<p>Big changes! Unbelievable and shocking!</p>
<h1>1 Stanford</h1>
<h1>2 MIT</h1>
<h1>3 Princeton</h1>
<h1>4 Yale</h1>
<h1>5 Duke</h1>
<h1>6 Harvard</h1>
<h1>7 Caltech</h1>
<h1>8 Pomona</h1>
<h1>9 Harvey Mudd</h1>
<h1>10 Orange Coast</h1>
<p>National Universities:
Parchment</a> Student Choice College Rankings 2014 | Parchment - College admissions predictions.</p>
<p>Liberal Arts Colleges:
Parchment</a> Student Choice College Rankings 2014 | Parchment - College admissions predictions.</p>
<p>A wild community college appears!</p>
<p>But enough talk about Caltech… how did Orange Coast College make the list? :p</p>
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<p>It scored 100% in its acceptance rate. That’s pretty good, isn’t it?</p>
<p>This was based on elo points and cross-admit battles, right? </p>
<p>It’s nice to see Georgetown placing well. If only the academics (I mean PA) agreed with the students. </p>
<p>Coming in behind a CC kinda stung though…</p>
<p>If you look at just the National Rankings, then it makes more sense. However, Duke being more preferable to Harvard and Berkeley being more preferable to Dartmouth is way off though.</p>
<p>Not sure you can say it is way off… who is to say that students didn’t pick one over the other last year in larger numbers, for example? Of course the data in Parchment is self-reported with no verification. And it is not a complete or statistically random sample. But some of it doesn’t feel too far off to me… my kid picked Mudd over U of Chicago and Swarthmore this year, and it moved above those two on the list this year. Not just her doing, of course, but if enough students do it, you could see how this analysis could track a change faster than US News does.</p>
<p>I do not give serious consideration to college ranking lists. Since critical thinking of the each list and individual’s preferences are crucially required to reach his or her meaningful rankings.</p>
<p>Regardless of this, new trends shown in this parchment rankings are remarkable under the ASSUMPTION that the Parchment is correct.</p>
<h1>1. The college decisions of the students in the Western region influence college rankings significantly.</h1>
<h1>2. Students’ preferences to LAC over national universities are decreasing due to location disadvantage and/or research emphasis.</h1>
<p>Individually I am very sorry for the declines of Williams (#29 LAC, #66 overall) and Amherst (#12 LAC, #34 overall).</p>
<p>Yes… but it is actually hard to take these rankings seriously with no additional ability to (1) verify that what students put in is truthful – we see on CC that “stat inflation” happens all the time, I bet “results inflation” hits Parchment pretty hard; (2) know that the group of people using Parchment is a representative group across all the colleges being ranked. What if students applying to Harvard are more likely to use it? Or it is more popular in one part of the country than another? </p>
<p>So while I find it interesting, I really don’t have a lot of confidence in it. Partly because Parchment also was not a very good predictor of my kid’s results last year, either. Her admission results were better than Parchment indicated they would be. So if they don’t have the right date to do a better job of predicting admission, one could assume that that same (possibly faulty) underlying data is being used in these rankings.</p>
<p>They put my odds at Cornell at 51%, so I hesitate to trust anything Parchment… </p>
<p>Oh, and apparently I had near perfect odds at UVa. ;)</p>
<p>I can’t believe Orange Coast beat out Irvine Valley. This ranking is a travesty and I’m appalled.</p>
<p>We’re re-releasing the rankings for 2014 soon… The issue here was that we made it so users could add community colleges to their profiles last year without thinking through how this would impact the rankings. Next year we’ll be discussing how rankings should work between community colleges and 4-years, since the applicant pools are often different between the two. </p>
<p>Thanks for the feedback!</p>
<p>The new rankings appear to be up. The community college is gone, but some of the other rankings have changed as well, most notably Harvard. I’ve listed in parenthesis how the rankings than have changed by at least 2 from last week. In fairness, the Elo points are remarkably close between HYP and Duke, so it’s not unreasonably that they’d change slightly removing community colleges and recalculating. </p>
<ol>
<li>Stanford </li>
<li>MIT</li>
<li>Harvard (up 3)</li>
<li>Princeton </li>
<li>Duke</li>
<li>Yale (down 2)</li>
<li>Caltech</li>
<li>(tie) Ponoma </li>
<li>(tie) Harvey Mudd </li>
<li>Brown</li>
</ol>
<p>@intparent, my son and I have been using parchment to help choose a range of colleges from reach to safety since that’s what our high school uses. If the data is not reliable then we need a better tool. Is there a generally available tool we should use instead?</p>
