preferences.</p>
<p>DudeDiligence has it right: this is another bogus ranking, the same old baloney re-sliced.</p>
<p>Well then my thinking and the thinking of many admission directors and university presidents is also flawed. I do think the quality of Harvard's student body is clearly superior to most others, the number of Rhodes, Westinghouse/Intel winners, future clerks of the supreme court, USA Today academic all-americans, National Merit Scholars, etc. etc. I think I could learn something more from them as compared to students at UVA (#20 on the list). That is not to say I couldn't learn something from UVA students, clearly alot. Also the opportunities I get at Harvard are probably better than those at UVA. For whatever reason, unenlightened 17, 18 year olds collectively pick up on things when making their decision as to where to finally matriculate. I can't believe their collective opinion, shaped by their peers, family, counselors, what they read and hear is not somehow reflective of the overall quality of a particular school. I do agree there is no absolute way of assessing a school. But for an undergraduate this one is at least as good, and probably better, than many others we have seen.</p>
<p>~TheDad~</p>
<p>Thank you, but I'm not interested in being "right," just trying to think through this latest and supposedly greatest. Like you, I just see this new information as the same old information viewed from a different angle, albeit from an arguably even more distorted angle.</p>
<p>What you say about LAC's couldn't be more correct. My D is a h.s junior, excellent academics, EC's, recs, etc., looking towards some combination of English, Theatre, and Education in her future. We live in the midwest (urban) and run in some pretty educated circles with lots of professionals. When she's asked about some of the colleges she's interested in, she gets the expected "oohs and ahs" when she mentions "Brown, Princeton, Duke, and Northwestern" . . . the ooh/ah factor is markedly less when she mentions "Wash-U, Rice, and Emory" (but for these schools you sometime hear the none-too-subtle whisperings of "can't she do better than that?") ... and the ooh/ah factor USUALLY disappears altogether, replaced by a vacuous stare, shen she mentions "Amherst, Vassar, and Pomona."</p>
<p>Sure, the popularity contest can theoretically tell you something, but what does it tell you beyond what THAT student chose ... given his/her circumstances ... given his/her preferences. I think it tells you next to nothing. We've got a college choice landscape that is dominated by the USNWR rankings ... it's then complicated by the existence of niche schools, specialty programs and majors, different philosophies for what characterizes quality UNDERgraduate education ... and it's further complicated by how in-state tuition, financial aid, and merit aid factors into the pricing of these similar, but by no means interchangeable products.</p>
<p>The intelligent student applies to a variety of reach/match/safety schools that jive with the student's overall feelings about the type of school that student wants to attend. But there are always going to be significant differences between these schools. After the acceptances and financial numbers come in, the student makes a choice based upon very specific factors for THAT student's circumstances.</p>
<p>Having said that, like in so many ways, I think HYP might be the exception. Those three schools have so much in common -- historically, geographically, prestige-wise, etc. Cross-admit data limited to these three schools can probably tell you a lot more of importance than cross-admit data generally (even so, they all have certain perceived specialties, supposed "feels," different reputations for diversity, interplay between the undergrad/grad divisions of the school, receptivity towards meaningful financial assistance, etc.). But extrapolating on cross-admit data generally? Where there are so many variables? And then ranking based on flawed data and questionable meaning?</p>
<p>To me, it falls under the broad general heading of -- just because you CAN do something, doesn't mean you SHOULD. And it's very revealing to me that Harvard's own educator said: "basically what that's showing is that Harvard's a popular college. It doesn't mean it's better, just that it's popular."</p>
<p>Popular might be better, but not necessarily so ... and certainly not for everyone ... not for all circumstances. As our kids have gone through the sometimes trying years of high school, I think most of us have urged our kids to resist peer pressure and not get their self-image unduly caught up in popularity contests. Why run away from this sound advice now?</p>
<p>A thirsty group may choose pepsi over water but that doesn't mean it is a better choice.</p>
<p>This ranking process is an interesting contribution to the world of college ranking but it has its limits as would any system you designed. </p>
<p>There is a Political theorem on choices that considers when candidate A is beats candidate B and B is wins against C but C beats A. Some of that comes into play here I am sure. </p>
<p>The best ranking for a student to use is one that they create for themselves using an honest understanding of who they are and what they want as guides.</p>
<p>Well said Mr. B. Hey, we're all human beings -- it's understandable how we strive to find meaning in chaos, form in formlessness, and black-and-white in shades of gray. But, while studies, rankings, more generally * information * have their value, it's simply dangerous to overlook flaws, limitations, biases, over-simplication, and, oh, an infinite amount of other defects, in order to attain some pollyanna-ish comfort and false objectivity in dealing with complex, real-world decisions.</p>
<p>I agree with you: The goal should be for every student to create their own personal ranking system (using everything else in the world -- other rankings included -- as part of their source material); this personal ranking system should mean EVERYTHING to the student who creates it, but NOTHING to any other student (who, of course, need to come up with their own personal ranking system).</p>
<p>It might be unbiased, but it sure is stupid.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>~DudeDiligence~</p>
<p>Quite moving and thougtful. I hope your D gets into her first choice and the school that is right for her.</p>
<p>Despite all my previous comments, I think it is a shame that kids can't go where they want that will get them the best education for them. Popularity contests are probably one of the huge negative things about HS. Getting rejected is probably one of the worst things for a student's self esteem, especially in this age of increased competition and the feeling of number one or bust.</p>
