<p><a href="http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=533&e=3&u=/ap/20041019/ap_on_re_us/college_rankings%5B/url%5D">http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=533&e=3&u=/ap/20041019/ap_on_re_us/college_rankings</a>
In their proposal, the economists sidestep the tricky question of what makes a good college. Instead, they assume top high school students know best, and they simply report their choices. Of the students admitted to, say, both Brown and Penn, how many choose each place? It is the same principle as Zagat's restaurant guides: Don't try to grade the food, just reveal whether a lot of people like it or not.</p>
<p>Economists? I'm not surprised they're letting the market decide</p>
<p>Most people that eat have had previous experience and a basis of comparison. Most HS kids know squat about pretty much anything. They are easily swayed by fashion and friends. How else would you explain most hs girls dressing like hookers and dancing like strippers??</p>
<p>Wonder why Harvard ranks so far above Princeton. I think it shows name recognition. Probably why so many kids keep applying to same colleges, because they don't really know anything about others. I would be curious about the reputation of Brown vs UPenn, if expectatios reflect any reality. So, it would behoove colleges to snare young celebrities, just for the publicity</p>
<p>Figure 1 on page 6 is intriguing--the whole thing reinforces my view that the process doesn't always have rhyme or reason.</p>
<p>Check out:</p>
<p>"A Revealed Preference Ranking of U.S. Colleges and Universities'</p>
<p>by Christopher Avery, et al. </p>
<p>Avery, Frof. at JFK School of Gov't., Harvard, is the author of the "Early Admissions Game: Joining the Elite"</p>
<p>This an excellent report on the rankings of U.S. undergraduate programs based on the students' revealed preferences, especially with cross-admits to multiple schools. It shows the top choices of the students when they are given a choice of multiple admissions.</p>
<p>Here are the rankings of the top 50 based on the report's ponts system or "Elo" points.</p>
<p>1 Harvard 2800 </p>
<p>2 Yale 2738 </p>
<p>3 Stanford 2694 </p>
<p>4 Cal Tech 2632 </p>
<p>5 MIT 2624 </p>
<p>6 Princeton 2608 </p>
<p>7 Brown 2433 </p>
<p>8 Columbia 2392 </p>
<p>9 Amherst 2363 </p>
<p>10 Dartmouth 2357 </p>
<p>11 Wellesley 2346 </p>
<p>12 U Penn 2325 </p>
<p>13 U Notre Dame 2279 </p>
<p>14 Swarthmore 2270 </p>
<p>15 Cornell 2236 </p>
<p>16 Georgetown 2218 </p>
<p>17 Rice 2214 </p>
<p>18 Williams 2213 </p>
<p>19 Duke 2209 </p>
<p>20 U Virginia 2197 </p>
<p>21 Northwestern 2136 </p>
<p>22 Pomona 2132 </p>
<p>23 Berkeley 2115 </p>
<p>24 Georgia Tech 2115 </p>
<p>25 Middlebury 2114 </p>
<p>26 Wesleyan 2111 </p>
<p>27 U Chicago 2104 </p>
<p>28 Johns Hopkins 2096 </p>
<p>29 USC 2072 </p>
<p>30 Furman 2061 </p>
<p>31 UNC 2045 </p>
<p>32 Barnard 2034 </p>
<p>33 Oberlin 2027 </p>
<p>34 Carleton 2022 </p>
<p>35 Vanderbilt 2016 </p>
<p>36 UCLA 2012 </p>
<p>37 Davidson 2010 </p>
<p>38 U Texas 2008 </p>
<p>39 NYU 1992 </p>
<p>40 Tufts 1986 </p>
<p>41 Washington & Lee 1983 </p>
<p>42 U Michigan 1978 </p>
<p>43 Vassar 1978 </p>
<p>44 Grinnell 1977 </p>
<p>45 U Illinois 1974 </p>
<p>46 Carnegie Mellon 1957 </p>
<p>47 U Maryland 1956 </p>
<p>48 William & Mary 1954 </p>
<p>49 Bowdoin 1953 </p>
<p>50 Wake Forest 1940</p>
<p>I'm not sure what the significance is of this ranking. Does it take into account that students rarely apply to all of the top ten schools of the list? For example, I'd doubt that a lot of the same students are applying to Caltech and to Amherst, so what does it tell you that a student who gets into CalTech chooses CalTech more often than a student who gets into Amherst chooses Amherst? It doesn't seem to me that this gives any information at all unless you know which schools students turned down in favor of those they attended. I'm not sure, even then, what it's measuring. Maybe someone understands this better than I do. </p>
<p>An interesting tidbit: Harvard takes a large number of Asian students and states explicitly that Asian students who get into Harvard choose to go to Harvard in higher numbers than non-Asian students. If you somehow factored out the Asian student preference for Harvard, I wonder if it would affect the rankings as a whole.</p>
<p>Sac:</p>
<p>I think the study accounts for the fact that Caltech and MIT and a few others attract a highly self-selected pool of students (so does BYU or Notre Dame, as the authors point out). The authors make no claim as to quality, merely preference. If, for example, a student is admitted at both Princeton and Harvard and chooses Harvard, this is noted as a preference for Harvard. That's all.
