<p>I think Penn is ranked fourth due to the amazing originality of its name :) .</p>
<p>"For goodness sake, didn't we all JUST spend several pages determining that the rankings were not, and should not be, based on <em>solely</em> selectivity via SAT scores, admit rates, etc?!?"</p>
<p>... but neither should the ranking trivialize selectivity by utilizing faulty models. Admit rates represent 1.5% of the total, SAT scores can be mitigated by the "expected graduation rate" moronic category. Amongst comparable schools, the differences in faculty resources are trivial. </p>
<p>So, after almost eliminating selectivity, what do we really have? A questionable measurement of popularity and an assessment of the size of the endowment. Oops, I forget, the ever so important -and blatantly manipulated- alumni giving rates.</p>
<p>Okay, so let's say they place more weight on selectivity? What does that tell me? A lot of people like the school? Whether I think I have a chance at getting in? You talk about popularity, but let's just talk about admit rates alone: how much of that is affected by popularity or vague notions of reputation and prestige?<br>
I would think that when really assessing a school, one would place more emphasis on the resources of the school <em>and</em> how the students turn out rather than how they are when they go in.
I'm quoting from the magazine website:
"Over time, we have placed greater weight on the "outcome" measures of quality (such as graduation rate) and de-emphasized the "input" measures (such as entering test scores and financial resources). This change is consistent with a growing emphasis by education experts on "outcomes" in assessing the performance of complex institutions such as colleges."</p>
<p>I'm not saying selectivity shouldn't be a factor, but it definitely shouldn't be as important as people think it should be.</p>
<p>rhys118,</p>
<p>well, 15% means 15 points out of 100 which is a lot greater than 1 point. i am oversimplifying it of course but i think you know what i mean.</p>
<p>As an end note: we all know that college decisions are a highly personal, objective choice. I think that US News has access and provides a lot of good, relevant statistics and information that should be helpful to prospective applicants.<br>
It's kind of a shame that they had to do the ranking. When I was applying to colleges, I pored over stuff like class size and student faculty ratio, but some kids look at only the rank number and their brain shuts down. But with that said, US News still remains the best system because their criterion is sound, and their methods are explained clearly. I think their reasoning on a number of issues is sound, such as de-emphasizing selectivity (as measured by SAT ranges, admit rates, etc) as a tell-all factor of the school's quality, mostly because admit rates reflect who wins the popularity contest in high school minds and who can promote themselves better, etc etc.<br>
The only considerable fault I can see is the peer assessment score, because that's the only part of the criteria that goes out of the realm of statistics into the realm of opinions and subjectivity. Regardless of how distinguished people are, I find it hard to believe that even Deans and Senior professors, etc can know enough to rate all of the schools listed and completely objectively.</p>
<p>Right, Sam, and admit rates are 10% of those 15 points, and SATs are 50% of the 15, and class rank rounding out the last 40%. You can do the math. So, we know that Penn is better than Stanford in the class rank, and Stanford is better then Penn in the SAT and admit rate.<br>
Now, I <em>wrote</em> that I didn't have a copy of the magazine, so I couldn't tell how much higher Penn's % of top tens were than Stanford, and how much higher Stanford's SAT range was, which is why I said I can't come to a conclusion.
If you're referring to what I said about Stanford not being able rank higher than Penn, then fine, I take that back. Stanford can rank higher than Penn if Penn's higher top ten % is not able to outweigh Stanford's higher SAT range (which means that Stanford should have a considerably higher SAT range, and be pretty close to Penn in the top ten % category).<br>
Admit rates can be seen as a sort of tie-breaker. You have the magazine, I don't. So enlighten me.</p>
<p>Well, every category has its fault if you want to find it. Predicted vs Actual graduation rate? What the h*ll is that? Alumni giving??? Yes, you can easily quantify that but how does that correlate to undergrad education. That's even more abstract than peer assessment score. What exactly is "financial resource"--is the money really spent on undergrad programs or medical schools/research?</p>
<p>Rhys, if the methods used by USN are explained clearly, they seem to do a particularly poor job with you.</p>
<p>The way that USN uses selectivity is far from being about admission rates. As stated earlier, it only represents 10% of the 15% allocated to selectivity. The remaining established the criteria of the students who were admitted. The level of the students who will attend does have an immediate impact on your expected experience at a school. </p>
<p>The remaining measurable statistics are all important, but under closer scrutiny, you will be hard pressed to find great differences among COMPARABLE schools. Few students end up making a decision between a third toer school and a Harvard-like school. Is there a real difference between a school that has a 6-1 student-faculty ratio and a school with a 10-1 ratio? I could on with every single elements that are used in the ranking. However, where you will find great differences is in selectivity. Just look at the wide range of acceptance number among the 8 Ivies. </p>
<p>In the end, the biggest variable is simply the peer assesssment. If you happen to like the peer assessment, you will probably love the USN rankings. If you happen to think that the peer assessment is nothing but a joke, you'll find little reason to like the rankings. </p>
<p>I happen to like the ranking but ONLY for the fact that it does a reasonable job in compiling the numbers - despite the lunacy of pretending to be scientific. The cost of subscribing is a very good investment. However, that does not stop me for considering the end product -if the ranking is supposed to be a ranking- to be entirely misleading and lacking basic integrity. There is no science behind the methodology, and their own former director admitted that the methodology is very suspect and lacks statistiscal integrity. The information is there, but it is manipulated and massaged in order to arrive at pre-established numbers to cater to a set clientele. </p>
<p>Twelve monkeys could probably rearrange the criteria by tossing darts at a board and not change much of the final outcome.</p>
<p>Uhm, I would think that Predicted vs. Actual graduation rate is pretty straightforward.
