Sorry @Penn95 for wrongly attributing @Cue7 's quote to you.
@Cue7 - I think what you are saying is, “A pox on both their houses!” which is a perfectly understandable stance to take. However, I don’t think rankings are going away. In fact, the evidence suggests that they are proliferating. I think the best we can do is hope that something else comes along that will keep USNews honest.
@Cue7 The average SAT for Penn is 1500, Chicago is 1540 and MIT 1530. That is if College Factual is accurate. I think at this level a 40 point difference in SAT scores does not show a difference in smarts or intellectual horsepower of the student body. MIT and Stanford have lower SAT scores than Chicago. To me the difference shows that the schools target different kinds of students and have different priorities. For example an entrepreneurial kid who has started her own company would more likely go to Penn or Stanford or MIT than Chicago. That kid has 1500 on the SAT and spent reasonable amount of time studying but focused more on her company. Is that person less brainy than another one who studied a lot more and got a 1550 or 1600?Also a student who has done big time biomedical research is more likely to choose Penn over Chcago and a person who has won a math olympiad and wants to do meth research is way more likely to choose Chicago over Penn. It is tricky to make generalizations about student bodies that are comparable in strength but probably have different interests and collective personalities for the most part.
Also the truth of the matter is most of the truly big time powerhouse students will overwhelmingly flock to Harvard, MIT, Stanford and also in a bit smaller numbers Yale, Princeton. I am talking about the top international math, science, chess olympiad champions, intel science competition winners, the tech whiz kids etc. The other top schools including Penn and Chicago get a good number of these prodigies, but not to the extent that Harvard or MIT does. Also specifically for Penn and Chicago i think they attract equally bright very extremely different students in terms of interests and personalities so it is hard to compare. On the other hand there is more overlap for Penn vs MIT, Harvard and Chicago vs MIT,Harvard so it is more meaningful to make those comparisons.
@Penn95 - what I’m saying is that, if Penn WANTED to make its SAT avg. 1600, it probably could. Given different demands on the incoming student class, however, it chooses not to do that.
So, I can’t really say which school has more intellectual horsepower, but my sense is that, at Chicago (and more so at MIT), these schools LOOK for pure processing power more avidly, and get more of those students. Then, at those schools, which are pointier to begin with, students engage in more mono-tasking on academic pursuits.
Put another way, the “geniuses” may get into Penn (and other schools), but choose to go elsewhere, whereas those very smart students (with business acumen, entrepreneurial ambitions, etc. as you say) may choose Penn over most other places. My sense is that you find more of these “genius” types at MIT, and then a decent amount more at Chicago, than Penn.
Again, this isn’t a knock on Penn - if it wanted more of the right-tail kids, it could change its goals and structure and get them. It could get all perfect SAT scorers too. Given the school’s different values though, my sense is that it simply has fewer of the right-tail students - by design.
The SATs are just a rough proxy of that. Chicago is clumped closely with MIT, Cal tech, Harvard, etc., and Penn is clumped a little more closely to Northwestern, Dartmouth, etc.
Maybe it’s helpful if I put it this way - if you look at, say, a Hopkins Med class vs. a MIT applied mathematics grad class, the SAT averages for both incoming classes would likely be very similar. I’d wager that, per capita, though, there are more genius-level minds in the MIT math dept than the Hopkins med class.
This is, simply to say, that Hopkins med isn’t looking for geniuses - it’s looking for the next crop of great doctors. MIT’s math dep’t, on the other hand, is very much looking for geniuses. So, there are differences within the student bodies, even though the standardized test scores for both would probably be in the same range.
To a much lesser extent, that’s probably what you see at Penn v. Chicago (or certainly MIT undergrad). It’s what I observed, at least.
