<p>I realize that acceptance rates aren’t everything. It just seemed strange since most of the other top schools like MIT, Caltech, etc. have such low admit rates. Also, I mean if a large number of applicants get into GTech, then where’s the proof that the admitted students are truly exceptional (unless only the best of students apply to GTech to begin with).</p>
<p>I think one of the points G.P. Burdell is trying to make is that these public universities like GTech and UIUC have engineering programs that are much better than the rest of the programs at the university. Making decisions about which engineering college is better based on the overall metrics is a little misleading because of the above fact.</p>
<p>but seriously. let us mourn the Most Grievious Underrating of the private schools. your students have it so hard . . .</p>
<p>my point was that what happened in high school means absolutely nothing if you are in an elite engineering program. I’ve seen people with 1200 SAT get 4.0, and people with 1500+ SAT drop out. I don’t see anything strange about it, Georgia Tech is a bigger school than MIT, Caltech, if the same people apply to MIT, caltech and Georgia tech, MIT caltech will admit a smaller class, MIT and Caltech are more selective yes, but the engineers who graduate from Georgia Tech are just as good. And that’s why it’s a great school, its ability/track record of graduating great engineers.</p>
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<p>My essence is imbued with sorrow and lament.</p>
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<p>Actually it does. USNWR controls for the number of alumni. They don’t walk down the street and ask an average person what they think of Smith College; they go to recruiting leads and engineering deans and ask “Have you worked with graduates of Smith College or are you informed about the programs at Smith College? If so, please rank this program.”</p>
<p>So a large school like Ohio State will obviously have a larger sample size, but as long as Ohio State and Smith College both have significant sample sizes, the methodology normalizes it.</p>
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<p>No, you missed the point. A 7,000 student engineering program will have to offer a lot of Calc I, Chem I, etc. courses. As a result, these programs hire instructors, and not tenure-track research professors. As a result, the expenditure per faculty drops, because there are some faculty performing no research at all. Smaller schools don’t have that problem. </p>
<p>It’s not an issue with public schools, it’s a way the rankings don’t accurately account for the research being performed. A measure of “Expenditure per Active Researcher” would be more accurate.</p>
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<p>It’s not a weakness: it’s a description of why the SAT scores are different, and that reason has nothing to do with the overall quality of the school or the argument that you’re making about an underlying bias in the USNWR rankings.</p>
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<p>Of course it’s significant. If you’re going to compare UC Berkeley’s average SAT score to Stanford’s average SAT score, and use that difference to make an inference about the engineering programs, you have to control for the impact of the non-engineering programs on the overall SAT score.</p>
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<p>Your college major isn’t engineering or anything math-related, I hope.</p>
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More than you might think. For example, three of the eight Ivy League schools have a vet school (Cornell) or a school of social work (Columbia) or both (Penn). Granted, the Cornell vet program is a “statutory” program that receives substantial state funding.</p>
<p>The Columbia and SUNY Stony Brook Social Work programs (just picked two in the same state) are good examples of this issue. Columbia (and Penn and other private schools) offer only graduate degrees in social work, so it doesn’t impact their undergraduate admissions statistics. SUNY-Stony Brook (and other state schools) have pressure from legislatures to offer BSW degrees to meet the societal need.</p>
<p>Because social work applicants tend to have lower SAT scores than, say, engineering majors, the BSW program drops the average SAT score for Stony Brook.</p>
<p>Does this have any impact on the Engineering programs at either college? Nope. Therefore your assertion that the average SAT score of a school somehow relates to the quality of an engineering program is false.</p>
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<p>I already addressed this point. There’s a difference between knowing a school really well and knowing lots of alumni, and knowing enough alumni to say that you are familiar with the school. </p>
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<p>So small schools don’t teach calculus or chemistry? Is there any reason why having an instructor teach calculus at a small school is different than having an instructor teach calculus at a large school. </p>
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<p>This applies equally well to private schools, since they too are fully capable of hiring instructors. </p>
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<p>You can control for it by looking at 75th percentiles. This controls for the social work majors, since they are most likely not in the top 25%. </p>
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<p>Except, we’re not using averages. I already said that we could use 75th percentiles. </p>
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Your college major isn’t engineering or anything math-related, I hope.