They observe that their system works for a limited number of colleges where it would seem there are a lot of cross-applications and cross-admissions. It breaks down lower down. They also claim that their system is not subject to gaming by universities the way the USN&WR rankings have been. But the fact that it can be applied only to a limited range of schools limits its utility.</p>
<p>Someone likened this system to a Zagat rating. I think the comparison is apt. Sometimes, I have agreed with and sometimes I have disagreed with the ratings for specific restaurants; or I have not sought out highly rated restaurants because they did not suit my needs, my pocketbook, or the distance I was willing to travel. Similar considerations are needed when thinking about colleges.</p>
<p>It's hard to imagine USC being ranked higher than UCLA in anything other than football. ;-)</p>
<p>Marite, I think I understand what you're saying. If you feel like Italian tonight, you're not going to consider Ethiopian or Chinese. But isn't the Zagat rating saying something about quality, while this is not? Also, even within the top 10 universities, I'm not sure how many cross applications there are. For example, a student who applies to Columbia (urban, core curriculum, large numbers of humanities students) may be more likely to apply and choose it over U of Chicago than to apply and not choose it over CalTech (science oriented) or Princeton (suburban). So, if we learn that those who get into Harvard and Columbia almost always choose Harvard, which is true, perhaps that MIGHT be useful, at least as a measure of prestige. But if we learn that somebody who did not apply to MIT, CalTech, Princeton, or Brown, chose Columbia, what does that tell us?</p>
<p>It seems as if they're ranking the top schools as if they are ALL in the same Italian category, and that Italian is what people usually feel like having. But then, I've always understood restaurants better than statistics.</p>
<p>Sac:</p>
<p>Maybe the restaurant analogy can be stretched a bit further. There can be a terrific restaurant, but, unless you're French, you may not feel it's worth a "detour" as they put it in the Michelin guide. I suspect that location is one thing that works against Princeton and in Harvard's favor, which is why Harvard ranks so much higher than Princeton despite Princeton's reputation. In the case of Columbia and Chicago, the location is perhaps a negative factor (not all students feel confident enough to live in a big city) as is the rigor of the core curriculum. The authors are not seeking to explain why Harvard is more often chosen than Princeton, merely that it is.
The main thing I got out of the rating is that, given the number of times Princeton loses out to Harvard and Yale in what the authors call "tournaments," it probably would not make sense for Princeton to abandon its ED policy as the new Dean of Admission had hinted at last year. I must say I was surprised at the frequency with which Princeton was passed over in favor of another school.
Having said this, I don't take rankings seriously anyway, whether they are USNWR or this new-fangled kind.</p>
<p>Interesting that this particular rating system emphasizes yield so strongly as USNWR is trying to de-emphasize yield. All rating systems need to be taken with more than a grain of salt. I have seen heated arguments arise over which school is better, Northwestern over Cornell, Harvard over Yale, and to an observer who is not in the heat of that argument, it is absurd. Considering the number of colleges we have in this country, arguing which college is number 30 vs number 26 gets to be a hair splitting issue. Ratings are useful when you have no idea how the system works as you can see some relative clumps in the individual schools. I also found the USNWR ratings useful with its differentiation of those schools that have less than half of their students studying the liberal arts. One area that I would like to see differentiated are the schools with more than half their students studying "tech" subjects as that is a major factor in the atmosphere of the school. I have seen kids with tech schools on their list with no idea how it would be different from the traditional college/uni. </p>
<p>I was surprised at the in-depth statistical analysis these researchers did in this study. Quite un Zagat like. Can't say that they did not put the time and thought into this study.</p>
<p>Sac said,</p>
<p>"An interesting tidbit: Harvard takes a large number of Asian students and states explicitly that Asian students who get into Harvard choose to go to Harvard in higher numbers than non-Asian students. If you somehow factored out the Asian student preference for Harvard, I wonder if it would affect the rankings as a whole."</p>
<p>Interesting point, since according to the latest figures, Asian Americans were 18.9% of the Harvard's acceptances, but 19.9% of Harvard's matriculated class for 2008. However, at UC Berkeley, where Asian Americans are 42% of the matriculated class, many have turned down the Ivies, including Harvard. This is even mor evident at the professional schools such as law and medicine. I have seen data where Asian Americans will opt to go the U.of California at S.F. (UCSF) School of Medicine over Harvard or any of the private elites such as Yale, Columbia or Penn's Schools of Medicine. Then again, UCSF School of Medicine is cosistently ranked in the top 5 of American medical schools. Asian students with a choice between Harvard, the Ivies or the private elites and the UC system, will opt of "prefer" the UC system, simply because of geography, economics, and the prestige of the jewels of the UC, including Berkeley and UCLA, the top-ranked public American universities.</p>
<p>I kind of like a rating system whereby future Ph.D. productivity is measured against SAT scores upon entrance, and selectivity, in order to come up with a "value-added" measure. What both this and USNWR do is mistake the test scores, etc. of students, and the prestige preferences of parents for the education that the students actually obtain while they are there.</p>
<p>By my measure, Kalamazoo, Earlham, St. Olaf's, Hope, Grinnell, and, perhaps, Reed, are by far the best colleges in the country. The main thing they have in common, besides being LACs, is that none of them are on the east coast.</p>
<p>This rating tells me absolutely nothing because we don't know WHY students chose certain schools: better financial aid package? Parents want them closer to home?