@Cue7 I get what you are saying but I still disagree. I think we define processing power and intellect differently haha. Both schools look for and get similar levels of processing power but in different manifestations. So in my previous example a kid with great accomplishments in biomedical research has less processing power than a kid successful in math? I don’t think one could say that. It is this difference in interests and also personalities that makes people flock to either one school. Now a super right-tail math whiz kid will likely choose Harvard over Chicago and a super right-tail biomed whiz kid will likely choose Harvard over Penn. So it is fair to say that there are significantly more right-tail kids at Harvard than Penn or Chicago because you can compare Harvard with each and harvard wins in almost every area of academic interest. But when it comes between Penn Chicago the schools are so different on every level that there is not much overlap and the choice will be based on the strengths of the schools (say math for Chicago, Biomed for Penn for example) and also the personality of the student.
Chicago attracts more of the pure academic, theoretic types than Penn, but more academic does not equal more processing power. Also it does not mean that because one student body is thought to be more reserved and less social than the other it is also brainier. In my opinion there is the same level of intellect and talent but in vastly different areas and also in vastly different types of people. For example a entrepreneurial, or applied-research-oriented kid who applies her knowledge does not necessarily have less processing power than a student who is very bookish and academic and theoretical. It is a different kind of talent. (of course there are both kinds of students in both schools, but the distinction serves to show the different personalities of the schools).
SAT is a rough proxy up to a point but after that it doesn’t say much in my opinion. If it was so then Stanford kids are significantly less brainy than Chicago or Yale kids.
@Penn95 - perhaps, but I don’t think that really plays out in practice. I’m defining intellect here in terms of the fields that the fewest number of people seem to be able to do - e.g. high level mathematics, physics, statistics, etc. (You could maybe throw linguistics in there, and some other fields.) By definition, honing one’s intellect in these fields requires a great deal of mono tasking - having a lot of processing power, and coupling that with endurance/grit/determination to stay focused.
At Penn, given how you just described it, with people with balanced and varied interests, I don’t know if you’d see that steadfast pursuit of higher-level, oftentimes theoretical (or difficult applied) fields. You may see it with some PROFESSORS (Wharton’s statisticians, for example, are some of the best around), but let me put it to you this way: how many wharton undergrads are striving to be world-class statisticians or econometricians? Once you start mixing fields and ambitions, it actually dilutes the ability to concentrate on the intellect development.
To provide some examples, if I wanted to find smart people - people who could solve complicated mathematical problems, zany physics challenges, etc., I’d much rather start with MIT’s grad school than Hopkins Med.
As another example, if you look at Putnam math competition winners (the top college math competition), you can get a rough sense of where the talent goes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lowell_Putnam_Mathematical_Competition#Top-scoring_teams
Harvard tops the list with 61 top 5 finishes, MIT has 46, Chicago has 11, UPenn has 3.
Those numbers, on their face, don’t surprise me - it equates roughly to what I’ve been trying to demonstrate.
@Cue7 The problem with basing a school’s merit/quality off of student outcomes is that the data will ALWAYS be skewed more so towards schools that are known for/specialize in high earning, high employment, and high return fields. For example, Tech School A/Big Private Med School A may have higher graduate employment rates and higher income than Private School B/LAC B simply because it is known for and specializes in a field that is very lucrative in that area. However, in terms of ACTUAL quality for said schools, especially when compared to schools who are known for the same field, you’ll find that students at school B are receiving a better education than students at school A.
I put more value in USNews type rankings than rankings that measure economic returns post-graduation.
Lastly, since different rankings specialize in different criteria, its actually SMART to aggregate them to get an OVERALL sense of the school’s education.
Payscale (which is also used as input for salary rankings by college for some of the rankings) is a terrible site as well.
No one I know professionally uses it. The UI is terrible, and it takes forever to enter your salary data. Comparing it to Glassdoor (more reliable given employees are actually using it for reviews) for positions at the same companies also produces large discrepancies. In short, the data on that site is garbage.
I think when schools in what we would consider the same peer group, with students of roughly the same caliber – like Penn and Chicago – have markedly different average outcomes, i don’t think that should reflect on the schools; rather, the causes can likely be attributed to self-selection and, to a lesser extent, differences in the cost of living (unless normalized).
UChicago kids tend to be highly intellectual. Some certainly go into Finance, given the stature of the Econ dept and the roughly 25% of Chicago students who major in it; but maybe many decide to go into less monetarily successful career paths. And we know that quite a lot of UChicago grads – given the intellectual bent of the school – head to grad school. Are their (non-)salaries being counted against UChicago’s figure?