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<p>Okay, explain how in a school with 100 people, taking the bottom 50 students out and replacing them with lower scoring students will change the 75th percentiles (hint: it won’t).</p>
<p>Just to clarify here, I do not have anything against large public schools. They are all very good schools, I just think that some of them are ranked too high on US News. I hope that I did not come across as mean spirited.</p>
<p>This is a joke, right?</p>
<p>wow way to be hating on public schools…</p>
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<p>Anyone can see that you were trying to build a serious argument until the last post, where I suppose you realized that it was just easier to make up a one-liner. </p>
<p>If you want to make a substantive case that public schools are not overrated by US News, that’s fine. But if you’ve realized that your points are wrong, you ought to concede them, instead of trying to pretend that you were never taking yourself seriously in the first place.</p>
<p>I have no doubt now that you think you’re being serious, but when you make arguments like:</p>
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<p>You completely invalidate your perspective. You do realize that college deans don’t sit around and say “oh, well I know 20 people from that school, it must be a good school!”. One of the main roles of a dean is to research what other schools do - they have frequent meetings about their faculty hiring techniques, how they operate their graduate and undergraduate programs, they know where graduates go to work and where they go to teach - it’s not an arbitrary guessing game.</p>
<p>The same goes for lead recruiters. Their job is to know everything humanly possible about the school - meet with faculty directly, know the abilities of the graduates, compare the performance of graduates from the same school with the same GPA, etc. </p>
<p>Then, you followed up the argument with this…</p>
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<p>Which demonstrates that you didn’t understand my point. A school with 7,000 undergrads will need dedicated, full-time instructors to teach those classes. A school with 700 undergrads can use a part-time instructor / part-time researcher to teach that class. The result is that the smaller school now has it’s research expenditures spread over a greater number of faculty (say 100% instead of 75%). </p>
<p>Which then leads to…</p>
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<p>Which makes no sense. Sure private schools are capable of hiring instructors - they could hire clowns to teach the class if they wanted to - but because of size, they don’t have to hire instructors in significant numbers. Therefore, intrinsic in being a small school is an advantage in the USNWR rankings.</p>
<p>Then you make this ridiculous claim:</p>
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<p>What? Let’s say you have two engineering schools: School A and School B, each with 4 students. The SAT scores of those students are 2100, 2200, 2300, 2400. By your assumption those schools are the same because the average SAT score is the same.</p>
<p>Now, let’s say School B has another program. That program has 4 students with SAT scores of 1700, 1800, 1900, 2000. This new program has no impact on the engineering school.</p>
<p>So let’s calculate quartiles:</p>
<p>School A: 2100, 2200, 2300, 2400.
School B: 1700, 1800, 1900, 2000, 2100, 2200, 2300, 2400</p>
<p>Is that 75th percentile different? </p>
<p>After that point, I just gave up on the rest of your post. </p>
<p>The fact of the matter is that in the USNWR rankings, the public schools having everything going against them, and yet they still perform well in engineering. And this comes from someone with degrees from both public and private engineering schools.</p>
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<p>Face it. You realized you were losing so you acted like you were weren’t serious the whole time, when you clearly were. It’s not original at all. If you debate with a little kid and they start to lose, they’ll probably do the exact same thing and claim that they never cared. </p>
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<p>This is a total misrepresentation of what I said. If a dean knows 20 people from one school as opposed to 5, they’re going to have a stronger reference frame for making a peer assessment. I already explained this to you, like three times. </p>
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<p>I absolutely love how you have to use little rhetorical pot shots like this to supplement your talking points. If you had any confidence in your arguments (as you did, before I pointed out all the flaws), then you’d just present them with no cheap insults. </p>
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<p>Actually, they can both use part time instructors. They’d just need more of them. </p>
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<p>I’ll repeat myself for the last time. A school with fewer students can still hire instructors, just less of them. </p>
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<p>Again, it’s just fun to see how your case is devolving from logical arguments to cheap insults. </p>
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<li> I never mentioned averages</li>
<li> I’ve said before that those students are part of the student body, and should be considered.<br></li>
<li> While we can make partitions to improve the performance of public schools, we can do the same thing to private schools.<br></li>
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<p>They are much closer than the averages are. Also, there’s an assumption here that students in the social work program would be replacing above average students, and not engineering students at the bottom of the distribution. The effect is also marginalized by the majors which have higher average performance than engineers. </p>
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<p>You’ve pretty much just been repeating yourself since your first response and ignoring all of the flaws that I’ve found in your case. </p>
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<p>Actually, a lot of them are very overrated by US News, because their larger student bodies allows them to achieve more recognition in the peer assessments. This is easy to confirm by looking at the SAT percentiles of schools ranked of similarly ranked private and public schools. For example, look at the SAT percentiles of Georgia Tech (#5) and Cal Tech (#4). The 75th math percentile at Cal Tech is 800, but the 75th math percentile at Georgia Tech is only 730. Like I said, the evidence clearly shows that public schools are overrated by US News, even though they are very good schools.</p>
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<p>I think GP’s point is that while they can they don’t.</p>
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I think GP’s point is that while they can they don’t.
