<p>Barron's -- I bought PR Guide when it first came out, noted data on Stanford was incorrect, tried calling/emailing PR Publications to no avail, and returned my copy. They should hire better proofreaders!</p>
<p>When a college administration has the courage to tell these ranking agencies to "go stuff it," that school soars to the top of my own personal list. They obviously feel they can continue to attract high quality students without the benefit of being listed in the PR book. At some point the guide would become irrelevant. Why do the Ivy League schools participate? Do they really need the boost of being at the top of a list? Are the administrators at HYPetc so insecure that they need to be reminded annually that they are number 1,2,3 or 5 on so and so's list of best universities? </p>
<p>Now if students would just follow the example and refuse to take these silly SAT tests.....</p>
<p>PR made a huge arithmetic blunder on Swarthmore's acceptance and yield calculations in this year's guide, too. The data they published isn't even in the right ballpark.</p>
<p>They copied the wrong number of from the Common Data Set to calculate the number of acceptances and ended up misreporting the number by 50% -- a rather significant error that could have easily been caught with even the most rudimentary checks -- such as comparing acceptance rates and yield to the prior year's number. </p>
<p>They misreported the acceptance rate as 38% instead of the correct 25%. As a result, they reported the yield as 26% instead of the correct 39%. Misreporting the acceptance rate numbers, especially when the correct data is supplied on the Common Data Set, is a pretty significant lapse for a college guidebook. The acceptance rate number is a key part of determining reaches, matches, and safeties in building an appropriate college list.</p>
<p>lderochi, this is just rank speculation on my part, but maybe the Oxy administration doesn't want all the extra publicity because they don't want to be part of the admissions rat race, in turn because of what it may be doing to the essential character of the school. One of Oxy's greatest strengths is it's ethnic diversity; its also a school where a full one-fourth of its students qualify for Pell grants. Oxy also places high value on engagement with the community and prides itself on its opportuties for community-based learning in Los Angeles and neighboring areas. As competition heats up for the top schools, Oxy may be more often used as a safety for rich white kids with high test scores from other parts of the country - maybe this make the job of the ad coms harder and threatens to displace the many local Californians of all races for whom Oxy is the only and/or best private option. A little bit more obscurity might help the school attract the students it wants. With a 45% admit rate they may already have plenty of applicants, and may not really want to join the eschelon's of the even more selective. </p>
<p>Anyway.... just speculation.... but I doubt that the school administrators made the decision to eschew the PR survey without giving serious consideration to what it meant. Their own internal surveys might tell them that PR isn't drawing the type of students they want.... and it would be easy for them to conduct a little one or two year experiment of seeing what happens when they are left out. They can always opt back in in the future.</p>