Is Duke going to be a casualty of Brown/Penn/Chicago's rise?

[jak321]

<p>@edwitten

A concerted effort went into making Chicago a hot school. In fact, according to a thread on the UofC forum, the school almost bankrupted itself in the process.

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<p>You may want to read through the entire thread… I don’t think they spent all (or even a good amount of it) on making itself a “hot” school. I doubt the few millions they spent on marketing nearly bankrupted them.</p>

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I actually admire what Chicago has managed to do in a short span of time. What I can’t stand however is listening to the sanctimonious imbeciles on the U of C forum go on about how ED policies are the scourge of their existence whilst simultaneously turning a blind eye towards their school’s own extensive and unprecedented effort to artificially improve its own yield and consequent ranking.

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<p>You may want to use less reducto ad absurdium, and read our (or at least my) arguments. ED gives advantages to the financially advantaged. More so than EA. That’s not good. Period. We (or at least I) don’t care (much) about how it affects a schools rankings (I’m not even sure it does, other than by marginaly affecting acceptance rate, a stat that has a 1.5% weight on USNews and is ignored everywhere else).</p>

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extensive and unprecedented effort to artificially improve its own yield and consequent ranking.

That’s not a bad thing, as we argue. Marketing, that is. I don’t know what else you’re alluding to, but if it has to do with gaming the rankings, read above. And I doubt the yield affected the ranking. If anything, it would be the other way around… Chicago has:

1. Improved FA
2. Improved undergrad experience
3. Marketed - not a bad thing, as long as they don’t lie. In the same vein I could argue that BBT artificially inflates Caltech’s yield and that Duke’s bball inflates its yield/no. of applications, since they all do the same thing (disseminate information without actually making a better product directly), but I don’t…
4. Improved its rankings - We’ve discussed this for a while. The only rankings where it has really improved by more than a few ranks are Forbes (no evidence of “gaming”, Chicago actually does do extrememely well and has been improving in most of Forbes criteria, eg. getting its students more prestigious scholarships, improved the undergrad experience, decreased debt-load, improved graduation rates etc.) and USNews (no evidence for gaming other than circumstantial. I’ve talked about one of it’s strategies, and I don’t think it qualifies as gaming)…</p>