This is why i fiercely dislike outcomes as a variable in judging the quality of a college: outcomes are so self-selective.
If a kid from school A spends ten years working on a PhD while a kid from school B spends ten years making a million dollars, guess which school will “win” the outcomes battle. But did school B’s kid actually get a better education or have a better experience in school?
If a variable doesn’t help to answer either of those questions, it should be viewed skeptically, IMO.
Academically, UChicago and Swarthmore are easily top-5 in their respective groups. No way is Swat all the way down at #8 among LACs or Chicago at 10 or 13 or wherever among universities.
It seems to me that there are problems with looking at anything through one dimension only. Swarthmore resembles Amherst and Williams academically and USNews has more or less sold us on the idea that they are alike enough to be virtual substitutes for each other. However, one look Swat’s College Scorecard statistics would have indicated how different circumstances on the ground were from how they appeared superficially. @stevensPR - Scorecard collects information from thousands of tax returns, so there is no problem with the samples being too small or “employers not using it.”
For the university, or for the individual?
If the university views itself above all as a knowledge factory, then the Hittite expert represents the better outcome. The GS partner represents a good outcome too … if he donates a million bucks to the university, so it can do a better job educating/hiring/supporting people like the Hittite scholar.
Great universities, at least from the faculty perspective, exist above all to create and share knowledge. People expect many other things from them; rankings like Forbes, Money, and Washington Monthly appeal to those expectations. But if you want to rank universities on their own terms (as knowledge factories), then alumni PhD production probably is a better metric than average alumni salaries. The average entering test score probably is a better indicator of undergraduate academic quality than the number of entering Pell grant students. The latter might be a good metric if you’re trying to measure impact on social mobility (as the Washington Monthly ranking does). However, you won’t necessarily improve on the WM social mobility ranking, or on an academic quality ranking, by averaging the two together for an aggregate ranking. You may wind up with a muddle, like the one WM gets when it averages its “social mobility”, “research”, and “service” rankings. So decide what you’re really trying to measure, then use the best metrics for that.
@prezbucky If it was just an academic ranking for sure, but this is not an academics only ranking. it looks at many other different metrics.
@Cue7 You are focusing on Math where Chicago has the clear superiority over Penn. If you focus for example on bioengineering, biomedical research, nanotechnology, robotics research for example the results would be in favor of Penn. And there are plenty of kids who do that at Penn to an extremely high level. I would say this is a field that is hard for most people. Also if you focused on people that have created complex businesses that have changed the world the results would be in favor of Penn. Not every entrepreneur becomes Elon Musk just like not every stat, math, Econ kid at Chicago becomes Milton Friedman. But one can’t sweepingly say the latter types are smarter than the formers. It is just a different type of smarts and neither is easy and at such a level either requires a very high processing power otherwise there would be many more Elon Musks and Milton Friedmans in the world.
@Penn95 - I used the Putnam math competition intentionally - a bunch of the winningest schools don’t have top-flight math programs - schools like Duke (12 top 5 finishes), Cornell (10 top 5 finishes), and Carnegie Mellon (8 top 5 finishes).
From what I know, Putnam just pulls smart kids (engineers, comp sci students, etc) - it’s not just the math majors. Further, keep in mind, Penn, for most of its history, was 3X Chicago’s size, 10X Caltech’s size, etc., but it doesn’t have a top 5 finish since 1963. This isn’t a perfect metric but, given such a long lapse, it just seems as if the brainiest kids (those who look to unilaterally increase their abilities in this area) might not be going to Penn, and/or be honing their skills while there.
I can’t speak to nanotech, robotics, and biomed because Chicago just doesn’t have programs (or established undergrad tracks) in that area.
Again, this isn’t definitive, but the Putnam comp results, on their face, don’t seem too surprising to me.