As for alumni giving, the rationale is that if graduates 1) enjoyed their time at the college and 2) have done well enough to have the money to give, they will contribute to the school.<br>
Financial resources are basically money spent per student. "Financial resources are measured by the average spending per full-time equivalent students on instruction, research, public service, academic support, student services, institutional support, and operations and maintenance (for public institutions only) during the 2003 and 2004 fiscal years."
It's <em>not</em> foolproof. But their methodology is, out of all the rankings, the one that makes the best out of the info collected, and has the most holistic accumulation of information relating to the quality and effect of a college.<br>
I agree, if we look at it, we can squeeze some fault out of most of the categories. Just like you can call "foul" at a category that might've caused Stanford to be lower than Penn (selectivity), I can call "foul" at another category that might've caused WUSTL to be lower than Stanford (peer assessment). Well, while we're at that, let's see who can make the best argument as to why Georgetown is better than Yale, based on discounting all the categories that Yale is better in. You get the idea?</p>
<p>rhy,</p>
<p>Well, I don't have the magazine and I just read it in the bookstore. Even if I do, I won't be able to tell you for sure. I actually didn't find the methodology. But from what I've seen in the past, they never fully detail the mathematical formula they use. They sorta describe it in plain english vaguely so you can't really reproduce the result using spreadsheet. That's the problem. There's some kind of normalization involved but they never really detail how they exactly did that. </p>
<p>I am also unclear what you were asking. I think we may be thinking of different things. You were still trying to see if the selectivity rank for Penn is justified by looking at how different the class rank is and how different SAT range is...etc. Well, even if I tell you Penn is 95% top-10% students while Stanford has 85%. Does that really mean Penn has higher class rank? Not necessarily. Stanford may have more top-5%. But based on the fact that Stanford's admit rate is 13% while Penn's is 21%, common sense, and who got in where among the CC board members (albeit small % of the whole applicant pool), I am pretty certain Stanford is more selective.</p>
<p>Now the question is if Stanford's selectivity is ranked 6th and Penn's is ranked 8th instead, is it enough to make 1 point difference such that Stanford is ranked 4th and Penn ranked 5th instead? My guess is yes. Why? Selectivity, though accounting for only 15%, is still one of the biggest components. Looking it from another angle, we know that Stanford dominates Penn in peer assessment. Stanford and Penn are actually fairly close in all other categories and each of them weights less than selectivity. Therefore I can totally see if how swapping the selectivity rank can make up the 1-point difference.</p>
<p>Okay, xiggi, have I ever said that selectivity is based largely on admit rates? Did I not post the breakdown of the selectivity category, and stated clearly that admit rate is only 10 % of that?<br>
As for selectivity weight, I already explained why I thought it's de-emphasis is understandable. I'm not going to repeat myself. You don't agree with my understanding; we'll leave it at that.