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<p>My experience with calculus and basic chemistry is that it should be taught by instructors, TAs, or even other students. I didn’t see how years of researching a specific area of mathematics like PDEs or number theory would make someone better at teaching the most basic concepts. </p>
<p>But nonetheless, the majority of people seem to think that professors and not instructors should be teaching classes. At the open houses I attended, professors would try to downplay the classes taught by instructors or tout what percentage of the faculty had terminal degrees. So I really don’t think that US News is misrepresenting common opinion here, or holding a bias that does not already exist in the mind of the public.</p>
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<p>It may be hard to see at your age, but you are actually being incredibly immature. My comment about “joking” is because your positions are so far off, they’re hard to believe. An engineer doesn’t understand how quartiles work, etc.</p>
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<p>And, as I explained, no one makes decisions based on how many people they know, they base it on factual and objective information about the program. </p>
<p>And even if it is dependent on the number of people, wouldn’t that just affect variability and not the mean perception? If I meet exactly one student from, say Smith College and she’s brilliant, that would positively skew my opinion, regardless of the quality of the actual program.</p>
<p>The only way meeting less alumni hurts a college is if 1) people rank schools higher if they know more people from that school, which doesn’t happen and 2) people meet a sample population that misrepresents the college because the sample size is insufficient to induce the law of large numbers (which can skew in either direction. Thus, your argument is invalid. For the third time. </p>
<p>So, either you’re not explaining yourself properly, or you’re having trouble understanding my argument. Which is it?</p>
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<p>or I’m incredibly frustrated and wasting my time re-explaining myself to you. </p>
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<p>Harvard can hire University of Phoenix graduates to teach their undergraduates, but they don’t. So making an argument about the quality of Harvard because they could theoretically hire some graduates from the University of Phoenix is ridiculous. </p>
<p>That’s the argument you’re making. The major private schools do not hire these people in significant numbers. The major public schools are forced to do so. That’s reality.</p>
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<p>Ok, you CLEARLY have no idea what you’re saying. Do you know what a quartile is and how it’s calculated? Do you understand my argument that a school with a low-SAT college is going to shift the average AND the quartiles down? </p>
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<p>I can’t believe it. Honestly, I can’t.</p>
<p>G.P. Burdell, the 1st, 3rd, 5th, and 6th points you make don’t have any substance. They are either insults, or they ignore the point entirely, so I’m not going to respond to them. I want to clarify this issue for you, but you’re going to meet me half way, and that means making substantive points and backing them up with evidence. </p>
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<p>You still haven’t put forth a compelling argument for why someone wouldn’t have a stronger connection to a program that they are more familiar with. All you’ve done is either declared that it is simply not the case (i.e. “no one makes decisions based on how many people they know”) or only considering those who are not familiar enough with the program to make an assessment. </p>
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<p>So if Harvard did hire U Phoenix grads to teach classes, do you think that ought to reduce their rankings (not that I see why you’re so eager to put down U Phoenix)? </p>
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<p>It’s going to shift the 75th percentile down much less, especially if the college is at the very bottom of the distribution. You’re seriously misrepresenting my argument here, and it’s very annoying.</p>
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<p>What is your argument again? You’ve drowned it out in all the hypocritical posts you’ve made.</p>
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<p>Can you back that up with a logical statement instead of being a baby?</p>
<p>Don’t forget to factor the retention rates as well.</p>