<p>A few years back, a study was done at Stanford, surveying kids who also were accepted and rejected by Harvard. At Stanford about a third of the kids had applied to Stanford but not Harvard, a third had been accepted by both, and a third had been accepted by Stanford but not Harvard. It was incredible to see how devastated the kids were who were rejected by Harvard. One Stanford student, who was rejected, said her younger sister had been accepted by Harvard. The Stanford student who was rejected by Harvard said, "Oh, what could have been." This from a Stanford student!</p>
<p>What is also clear is that you don't have to go to Harvard to be equally successful (that is if you were good enough to be accepted by Harvard) (<a href="http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2004/09/in_defense_sort.html%5B/url%5D):">http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2004/09/in_defense_sort.html):</a></p>
<p>"The researchers Alan Krueger and Stacy Berg Dale began investigating this question, and in 1999 produced a study that dropped a bomb on the notion of elite-college attendance as essential to success later in life. Krueger, a Princeton economist, and Dale, affiliated with the Andrew Mellon Foundation, began by comparing students who entered Ivy League and similar schools in 1976 with students who entered less prestigious colleges the same year. They found, for instance, that by 1995 Yale graduates were earning 30 percent more than Tulane graduates, which seemed to support the assumption that attending an elite college smoothes one's path in life.
But maybe the kids who got into Yale were simply more talented or hardworking than those who got into Tulane. To adjust for this, Krueger and Dale studied what happened to students who were accepted at an Ivy or a similar institution, but chose instead to attend a less sexy, "moderately selective" school. It turned out that such students had, on average, the same income twenty years later as graduates of the elite colleges. Krueger and Dale found that for students bright enough to win admission to a top school, later income "varied little, no matter which type of college they attended." In other words, the student, not the school, was responsible for the success."</p>
<p>In a way, the poll I have listed and in particular the USNews poll have exagerated our winner take all society and the disappointment that is inflicted on kids when they get rejected from colleges that have been stratisfied into a seemingly elite hierarchy.</p>
<p>Yale Law Professor, Henry Hansmann, talks about why stratisfication occurs and the role of USNews, especially its effect on Yale Law school (<a href="http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ffp9901.pdf%5B/url%5D):">http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ffp9901.pdf):</a></p>
<p>"Education, and particularly higher education, has an important characteristic that distinguishes it from most other goods and services: it is an associative good. The essential characteristic of an associative good is that, when choosing which producer to patronize, a consumer is interested not just in the quality and price of the firm's products, but also in the personal characteristics of the firm's other customers. And so it is with education. When choosing among undergraduate colleges, for example, a student is interested not justÂor even primarilyÂin the colleges' faculty, curriculum, and facilities, but also in the intellectual aptitude, previous accomplishments, sociability, athletic prowess, wealth, and family connections of the colleges' other students. The reason is obvious: these and other attributes of a student's classmates have a strong influence on the quality of the student's educational and social experience, the relationships (including marriage) that the student will have later in life, and the student's personal and professional reputation. In short, the thing that a college or university is selling to its students is, in large part, its other students. Harvard College would be nowhere near so attractive to a prospective applicant if Harvard's faculty, curriculum, and facilities were to remain as they are, but its other students past, present, and futureÂwere no different from those of an undistinguished state institution with open enrollment...</p>
<p>"(Hansmann describes how this associative characteristic affects the higher education market, given that institutions also are very concerned about who their students, or customers, are. Competition for top quality prospects has led to pronounced stratification of students as they are sorted in a largely hierarchical fashion across the nation's colleges and universities. ) </p>
<p>"... recent years seem to have brought increasing convergence, and hence increasing stratification. The increasingly meritocratic character of our society is one important reason for this. Today, economic success, and hence social status, goes increasingly to individuals who have strong intellectual aptitude and the motivation to use it. Other personal attributes that once might have contributed importantly to successÂsuch as good family connections, inherited wealth, sociability, and athletic prowessÂare becoming less important. And, rightly or wrongly, a limited set of general measures Âsuch as SAT scores and grades achieved in previous schoolingÂare now widely accepted as the best measures of intellectual aptitude and motivation. The result is that it is becoming increasingly easy for all of the nation's college applicants (or applicants to a given type of graduate or professional school) to be ranked according to a common metric that is widely shared. All universities therefore tend to rank their applicants in the same way, and all applicants tend to rank the student bodies at those universitiesÂand hence the universities themselves Âin the same way. A tendency toward ever more intense nationwide stratification of students across universities is the result.</p>
<p>"This process is receiving a strong boost today from the advent of prominently published rankings of academic institutions, such as those put out by U.S. News and World Report. Partly as a reflection of the stratification of educational institutions that has already occurred, and partly perhaps because everyone enjoys a contest and because of the need for simplification in popular journalism, these rankings typically involve little more than simple listings of institutions in linear order from best to worst. Students who have no better information will of course have an incentive to apply to the highest ranked institutions that they believe might accept them, and then to attend the highest-ranked institution to which they are admitted...</p>