To clarify my view on peer assessment, I don't think it is completely a joke nor will I discount it <em>completely</em>. I would rather see it with less weight, which is why I can have a problem with it, but still on a very general sense, understand why the schools are ranked the way they are, but then again, this is all personal opinion, seeing as we all have opinions on how each category should be weighed.<br>
And I have mentioned in one of my previous posts that the greatest value an applicant can get from US news is to look at the categories of statistics presented that are relevant to them, rather than only the overall ranking number, so in that respect, we at least agree.</p>
<p>This has the supposed methodology:</p>
<p>(scroll down)</p>
<p>Well, I didn't actually read what "predicted graduation rate" is. I just saw the word "predicted graduation rate" and I just thought how can anyone come up with such thing as "predicted graduation rate". WUSTL's predicted graduate rate was something like 86% and the actual was something like 92%. WUSTL therefore has 6% "extra" and awarded point for that. How did they come up with 86% to begin with??</p>
<p>Finanical resource, like you said, is money spent on research....etc. Well, does it say it is money spent on science/engineering/liberal arts research? What if a lot of it were spent on medical school where there's no undergrad program. If I am not mistaken, UPenn's med school is ranked like #4 or #5? A lot of money probably did go to that.</p>
<p>rc,</p>
<p>that's what i meant by being vague. it doesn't fully detail how they actually did it.</p>
<p>let me give you an example, they say peer assessment account for 25% of the total. So peer assessment has a maximum of 25 point of out 100. So does that mean Stanford, which gets 4.9 out of 5.0 gets 25<em>(4.9/5.0)=24.5 for this category? Okay, that's easy. So Penn gets 25</em>4.5/5.0=22.5. Okay, no problem in that, at least it seems to me. How about faculty resource? Now that's the tricky part. Because there's no such thing as 4.9 out of 5.0. It's just a rank. So if Stanford is ranked #3 in that, how much of 20 points does it get? I doubt it's 20 point multiplying by the percentile. Because if that's the case, there would be very little difference between #1 and #10. And if we do the same for all other categories, except peer assessment, then the difference in total among the first 20 would be small and the rank would be completely dominated by peer assessment score. #1 and #5 wouldn't be separated by 6 points (difference between Harvard and Stanford even though they tie in peer assessment).</p>
<p>Oh, alright, I get it.</p>
<p>GoBot, my counselor told me that WUSTL was a very expensive undertaking when I applied to colleges. Understand, that there are a myriad of other "less than subtle" charges accrued once you get into college. This makes the difference between supposedly equal costing schools more distorted.</p>
<p>By the way, Trinity warned everyone to diss Duke and Penn on thir respective boards. It is getting old now.</p>
<p>For the selectivity versus admit rates, Rhys, I may have read too much in this statement of yours" </p>
<p>"Okay, so let's say they place more weight on selectivity? What does that tell me? A lot of people like the school? Whether I think I have a chance at getting in? You talk about popularity, but let's just talk about admit rates alone: how much of that is affected by popularity or vague notions of reputation and prestige?"</p>
<p>Now, as far s the expected graduation rate, let me repost something from another forum:</p>
<p>While I understand that graduation rates are important, let's look how USN uses it as a double whammy with the expected graduation rate. For instance, the expected graduation of Harvey Mudd is 99% while Swarthmore's and Pomona's are at 96%. Does USNews not see the ridicule of expecting one of the toughest engineering school in the country to have a 99% expected graduation rate? This results in a penalty of MINUS 16! Caltech -the school most comparable to Mudd- gets an expected graduation rate of 90%. Here we may assume that USN paid attention to Stanford's Gerhard Casper letter, but only changed the demand placed upon Caltech. </p>
<p>The way I see it USN found the most insidious way to penalize schools that are most selective and protect the desired status quo. Lower selectivity at a favored school? No problem: slap a lower expected rate and it will results in a few bonus points. Wellesley gets an easy earned PLUS 4 in that category and that mitigates the impact of its lower selectivity. Swarthmore gets a MINUS 5 and Pomona a MINUS 6. If you want to track the reasons behind the drop in the "quality points" of Pomona and Swarthmore, do not look farther. In this case, it would be to the greatest benefit of the school to underreport its SAT numbers. Come to thing about it, Middlebury might be onto something here, as they dropped their reported SATs for 2009 from and average of 1440 to ... 1315. That should earn them some solid bonus points in the future! </p>
<p>The entire thread is at <a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=90093%5B/url%5D">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=90093</a></p>
<p>Devil May Care
You or your counselor should have checked out the facts. I have my statement from WashU and it reflects the charges shown on their site. I have not seen any additional charges - so I have no idea what you are talking about. If you find out let me know.</p>
<p>Under-rated National Univ.-Uchicago, Rice, Gtown. Under-rated LAC's-Holy Cross-no way Mt.Holyoke, Lafayette and some others are better than HC.</p>
<p>I most certainly am not as avid as you in this little quarrel. I will not be able to deter you, and that's fine. WUSTL was never on my radar for schools, so I am not as invested into this debate. You could be a little less terse though.</p>
<p>Forget it.</p>