A pointless list, but it keeps people busy!</p>
<p>Does anyone know why USNWR ditched yield? Colleges certainly think it's important. I find that yield-driven, adjusted lists like this Harvard one, or the Laissez-faire ranking that CC posts, are much closer to my internal, never fully worked out ranking than the USNWR one.</p>
<p>Mini, I am a great admirer of your iconoclastic ratios and ranking systems, and this one is a beaut! It's only possible flaw is that there's a lot of mediocrity among the PhDs out there.</p>
<p>This system seems like a vicious cycle to me: Kids choose schools that rank high in the various rating systems, then the schools rank high because kids choose them.</p>
<p>Because the study is a measure of preference, it is really little more than a popularity contest. Quality of education is a much more difficult criterion to evaluate and certainly beyond the grasp of any high school senior. So choice must, by necessity, come down to subjective factors such as reputation, probability of post-graduate success, that elusive factor called "fit", among others.</p>
<p>The only thing we know with some degree of certainty is that the most important factor in the quality of the education a student receives is the qualities the student brings to the table. The exhaustive longitudinal study conducted by Krueger and Dale concluded that post-graduate success measured in terms of salary was independent of the college a particular student attended but was dependent on the academic abilities of that particular student. Simply put, a student accepted to Yale and Denison would likely have the same career success choosing to attend Denison rathrer than Yale. If my memory serves me, I believe both colleges were included in the study.</p>
<p>All this might be "academic" except for the fact that some students may be paying $160,000 at Yale vs. a free ride at Denison. The families of many students may be more than willing to pay the price to attend Yale and that is fine. However other families might choose Denison if they were aware of the Krueger and Dale findings. I know for a fact that this was the case for our family. Our EFC was about $81k but we didn't feel capable of paying $40k/yr to send our son to the likes of Cornell(sob), CMU or N'western.</p>
<p>In my experience, very few kids turn down HPY except for each other, and those who do may pick a full ride at some schools that offer merit awards such as Duke, UNC, Cal Tech. Possible exceptions have been MIT and Stanford. Because I have no experience with the UC schools, I cannot comment on that, but I have gotten the strong feeling that the sentiments about the UC system, particularly UCLA and Berkelely are that they are strong contenders against any private college for Californeans. I did not check if this is an Asian sentiment or not, perhaps, Rattle, you have examined those numbers. </p>
<p>I do feel that when it comes to medical school, it is whole different story as far as private vs public schools. After paying 4 years of a private school many parents draw the line at graduate/professional schools which means taking a lot of loans if you go private in a profession where the income has been diminishing even as the tuition increases. I know that I wish my niece were at a state school as she will be $160k in debt when she finishes medical school. My d just went through the trouble of establishing state residency where she expects to go the a public med school and the difference in tuition is staggering. Unless you expect to go into research or some specialized area, I am not sure the differential is worth it and I guess students are coming to that conclusion.</p>
<p>The reason USNWR eliminated yield from their data is that they felt that this was a bad indicator for focus on part of the schools. It is easy to bring up the yield numbers in ways that are detrimental to students. I don't go with their logic as I think the colleges are already are doing whatever they can to have the most favorable yield numbers possible. It is their self interest to do so. Even if the yield numbers were used to lower ratings at colleges with high yield, it behooves the college to have low yield numbers in so many more important ways that it is not going to make a difference.</p>
<br>
<blockquote> <p>Does anyone know why USNWR ditched yield? <<</p> </blockquote>
<br>
<p>I assumed it was because yield is easily manipulated, as in the Tufts Disease. And colleges on the make certainly WILL do just about anything they can to game the ranking system.</p>