On so many fronts this is basically using a celebrity magazine to determine which is ‘best’. ‘Best’ isn’t necessarily fame (or notoriety).
So, a few easy reasons why this is a bad idea:
- Only 17% of Wikipedia entries are for women. This isn't just historical: famously, in March 2 years ago a Wikipedia moderator refused to allow the creation of an entry for Donna Strickland on the grounds that she did not "qualify" (note that Strickland's collaborator (a man with a virtually identical CV, had had a page since 2005). Strickland got her listing 7 months later on the afternoon of Oct 3: hours after she won the Nobel prize for Physics.
- It will inevitably overweight older, richer schools- which will tell current applicants absolutely nothing about the strength of the school, in their area of interest, now.
- It presupposes that the college is the *cause* of the alum's success, with an implied comparable causality for a potential applicant: 8 people per thousand grads from college X became successful v 2 per thousand from college Y so your 'odds' of becoming successful are 4x higher at college X than Y?! Obviously nonsensical. There are many very successful people who would argue that their college experience was more of a negative than a positive. There are also plenty of successful people whose fame came from something that was a career change and was unrelated to their college experience. There are much, much better stats - by area of interest! available.
- LACs are not "far superior anyways". LACs are great- but they are not the right or best or even viable choice for everybody. And I would stake a pretty hefty bet that the # of people with wikipedia pages who went to universities (v LACs) dwarfs the # who went to LACs.