<p>The recent thread about the Barron's</a> Profiles of American Colleges - 1969 reminds me that the issue of ranking colleges by selectivity has been around a long time. These days, who compiles a list of the most selective colleges? What colleges are on the list? As scholars on the issue </p>
<p>note, "selectivity" doesn't just refer to base acceptance rate. I thought that U.S. News ranks colleges by selectivity, but I haven't seen such a ranking in the print edition of the America's Best Colleges. What sources have you seen that ranks colleges by selectivity, and how do the sources calculate selectivity?</p>
<p>Suggest get a spreadsheet, input the % admit and SAT scores from US News or wherever, for the suspects of interest, and weight them however you want. Add in yield, if you think this is relevant. And/or % in top 10% of class.</p>
<p>Nobody else's weighting of these different selectivity parameters will have any more validity than yours will, to you.</p>
<p>Obvious exceptions for the places using criteria outside of the traditional academic; eg Julliard.</p>
<p>I don't think admit rate is a very good indicator of selectivity because it is a function of how many apps you receive and the number of apps can be manipulated by marketing and other things.</p>
<p>Percent in the top 10% of HS class...that depends on the quality of the HS.</p>
<p>I think SAT scores are the best measure of selectivity, or the ACT.</p>
<p>But, some schools are dropping the SAT requirement so you have to assume that their real selectivity is below what their standardized tests indicate. Schools that drop the SAT requirement should probably be dropped from any selectivity ranking.</p>
<p>The elusive "reputation" or "peer assessment" might be the best proxy for selectivity, after SAT.</p>
<p>By the way, the earliest ranking of colleges I have seen was from a book published in the 1940s that ranked colleges according to how many alumni were in Who's Who. This isn't the same as selectivity, of course.</p>
<p>Some of the second tier tech school have high admit rates, but high SAT scores as well. I don't know how you take self-selection into account when deciding what "selective" is.</p>
<p>
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The elusive "reputation" or "peer assessment" might be the best proxy for selectivity, after SAT.
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<p>A quick look at the USNews methodology to compose a comparative ranking of selectivity versus the "peerR assessment would reveal that those two hardly work in unison. Schools with very high selectivity are penalized by the geographically cronyist -if not blatantly manipulated-- peer assessment. Other schools maintain a high peer assessment that has little to do with facts, and especially not with any measure of selectivity, at least as it should be understood as a process of ... selection. The term is often misused.</p>
<p>The US News Peer Assessment score is highly correlated with the SAT 25th percentile, the selectivity rank, the graduation rate, the percent of students in the top 10 percent of their HS class, and the acceptance rate. The correlations are all very high...about .7.</p>
<p>I'm not endorsing it, but there is a direct answer to the OP's question: the on-line version of USNews will sort schools by selectivity, based on acceptance rate (10%) standardized test scores (50%), class rank (40%) </p>
<p>Research Universities:</p>
<p>Harvard 1
Yale 2
MIT 2
Princeton 4
WUStl 4
Stanford 6
Penn 6
Brown 8
Duke 8
Dartmouth 10</p>
<p>Thanks for post #10. I thought someone had posted something like this last year, and I didn't realize the list doesn't appear in the print edition.</p>