<p>"...Before the U.S. News rankings, the choice between going to the Yale Law School and the Harvard Law School was a complex decision on which opinions might reasonably differ. Once the rankings were published, however, students were choosing between attending the best and the second- best law schoolsÂor at least between the schools that other people thought were the best and second-best law schools. Who wouldn't choose (what other people thought was) the best? Moreover, the rankings made choosing Yale quite rational. Whether or not Yale was the best law school before the rankings, after the rankings were published Yale would surely attract an even larger share of the best applicants, and hence it would become the best by virtue of having the best collection of fellow law students. The rankings are a selffulfilling prophecy.</p>
<p>"These rankings have been a mixed blessing even for the Yale Law School. Before the rankings, students would sort themselves among law schools according to their particular interests. Very roughly speaking, for example, Yale Law School tended to attract students with more academic interests in the law or whose orientation was more toward careers in the public interest, while Harvard tended to attract the more commercially minded students. The rankings may be breaking down this segmentation, causing students to sort themselves among schools simply according to their Law School Aptitude Test Scores and college grade point averages. Of course, the Yale Law School can try to preserve its special character by giving preference in admissions to students who appear more academically minded or more oriented toward public interest careers. But admissions applications offer only crude evidence of an applicant's real interests and ambitions. Truly effective sorting on these dimensions must be done by the applicants themselves. The rankings may be undercutting that kind of selfsorting, thus depriving educational institutions of an important degree of diversity."</p>
<p>So in the end I would say this, DudeDiligence, it is probably best to keep this poll to yourself and away from your D. It's just one of the things to keep in the back of your mind when helping her reach a decision. Your goal of protecting her from popularity contests is a noble one. And in the end if she should happen to be rejected from a particular school, her self esteem may not suffer and she can go on to a wonderful and fruitful education. Good luck.</p>
<p>Ah, compliments from dear Hormesis ... but perhaps not, eh? ;)</p>
<p>Alas, my aim is neither to keep anything (this data included) to myself, nor to "protect" my daughter from a popularity contest. Quite the contrary. I specifically and intentionally said that I've urged her to "resist" peer pressure and "not get their self-image unduly caught up in popularity contests." So, rather than censoring and over-protecting, my particular aim is to educate and to help provide perspective, in this instance to help her to understand the inherent limitations in this particularly insidious kind of popularity contest -- USNWR rankings and this oddly flawed and limited new study -- so she can productively face and overcome peer pressure and popularity contests.</p>
<p>I've got great confidence in her ability to discern that the "best college" answer is complex and ultimately unique for every individual. She's the second of two children, part of a large extended family, and over the past few years has seen friends and relatives opt to attend Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Washington University (to study such things as electrical engineering, biomedical engineering, music performance, accounting, musical theatre, journalism, and accounting) rather than attend nominally (or ranked) more prestigious schools (sometimes substantially so). I think her ability to go beyond the easy answer -- not to accept the facially simple, "one size fits all," but perhaps flawed solution -- will serve her well during her adult life in this complex, amorphous world of ours.</p>
<p>You clearly see much more value in this new study than I do. I'm happy for you. You're welcome to it. And good luck to you too.</p>
<p>I see it differently. I see this study as flawed, limited, and distorted, or, to quote TheDad, "the same old baloney, re-sliced." What you quote from the Yale law professor puts this into its proper perspective:</p>
<p>"This process is receiving a strong boost today from the advent of prominently published rankings of academic institutions, such as those put out by U.S. News and World Report. Partly as a reflection of the stratification of educational institutions that has already occurred, and partly perhaps because everyone enjoys a contest and because of the need for simplification in popular journalism, these rankings typically involve little more than simple listings of institutions in linear order from best to worst. Students who have no better information will of course have an incentive to apply to the highest ranked institutions that they believe might accept them, and then to attend the highest-ranked institution to which they are admitted... ."</p>
<p>Many students indeed dont have any better information, nor are they encouraged to find such better information. What a loss, what a great "opportunity cost" loss! Consequently, some of these students unwittingly become parties, victims almost, to a particularly distasteful kind of "dog and pony show," with little to no benefit to them, because of misplaced reliance on somebody's proprietary formula (and cottage industry).</p>
<p>I'll continue to look (and so will my daughter) at all of this information -- but as one part of a complex, dynamic puzzle, not as an easy to digest universal answer.</p>
<p>No, it was a genuine compliment.</p>
<p>
<p>...I think her ability to go beyond the easy answer -- not to accept the facially simple, "one size fits all," but perhaps flawed solution -- will serve her well during her adult life in this complex, amorphous world of ours.
</p>
<p>And I think your foresight to be open and to share your persepective and all the data you feel pertinent with your D is a good one. She clearly has a good education already away from school.</p>
<p>Hormesis~
Thank you and Happy New Year.</p>
<p>You're welcome and Happy New Year</p>