(It’s interesting you brought up Elon Musk, by the way - he’s a signature Eng/Wharton grad, and as I understand, he embodies what these two schools covet: great intelligence [but not necessarily off-the-charts intellect] coupled with ambition, drive, vision, and maybe a little ruthlessness. As I understand it, there were certainly smarter engineering students around [even in his cohort - I don’t think he was one of the top Penn grads his year], but none matched his ability to monetize his work.)
Wowza we are painting with some broad brushes here.
Perhaps the difference between the SAT scores at Penn and Chicago can be explained, not by the brain power of the average student at either university but by any number of other factors:
But I utterly reject the premise that SAT scores in some way indicate that the kids at Chicago, or MIT, or Stanford, or Columbia, or Brown have more intellectual horsepower than students at schools that are clearly in the same peer group but don’t have the exact same SAT scores.
So if post-grad vocation is largely by choice, it should not reflect (much) on the quality of the school; rather, it reflects the preferences of the students.
And – if you are going to include average post-grad salary as a (small) component of ranking a school, you should also include percentage of kids who go on to grad school. The former confers an advantage to more pre-professional schools; the latter, to more intellectual schools.
And if there’s a correlation between SES diversity and percentage of athletes at a school and test scores, we should perhaps re-evaluate average score differences of, oh, 50 points or less as insignificant… if the school with the lower scores does have a larger percentage of athletes or relatively more kids from lower SES households.
Good stuff.
@Cue7 Elon musk got his degree in physics from the College, not SEAS. He then added an additional year to his education to get the second BS from Wharton. Maybe, that’s why he didn’t graduate at the top of the class in engineering 
– and he wouldn’t have been directly compared to anyone in his cohort since cohorts are mostly a thing freshman year when he wasn’t a whartonite. So I guess you could say he’s a signature College of Arts and Sciences grad: very smart, very driven, and very successful. 
The only way to truly measure student success is to measure if students are happily employed in their desired field of choice and to break to down by acceptance rate to top PhD, MD, MBA, Law programs. That truly measures if the colleges either inhibit or enable students to go where they want to go. One program could place 50 people in HBS or HLS annually, but if the acceptace rate is a paltry 5%, that is utterly unimpressive objectively.
Unfortunately placement metrics for other rankings never take this into account. Most posited by other users or publications are based on volume of placement, some combination of salary (without normalization to location) with limited sample size, fame of alumni or some other combination which falls short.
@PennCAS2014 - I certainly agree, SAT scores are a questionable way to measure braininess. I guess what I’m trying to find out is which colleges have a disproportionate share of those kids who are at the far right of the curve for anything that measures this trait.
Most people don’t doubt that Harvard, mit, etc certainly have these types of kids.
Maybe the better way to ask the question is this: if you were looking for the highest concentration of brainy students (college or grad level) where would you go? Per capita, would you find these students in certain programs at certain places?
I’d always thought of programs like princetons physics grad program, mit math or stat, cal techs astrophysics, chicagos physics and math, etc to house these sorts of students.
I could very well be mistaken though, and I’m genuinely curious - where are the epicenters for these types of students? Is it actually at penn med or harvards mba program? Georgetowns foreign service school? Where?
^ Data on PhD completions is easily available and is frequently cited on CC. High PhD production may be a fairly good indicator of high academic quality. You can make millions of dollars without ever even attending college. You aren’t likely to complete a doctorate if your college didn’t do a pretty good job of motivating and preparing you for academic work.
One top 50 college list for STEM PhD production, adjusted for institution size, is dominated by LACs (including “Colleges that Change Lives”), Ivies, and technology institutes. See table 4 in: https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf13323/
I found that after adjusting for average SAT-M scores, the Ivies drop to the bottom half of this top 50.
See post #7 in: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/17572046#Comment_17572046
Similar colleges seem to dominate the top-college lists for PhD production in humanities and social science fields as well (https://www.reed.edu/ir/phd.html). Although selection effects must be a factor, I think normalized PhD production data probably reflects academic treatment effects better than other “outcome” data such as average salaries or Who’s Who entries. But even at the top PhD-producing colleges, most students don’t choose to pursue PhDs; these choices presumably are influenced by confounding factors unrelated to academic quality. So, lower PhD production may not indicate lower academic quality.