<p>I hope you didn’t take that part as meant for you. Seriously.</p>
<p>BTW, I should have corrected my first statement. Realized that today as I was sipping my iced coffee. I mentally slipped - old age - and thought of the old law school size. Given the increase of 1/3, my number really isn’t that far off. The old number was meant to give the impression - a little low of course, but then one can’t help but advocate, can one? - of 10% of the class. Looks like they’re a few ticks over that now. </p>
<p>I enjoy poking at the solemnity and particularly at notions which appear correct on their face but which statistically don’t stand up. College admissions is a particularly hilarious area because people - mostly absolutely uninformed kids - quote rankings as though God writ them. They have no clue how the ratings are derived. They don’t understand error. They don’t understand what a standard deviation is. They have no idea that #32 may actually be lower than #45, especially since I would bet real money that the compilers don’t run 10,000 trials for each major error scenario. They don’t understand how the ratings weight subjective versus objective factors - and I doubt more than a handful (out of each 10,000) even attempt to look up the methodologies. </p>
<p>That this is true even in the quantitative fields is striking. A tiny number of future engineers looks up how that field’s rankings are compiled - or how the methods vary by compiler - and, even though there’s an actual engineering society to advance engineering education, almost no one looks up what the departments actually get in research dollars in the fields in which they’re interested. Nope, it’s all about books and magazines that print lists because lists are inherently believable and kids are just as susceptible to marketing even as the media tells us that kids are more cynical. You can actually find the number of published papers a department generates. </p>
<p>It’s amazing that people concentrate on small apparent differences that literally may not be real, meaning they’re within the error. School A is #27 and school B is number #32. Wow! As for a school like Yale, the schools at the top end of the prestige lists are in a different general class or grouping.* If you understand statistics at all and if you spend any time with the methodologies, you see there’s a bunch of schools in this group, a huge bunch of schools here - which may divide into a few somewhat smaller but amorphous groups - and then another “lower” bunch. I’m sure some of the people doing the work understand and would prefer to present the data differently but there is power in a list which has a #1. It’s genuinely weird and even disturbing to hear kids defend the most marginal prestige issues. </p>
<p>Note: grad school matters. Academic jobs reflect the ranking of your grad program and the earnings difference lasts for about a decade, at least per the study I read. We all know a highly ranked law school attracts more lucrative firms that pay more. (Though of course we then see people find their level, no matter where they went.)</p>
<p>But no, I hated debate because, to me, it was artificial. I’m more into the sport of negotiation. </p>
<p>*As admissions has changed, with more kids from more backgrounds and more places applying to more places, there are two possibilities: a) the admissions offices have somehow developed the skill to analyze and thus admit the actual “best” applicants or b) they haven’t. If anyone reading this has ever done hiring, he or she knows the answer is the latter; even the most elaborate game playing testing yields some stinkers and excludes some you wish you’d hired. (This isn’t a knock on the admissions people; this is a limit of systems that try to predict the future based on imperfect evaluations of imperfect past data.) I could lay out some number analysis but the answer is that admissions are more of a lottery and if you were to look backwards at the applicants from the future, you’d find they aren’t allocated with great efficiency in the rankings order. This means the rankings are what? Rough measures that include ancient past performance that can generally be lumped in bunches but which less and less reflect the actual allocations of talent. (And some argue they never did, but the culture was less open in important ways, as in the old club of Wall Street, and the culture was less merit rewarding.)</p>