<p>I wouldn’t give Parchment “data” the time of day. This is based on self-reported, unverified claims by relatively small numbers of persons claiming to be cross-admits. Anyone can go on parchment.com and claim to have been admitted to any school they want. And given the small numbers of people participating, it’s easily manipulated. I’m not accusing anyone in particular, but it’s notable that some of these colleges have jumped enormously in the Parchment rankings in a year’s time based on very small numbers of self-reported cross-admits. So, for example, among national universities, Brigham Young moved up 20 places in the rankings in one year, based on all of 84 self-reported “student decisions.” Brandeis moved up an extraordinary 62 places, based on 200 student self-reports. The University of Tennessee moved up a whopping 138 places, based on 105 student self-reports. East Carolina, up 108 based on 69 reports. Wichita State, up 109 based on 75 reports, and so on.</p>
<p>Among LACs, the numbers of self-reporting cross-admits are even smaller, and the gyrations in rankings even wilder. Even apart from the obvious risk of data manipulation by entering false reports, any ranking system that fluctuates so wildly from one year to the next is clearly unreliable. Colleges just don’t change that much overnight.</p>
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<p>I can understand the objection of Duke being more preferable to Harvard. But Berkeley over Dartmouth, why not? </p>
<p>If you’re interested in a world-class engineering education or computer science or physical sciences such as chemistry and physics, Berkeley is the better choice to Dartmouth. The only edge Dartmouth has over Berkeley is its close ties to Wall Street. Other than that, it’s more reasonable to choose Berkeley over Dartmouth.</p>
<p>Wow, and I thought the other rankings lists were dumb.</p>
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<p>I considered Parchment “interesting entertainment” during D2’s college search, not much more. I think the best source is the school’s own “common data set”. Search for “<college name=”“> common data set”, and for most colleges you will find a standard document with a great deal of information about admissions for that college. You also just have to know something about the college admissions process – know that the bottom 50% in standardized test scores typically have a lot of students with a “hook” in them (athlete, URM, legacy, etc.). So don’t assume if your scores fall under the 50% mark that the school is a match unless you also have a hook. </college></p>
<p>I also think Naviance is pretty useful if your high school has it. You can see how other students from your kid’s high school have fared with similar test scores and grades.</p>
<p>Sally305, this is not a ‘dumb’ ranking. It is actually an interesting attempt to take decisions across colleges that students are actually making and try to determine what the market is doing school-against-school. The problem, though, is that the data is flawed. It is not a complete set of data, and not validated or audited for accuracy/truthfulness. If someone had a clearing house of this data that was “real”, I would find this fascinating. Maybe Naviance could do something like this IF high schools could be encouraged to make sure their data is accurate and complete.</p>
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<p>You are absolutely correct if we are talking about grad program rankings, mainly focusing on measuring research performances, or rankings of certain (pre-prifessional) programs. But our major concern is (quality of) general college eduaction. IMO you constantly confusing grad school rankings with college rankings. 
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<p>It may be interesting, but it lacks so much detail as to be useless, IMO. We have no idea what factors motivated each individual student to make a final decision in favor of one school over others in his or her consideration set–financial need, parental pressure, desired majors, boyfriend/girlfriend at the same school…it could be anything. I suppose it could be useful in an internet shopping comparison kind of way, like when you are looking at a blue dress on a website and other suggestions come up on the side (“you might also like…”). For me the Common Data Set (and websites that allow you to compare CDS details side by side, like College Navigator) offers the only way to adequately compare colleges using data.</p>
<p>Parchment data gives us an idea about consumer preference, whether it is rational or not. It is interesting to know how students (& their parents??) exercise their choices; however, I agree that it has many drawbacks as mentioned by intparent.</p>